In 1966, ten thousand people attended “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” a now-forgotten collaboration between Bell Labs engineers and New York art world heavyweights. The pairings were colorful and bizarre. Robert Rauschenberg, for example, staged a tennis match with rackets wired to cut the lights in the auditorium each time a ball was hit, amplifying the sound of each volley. Yvonne Rainer choreographed a dance by walkie talkie. John Cage produced a real-time composition with a combination of Geiger counters, telephones, transistor radios, and “the brain waves of his collaborators.”
At their best, these collaborations found unexpected overlaps between art and technology. Researchers and artists hated corporate managerialism; both worked best without top-down direction, preferring to self-organize with talented peers. At their worst, these collaborations produced uninteresting works, poor mishmashes that neither art nor engineering would want to claim. Artist-engineer collaborations were not always harmonious either: they spoke different languages, didn’t respect the craft of their counterparts, and were plagued by values and status differences.
We see similar challenges today. Tech companies launch creator programs that treat art as purely instrumental, or they present art as a kind of technical demo that functions as advertising. Bored big tech employees, dubbing themselves “creative technologists,” make cutesy web apps and artists attempt “research art,” both of which often are technically and creatively mediocre. When every startup is a “neolab” or interested in the “future of creativity,” the history of experiments like 9 Evenings becomes immediately useful. How should artists and engineers collaborate? What does technology have to offer art, and vice versa? What does “great work” look like, and how might the arts and sciences contribute to a free, democratic society? John Beck and Ryan Bishop’s Technocrats of the Imagination makes a phenomenal historical companion that offers some answers.
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Beck and Bishop trace the intellectual history of both Cold War defense research and midcentury art cultures, finding the unlikely places they align. A central character in their story is John Dewey, an American pragmatist philosopher. Dewey wrote that knowledge could only come from application, experimentation, and practice, rather than being a purely mental process. These ideas invisibly animate Silicon Valley’s “first principles” thinking, its embrace of independently driven Montessori education, and the skepticism of institutional knowledge baked into dropout culture. Dewey’s influence endowed both technology and art with a hands-on culture.
Dewey’s work shaped Bauhaus ideals to remove artificial distinctions between creativity, skill, and efficient production. Black Mountain College, a focal point for artists and designers like Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Ruth Asawa, and Buckminster Fuller, further set these ideas into practice. Residents self-organized, cooking their own meals and working together across disciplines. Albers held this need to grasp and rediscover knowledge as an ideal; in his words: “we have arrived at [these ideas] independently, through direct experience, and they are our own because they have been rediscovered rather than taught.” This environment, unburdened by institutional or disciplinary restrictions, would be a perfect place for new art forms to emerge.
Scientists shared this spirit, balking at attempts by policymakers or lab bosses to explicitly direct them, believing only self-direction and curiosity-motivated research would lead to true novelty. Vannevar Bush, director of much World War II scientific research spending, increasingly supported “blue sky” research—fundamental work without a defined goal. In his famed report Science: The Endless Frontier, he wrote that “[scientific progress came from] the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” The research lab and the artist commune shared more than they might expect—both were self-legitimating environments that insulated experts and gave them freedom for self-directed work.
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Bell Labs, the research wing of telecommunications giant AT&T, had been welcoming artists and musicians to its New Jersey campus since the 1950s. Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Labs, and artist Robert Rauschenberg formalized these exchanges into Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), a nationwide organization that brokered 40 pairings of engineers and artists per month at its peak.
In practice, however, these collaborations often stumbled. The engineers sometimes viewed themselves as artists, sabotaging the collaborative dynamic. The artists frequently confused technical and aesthetic decisions, arguing over where knobs should be placed on devices or what color batteries should be. Klüver also struggled to raise funds for the organization. Companies weren’t generally interested in art, so Klüver pitched E.A.T. as an organization that could inject creativity into corporate working methods or in functional terms, arguing that art could be made in a corporate-compatible way: “the artist likes to deal with his problems in a matter-of-fact way and not ‘esthetically.’ Esthetic considerations will hinder the development of new art.”
This ultimately was the largest problem; engineering as a discipline did not value art. Klüver hoped to free engineering from its regimented nature through these collaborations, moving the field out of its subordinate position to science. However, to engineers, the collaborations looked like leisure; Klüver’s boss described the work as “strictly comparable to golf, skiing, politics, public service, and other spare-time avocations.” Engineers felt they were treated as technical support, and Klüver consistently had a shortage of interested engineers.
The same tensions flared up in a similar program at LACMA. Curator Maurice Tuchman sought to bind the museum to Southern California defense funding, pairing artists with think tanks like the Hudson Institute and RAND Corporation. These think tanks were staffed by “defense intellectuals,” quantitative policy analysts whose power reflected a growing nationwide faith in the ability of social science to solve societal problems. Like engineers, these analysts saw art as hierarchically below their work.
Artist John Chamberlain, for example, couldn’t make much of his residence at RAND. He initially struggled to gain material from “subjects” at the think tank, before pivoting to a project exploring the company’s internal memos as a communicative form. This quickly turned antagonistic, when Chamberlain “suggested dissolving the corporation, cutting off the phones for one day, and taking photos of the staff on the patios” in company-wide memos. He received similarly hostile memos in return. Chamberlain also screened one of his films—complete with “hallucinatory soft porn”—in the cafeteria. Employees promptly complained, cancelling the screening.
In truth, artists and engineers were never on even footing. Describing some of the challenges of the A&T collaborations, as Beck and Bishop write:
The artists wanted respect; they wanted their world recognized as professionally rigorous; they wanted their contribution to stand equally alongside that of scientists, engineers, and businessmen. Their disappointment and humiliation, however muted or disguised, is a measure of their own fascination with, and desire to bathe in, the lustrous aura emanating from high-status, high-powered Cold War elites.
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This asymmetry persists today. There are many justifications for why artists are upset with AI companies. The simplest, and most descriptive, is that many artists struggle to make ends meet while watching AI researchers get billion-dollar compensation packages. Public frustration, as in a scathing letter from beta testers of OpenAI’s Sora to their “A.I. Corporate overlords,” reflects an insecurity that technology marginalizes or works against their interests. And aside from some hopeful new developments, tech has largely failed to fund cultural institutions. For all the wealth San Francisco has created, it has an opera, symphony, and art museum with budget deficits. Civic responsibility—including art patronage—is too often seen as a lack of “true belief” in technology.
Much “creative technology” work we see today stumbles, much like the collaborations in Technocrats of the Imagination. Artists mimic engineering, building unscalable and poorly architected systems. Engineers make artworks that are conceptually uninteresting and lack formal experimentation.
The authors of Technocrats basically conclude that experiments like 9 Evenings “didn’t work.” For me the truth is much more complex. I’m sympathetic to the belief that these particular events didn’t achieve their aims, but there were abundant, successful marriages of art and technology that took place beyond the book during the same time frame. In my view, the best work occurred when engineers and artists were allowed to pursue their specialties rather than work poorly in between them.
Consider hypertext, the system of links and pages now familiar to us through the internet. This work required frontier science, huge leaps in networking, browsers, graphics, and distributed systems. It paired these technical innovations with new forms of writing, like blogs, forums, and social media, and a whole new set of creators whose work was “internet native;” perhaps interesting on its own, these writings were formally entangled with new technologies.
The same can be said of computer graphics. Animation advanced state of the art hardware (GPUs developed alongside these workflows), software (raytracing, 3D modeling), and art, birthing a generation of technical artists. At studios like Pixar, engineers and artists worked alongside each other, each focusing on their domains of expertise, unified in artifacts that neither could produce alone, like Toy Story.
The most important legacy of the programs Technocrats describes, rather than specific works, is a sense of the value of these collaborations, and a vision for how art and technology build a great free society. Both disciplines, regrettably, have turned inwards in recent years. Contemporary art appeals to an ingroup rather than the public, hyperfocusing on political depictions and identity rather than pursuing and pushing larger ambitions of what art can be. The tech industry has lost orientation toward the public; just 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact over the next 20 years.
The shared vocabulary of “creativity” across the arts and sciences in these midcentury collaborations appeared distinctly American, distinguishing the country from the obedience, conformity, and unjustness of 20th century authoritarianism. The American project was always one of delicate contradictions. Midcentury leaders sought a country of unity without homogeneity, of individualization and specialization without alienation. Creativity, the opposite of the authoritarian personality, of a citizenry that was “diverse, autonomous, reflective, and tolerant of ambiguity” was as strong a base as any. As the authors of Technocrats argue, the models of exchange in these interdisciplinary programs were, at least in part, “rooted in a conception of how a free society should operate.”
Structuring the relationship between art and technology, between science and the humanities, will always be fraught and challenging. György Kepes, of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, quoted Dewey about his imagination for how they might cooperate: “without [science], man will be the sport and victim of natural forces which he cannot control, [while without art] mankind might become a race of economic monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature and one another, bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation.”
Lucas Gelfond
Lucas Gelfond is an engineer and writer from California. He lives in New York.