07 Aug 2025
Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) at LUMA Arles
Essayby Alexander Burenkov
In the blazing summer light of Arles—where Roman ruins meet Frank Gehry’s mirror-like architectural tower at LUMA—Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) casts a cool, cerebral shadow. Originating as part of the 2024 edition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide—a region-wide initiative presented by the J. Paul Getty Trust across Southern California, encompassing over 60 exhibitions and public programs exploring intersections of artistic and scientific inquiry—this ambitious show is co-organized by the Getty Research Institute (GRI), a global leader in visual culture research and home to one of the world’s most extensive art libraries. It offers a deep dive into the often underappreciated artistic experiments spearheaded by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).
Dubbed The Idea Factory, Bell Labs was a telecommunications powerhouse throughout the 20th century, credited with innovations ranging from the invention of the transistor in 1947 to early developments in high-speed digital networks. In the 1960s, visionary engineer Billy Klüver began forging unlikely collaborations between the New York avant-garde and Bell Labs' engineering elite. He organized artist tours of the Labs and enlisted engineers to co-create multimedia works using emerging technologies like photocells, fiber optics, transistors, and infrared cameras. It’s unlikely Klüver could have predicted that these early experiments would ignite one of the most radical and enduring movements in media art history. Founded in 1966 by Klüver, fellow Bell Labs engineer Fred Waldhauer, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, E.A.T. arose during a moment of utopian optimism—a fleeting but fervent belief that art and technology could not just collaborate, but conspire to reshape the future. Their goal was to foster creative partnerships between artists and technologists—a “civilized collaboration between groups unrealistically developing in isolation,” as E.A.T. phrased it. The exhibition at LUMA faithfully reconstructs this spirit, treating E.A.T. not as a relic of techno-utopianism but as a living archive of artistic and social potential.
One of the first works to greet visitors is a signature piece by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. Her ephemeral Fog, given a major retrospective at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2022, unfurls over a picturesque pond and the surrounding 10-acre park designed by landscape architect Bas Smets. Nakaya, now in her nineties and still active, bridges the historical and the contemporary, and is uniquely featured in both of the LUMA Foundation’s current exhibitions. In addition to Sensing the Future, she appears in the evolving exhibition Streaming from Our Eyes (formerly Dance with Daemons), initially staged at Fondation Beyeler and curated by Tino Sehgal, where elusive works engage in a kind of ping-pong dialogue—an open choreography of concepts. Nakaya’s fog sculptures, in particular, disrupt the hardware-heavy, male-dominated mythos of E.A.T. with something elemental and ephemeral: climate made visible. At the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, when Pepsi-Cola commissioned E.A.T. to design its pavilion, Nakaya enveloped the geodesic dome (despised by many in the group) in a cloud of fog—a “negative sculpture” shaped by wind and time. As Nakaya once remarked, “Fog makes visible things become invisible, and invisible things—like wind—become visible.”
Just beside the tower entrance, another public artwork draws visitors in: a slowly moving white fiberglass dome, barely perceptible in motion. This is Float (1970), one of seven motorized sculptures created by Robert Breer with engineer John Ryde for the Pepsi Pavilion. Designed as an interpretation of a Japanese rock garden, these domes moved at an imperceptible pace (30 cm per minute), accompanied by ambient sounds of nature and city life. Inside the pavilion, visitors experienced a theatrical gesamtkunstwerk: a 90-foot-wide mirrored ceiling made of aluminized mylar cast inverted reflections, animated by dynamic lighting and electronic sounds emitted from beneath the floor. Visitors used handheld receivers to tune into different soundscapes—from shattering glass to birdsong. Performances curated by artist Tony Martin and choreographer Remy Charlip added to the immersive environment. The Pavilion—part psychedelic chamber, part proto-VR installation—now reads as a precursor to contemporary installation art. Archival images on view alternate between vividly colored photographs of free-form happenings full of the spirit of the dawn of the psychedelic era of the 70s and formal black-and-white snapshots that resemble arcane rituals or tea ceremonies, reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9. At LUMA, seldom-seen footage and archival materials reveal how this visionary project emerged at the crossroads of corporate sponsorship, countercultural innovation, and technological experimentation—often in tension—within this highly original take on Gesamtkunstwerk.
The show unfolds in Living Archives, a long gallery corridor where Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds float above visitors. Warhol created these reflective, helium-filled pillows in the 1960s after Klüver introduced him to Scotchpak, a new material developed for the U.S. Army to keep rations warm. The corridor serves as a spine to the show, which is divided into two parts: archival displays of documents, photos, and videos on one side, and re-creations of iconic artworks and kinetic installations on the other. The chronology begins with E.A.T.’s seminal 1966 project 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a hybrid art-tech festival at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory. There, artists like John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, and Alex Hay collaborated with Bell Labs engineers on pioneering multimedia performances. Archival footage from the event is threaded throughout the exhibition. In one scene, Alex Hay appears on stage wearing what resembles a suicide vest—but is, in fact, a complex network of electrodes converting his bodily functions into eerie, modular sounds. He methodically arranges 64 fabric squares in a grid, then sits quietly among them as Rauschenberg and dancer Steve Paxton probe the cloth with long poles in a choreography of slow, deliberate gestures. Elsewhere, John Cage manipulates dials and utilizes only sounds that were in the air in different parts of New York transmitted via phone during the performance to generate his hazy sonic collage Variations VII, while nearby Lucinda Childs in her Vehicle transformes movement into sound with help of Doppler sonar machine designed by Peter Hirsch and Ground Effects Machine, by swinging buckets at different speeds through invisible ultrasonic fields, triggering sounds reminiscent of cave water droplets and sudden cello strokes. The dancers of Yvonne Rainer in Carriage Discretness communicated with the artist by using walkie-talkie, while the main communication tool for Robert Rauschenberg in his Open Score was a tennis racket wired with transmitters that caused every strike of the ball to emit a loud sound and extinguish an overhead light during the match between painter Frank Stella and professional tennis player Mimi Kanarek (the original rackets are exhibited in the opposite hall). The black-and-white footage is grainy, cryptic, and electrifying—evocative of the moon landing in both aesthetic and cultural weight. There’s a palpable tension between the elegance of conceptual choreography and the unruly mechanics behind it, as if the seams of the future were showing. The exhibition underscores how 9 Evenings left a profound mark on avant-garde art of the late ’60s and ’70s.
E.A.T.'s most active years stretched from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, a period of electrified experimentation. While the show captures the thrill of that era, it doesn’t gloss over its limitations. The roster of contributors skews male and insider-driven. A small ceramic chip from Forrest Myers’ Moon Museum (1969), allegedly sent aboard Apollo 12 and bearing minuscule drawings by six artists including Warhol and Rauschenberg, feels like a privileged, nearly invisible gesture—easy to overlook, both literally and metaphorically. Probably the most striking work on display is Jean Dupuy’s Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust) (1968), in which the rhythm of the viewer’s heartbeat causes colored pigment to bounce with the help of a stethoscope placed on the chest. movement through a darkened space using light-sensitive sensors and infrared beams. In an age of biometric surveillance and algorithmic opacity, the work feels not dated but hauntingly prescient, remaining a powerful metaphor for the human pulse at the core of technological systems. Another memorable piece from the show is Hans Haacke’s Photoelectric Viewer-Controlled Coordinate System (1968), a dark room in which the four walls are fitted with seven evenly spaced light bulbs and, underneath each one, a tiny photosensitive receptor and infrared projector. As the viewer walks through the room, the bulbs that correspond to their position light up, so that the illumination ends up pinpointing one’s physical location. It seems that back in the 1960s, a pioneer of "institutional critique" made a powerful statement about the transparency of human presence to technology and the then-emerging foundations of what Shoshana Zuboff would later call the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Interactivity and openness were at the core of E.A.T.’s activity, and its membership was open to all artists and engineers. By 1969, due to early efforts to attract engineers, the group had over 2,000 artist members as well as 2,000 engineer members willing to work with artists. Expressions of interest and requests for technical assistance came from the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, South America, and beyond. People were encouraged to start local E.A.T. groups, and about 15 to 20 were formed. Just as intriguing are the letters E.A.T. received after the event 9 Evenings—they occupy an impressively vast space in the exhibition. Blown up and arrayed on a wall, they include messages from figures such as Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse (super keen on “chemistry”), David Hinton, and Marta Minujín, all seeking to work with the group. Minujín’s Minuphone (also on view in the exhibition) offers playful and anarchic sensibilities, reimagining the public telephone as a “psychedelic trip,” reminding us that collaboration doesn’t always have to be solemn—it can be insurgent and absurd.
Engaging deeply with civic-minded projects focused on environmental design and urban communication, E.A.T. consistently expanded the scope of what art could be—and whom it could reach. A particularly compelling section of the exhibition is devoted to Projects Outside Art, a radical thread within E.A.T.’s practice that extended its collaborative, experimental spirit beyond the conventional boundaries of the art world. First unveiled as an exhibition in New York in 1971, Projects Outside Art signaled a decisive turn toward socially responsive, systems-based inquiry. It catalyzed a number of initiatives developed in partnership with universities and government agencies around the globe, reflecting a commitment to embedding artistic and technological collaboration within the social fabric. Among these were City Agriculture, which designed rooftop gardens for installation in New York; the dreamy interior environments of Children and Communication (1972), a pilot project enabling children in different parts of New York City to converse using telephone, telex, and fax equipment; Telex: Q&A (1971), which linked public spaces in New York, Ahmedabad, Tokyo, and Stockholm by telex, allowing people from different countries to question one another about the future; a 1973 pilot program to devise methods for recording indigenous culture in El Salvador; and finally, a large-screen outdoor television display system (1976–1977) for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
All these projects are strong evidence of E.A.T.’s belief in advanced media not as spectacle alone, but as a tool for social transformation. Committed to the preservation and free dissemination of their ideas and inventions, in 1980 E.A.T. compiled an extensive archive chronicling its activities and initiatives, assembling over 300 original documents—including reports, catalogues, newsletters, proposals, lectures, announcements, and reprints of key publications. The archive also incorporated selected press coverage and articles by external writers. Complete editions of this material were disseminated to major institutional libraries in cities such as New York, Washington, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, Ahmedabad, and London, ensuring that the legacy of E.A.T. would be accessible to future researchers and cultural historians around the world. While many of E.A.T.’s initiatives never advanced beyond the conceptual or prototype phase, their visionary frameworks and collaborative methodologies have left a lasting imprint on the landscape of contemporary art. Projects Outside Art, once seen as a peripheral venture, now reads as a prescient model for interdisciplinary and socially responsive practice. Crucially, the evolution of technology has begun to close the gap between the speculative and the achievable, allowing some of E.A.T.’s once-imagined projects to finally materialize.
A compelling example is Island Eye Island Ear (1970), David Tudor’s ambitious environmental composition that originally envisioned the transformation of Sweden’s Knavelskär island into a living, multisensory artwork—integrating sound, choreography, sculpture, fog by Fujiko Nakaya, and kites by Jackie Matisse. More than five decades later, the project has found new life: as part of the 2024 Lofoten International Art Festival, it was realized on the Norwegian island of Svinøya, following a previous staging on Kamome Island in Hokkaido. This reactivation hints at a broader trend. As ecological awareness and discourses around sustainability and reuse—including the recycling of unrealized ideas—gain momentum, it seems increasingly likely that curators of biennials and art festivals will turn to E.A.T.’s dormant proposals, reviving them within fresh cultural and environmental contexts across the globe.
The period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s marked the most electrified chapter in the history of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), when an unlikely but potent chemistry formed between the seemingly insular worlds of art and science. Yet the momentum began to falter with the 1973 oil crisis: public support waned, and as technology became more widely accessible, many artists and engineers struck out on their own paths. Despite the dispersal, E.A.T.’s co-founder Billy Klüver—alongside his partner Julie Martin—remained steadfast in their commitment to safeguarding the initiative’s legacy. Together, they assembled and maintained an archive that would become essential to understanding the complex interrelations between art, technology, and the spirit of experimentation that defined a generation. This is not the first time E.A.T.’s groundbreaking work has been revisited. In 2001, Klüver organized The Story of E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, 1960–2001, an exhibition composed of photographic and textual panels tracing the organization’s evolution. It debuted in Rome that summer before traveling to New York’s Sonnabend Gallery and toured a range of venues including Lafayette College, the Evolution Festival in Leeds, the University of Washington in Seattle, San Diego State University, Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC), the Norrköping Museum of Art in Sweden, and a gallery in Santa Maria run by Ardison Phillips—himself a key figure in the Pepsi Pavilion project of 1970.
By revisiting the trajectory of the movement, the new exhibition at LUMA offers more than historical reflection. It reveals how the questions posed by E.A.T.—about interdisciplinary exchange, innovation, and the future as a shared project—remain not only relevant but urgent. What’s most striking about Sensing the Future is how contemporary its concerns feel. E.A.T.’s ventures into Projects Outside Art speak directly to today’s cross-disciplinary urgencies. In an era of climate collapse, AI, and deepening divides between technical elites and the public, E.A.T.’s ethos of open collaboration seems less like a utopian dream and more like a necessary blueprint. But while the exhibition looks backward, it also implicitly asks: what would an E.A.T. for the 21st century look like? In our own age of accelerated innovation and existential risk, can art and technology still conspire toward liberation rather than control? By revisiting a movement that made space for experimentation without the guarantee of success, Sensing the Future opens a door—not just onto the past, but onto alternative visions of what art, science, and society might still become. Yet the exhibition doesn’t shy away from ambivalence. There’s a subtle but persistent reminder that many of these experiments were short-lived or impractical, their aspirations often outpacing their impact. Unlike the triumphalist techno-spectacles that dominate some large-scale biennials or expos, Sensing the Future allows failure, friction, and fragility to enter the frame. This honesty is refreshing.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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13 May 2025
Interview with Annet Dekker - Art, Museums and Digital Cultures Cluster
By José Pardal Pina
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