COLLISION COURSE
IN 1970, OSAKA BECAME the first Asian city to host a world’s fair, signaling Japan’s triumphant postwar industrialization. Over sixty-four million visitors experienced exhibits introducing both technological and cultural advancements, from IMAX to mobile phones. Like all world’s fairs, Expo ’70 was powered by a modernist belief in industry as an international engine of progress—a positivist narrative that has become increasingly difficult to countenance, considering what we now understand about the costs of industrialization, ranging from labor abuses to climate change and colonialist forms of resource extraction. Given the prominence of artistic displays at these fairs, which continue to be organized (the next returns to Osaka this April), they surface important questions about art’s relationship to industry, including questions about art’s autonomy from techno-capitalist imperatives and its ability to model or challenge new socio-technical structures, from social media platforms to artificial intelligence.
One of the most consequential cultural exhibits at Expo ’70 was the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, which was overseen by a New York–based group called Experiments in Art and Technology. This groundbreaking organization was cofounded by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer in the wake of their 1966 production “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering,” which presented live performances organized by artists such as John Cage and Yvonne Rainer with the technical assistance of various engineers. E.A.T. was essentially a broker of collaborations between “the two cultures” of art and science, to borrow C. P. Snow’s 1950s terminology. As recounted in curator Nancy Perloff’s exhibition “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.),” currently on view at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles (where the organization’s archives are housed), no fewer than twenty artists and fifty engineers and scientists worked together on the design team for the Pavilion. Guarded by Robert Breer’s plodding kinetic sculptures and surrounded by Fujiko Nakaya’s vapor cloud, the Pavilion was capped by the so-called Mirror Dome—an immersive mirrored room measuring ninety feet in diameter that allowed visitors to see their reflections floating above their heads, as depicted on this issue’s cover. As with the technological spectacles that have become popular with audiences far outside the art world in recent years (from van Gogh light shows to the Las Vegas Sphere), the most interesting question might not be whether the Pavilion was “good,” but rather, what it reflected (pun intended) about the possibilities and limits of collaborations between art and engineering, as well as about the evolving nature and role of aesthetic experience in an increasingly postindustrial cultural landscape.1
Judging by innumerable artist bios and institutional press releases produced over the past few years, it seems that the so-called “intersection of art and technology” that E.A.T. mapped over half a century ago has become something of an ideological gridlock of technoutopian and technodystopian worldviews. (The congestion likely will keep getting worse, given the pileup of AI-generated content and the rallying of the cryptocurrencies that fueled the first NFT boom.) Countless shows have been organized in response; some merely establish that artists use technology (and sometimes more specifically, digital and internet technologies), while others focus more narrowly on particular time periods, aesthetic strategies, cultural questions, or tools. The past few months alone gave us a bumper crop of initiatives devoted to various histories of art and technology, including “Radical Software: Women, Art and Computing 1960–1991” at Mudam Luxembourg (through February 2); “The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (through March 16); “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern, London (through June 1), and the publication by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum of the book Digital Art: 1960s–Now.2 In fact, the GRI’s “Sensing the Future” is only one of eighty-four exhibitions produced under the aegis of the Getty initiative PST ART: “Art & Science Collide,” which opened last September and continues throughout this spring.
In this issue, that massive undertaking provides a case study for working through the state and stakes of “art and technology” today. Notably, very few of PST ART’s exhibitions focus on digital art (with some exceptions, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s survey “Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film,” continuing through July 13). It is to PST ART’s credit that it cast its net more broadly, locating digital art and the “intersection of art and technology” on the larger and older map of “art and science”—a territory so vast that it is usually almost impossible for us to see. Some of its best exhibitions, such as the Getty’s own “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” look carefully at how artists have contributed or responded to scientific discourses, in ways that expand how we understand the terms on either side of the ampersand. But some of these shows also prove, once again, that works that actually make use of technology in their display, from kinetic sculptures to real-time software programs, are uniquely challenging to work with, and that we must continue to expect that our institutions large and small develop the expertise and resources to do justice to the potential of these artworks as aesthetic objects, and not treat them as merely technical demonstrations. As we continue to grapple with the division between art and science through educational STEAM initiatives that too often instrumentalize art for neoliberalism, and as the US government is given over to the agenda of Elon Musk, we need artists who can think both poetically and critically about technology, now more than ever.
In addition to the features on PST ART, this issue also includes many other examples of what it might look like to think about “art and science” as one of the foundational ground plans of art history and artistic practice. These range from Jana Baumann’s Passages on Rebecca Horn to Stephanie O’Rourke’s review of Michael Lobel’s new book on van Gogh and industrialization, Alex Estorick’s overview of speculative design, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Top Ten, and David Ross’s tribute to Bill Viola. We also might think of Piotr Orlov’s column on Wadada Leo Smith’s graphic scores and Barry Schwabsky’s feature on Denzil Forrester’s dancehall-inspired paintings as being about the relation of visual art to the science of music. The second volume of our Artforum Dossier series, “Art and Science,” takes a similarly broad app-roach, collating a wide array of articles from our archives that relate to the conjunction of art and science (including texts by Simone Forti and Klüver on “9 Evenings”); the Dossier is now available to peruse on our website. Of course, the danger of seeing everything as science or technology, or as a reflection of them, is that these terms get emptied of their meaning; but at the same time, it is impossible to understand art without asking how it relates to these shifting fields, which are foundational to understanding our society and are responsible for some of art’s urgency today.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
NOTES
1. On the van Gogh light shows, see Joseph Henry, “Blow Up,” Artforum.com, August 11, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/columns/joseph-henry-on-immersive-van-gogh-250384/.
2. For the sake of full disclosure, I will note that I contributed to the Mudam Luxembourg, Tate Modern, and V&A projects, and also curated another exhibition that could be on this list: the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s “Electric Op,” continuing through January 27, which was my final exhibition before joining Artforum.
