[ recap ]

Last week we looked at commonplace books, Abraham Moles, Joan Didion, Niklas Luhmann, and Walter Benjamin.

[ thoughts ]

I have been thinking about what we mean when we say art + technology.

The phrase has become a category of its own. The Guggenheim runs the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has an Art + Technology Lab. In January, the Doris Duke Foundation and Mozilla Foundation launched Artists Make Technology, which brings performing artists into the development of new technologies.

Yet a camera is technology. So is a synthesiser and the printing press. We rarely feel the need to put a plus sign between those tools and the art made with them.

The ancient Greek word technē is usually translated as art or craft, though neither English word matches the Greek exactly. Medicine, music, painting, shipbuilding, carpentry, pottery could all involve technē: knowledge put into practice through skill.

So I suspect art + technology tells us as much about the age of a technology as it does about the work itself. When a tool is established, we tend to call the result photography, music, film or printmaking. When the technology is still unfamiliar, we keep its name visible.

In New York in 1966, a group of artists had ideas they could not realise alone, so they turned to engineers at Bell Labs, for help.

[ creativity ]

Ten artists and more than thirty engineers and scientists developed 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances that opened at New York's 69th Regiment Armory in October 1966. The engineers contributed more than 8,500 hours during its development.

Robert Rauschenberg's Open Score began as a real tennis match between the American painter Frank Stella and the tennis professional Mimi Kanarek. Bell Labs engineer Bill Kaminski had designed a small FM transmitter could fit in the handle of a tennis racket. A contact microphone picked up the vibration of the strings, and each hit travelled through the Armory as amplified sound while one of forty-eight lights switched off.

As the court became darker, infrared light illuminated hundreds of people entering the space. Television cameras sensitive to infrared picked up their movements, which were projected onto large screens, allowing the audience to see on screen what had become difficult to see directly in the room.

The electronics were part of the structure of Open Score. The rackets controlled sound and lighting, while infrared television changed what the audience could see. Rauschenberg could describe what he wanted to happen, while engineers worked out how to make it happen.

During preparations for 9 Evenings, Rauschenberg and the American artist Robert Whitman joined Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer to form Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

The organisation helped artists find engineers and scientists who could work through technical problems with them.

The organisation described its aim as the "interaction of art and engineering."

A few years later, the British painter Harold Cohen began learning to program while teaching at the University of California, San Diego, he began developing the ideas that became AARON, which he named in 1973. He continued developing the software for more than forty years.

AARON generated images by following rules Cohen had written, with some variation introduced by chance, while Cohen built drawing machines and later painting machines to turn the program's instructions into marks on paper.

When Cohen began working on colour, he found something he could do as a painter but struggled to explain. Years of painting meant he could look at two colours together and make a judgement without having to describe how he reached it.

In a 1995 interview, Cohen described his frustration at being unable to explain exactly what happened in his own head when he worked with colour. Programming required him to articulate parts of painting that experience had made intuitive.

Computers were increasingly sold with software made for particular tasks. Cohen's practice had developed under different conditions because the software he needed did not exist. As he put it an interview, "There is no package for what I do."

[ making ]

Today, most people use generative AI through tools somebody else built, which makes Cohen's line especially relevant.

"Made with AI" can describe very different processes. Someone might generate an image and choose the result, assemble generated fragments with photographs or drawings, or use an AI tool for one stage of a process that eventually becomes sound, code, paint or another physical material. The label tells us what technology was used, but not much about how the work was made.

In 1970, the American designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller published I Seem to Be a Verb, made with Jerome Agel and the graphic designer Quentin Fiore. Fuller wrote, “I know that I am not a category.”

I like the distinction because categories name things, while verbs describe what they do. For art + technology, that suggests a simple exercise: start with the action:

The technology changes the work by ________.

In Open Score, the transmitters turned the impact of a tennis ball into sound and a lighting cue, while infrared television revealed people in the darkened Armory.

With AARON, Cohen's rules generated drawings through software and required him to describe parts of his painting practice precisely enough for a computer to use.

Then look at what the maker changed about the technology or the way it was used:

I changed the use of the technology by ________.

Rauschenberg and the engineers put a transmitter inside a tennis racket and connected its signal to the lighting system. Cohen spent decades changing AARON because the software he needed did not already exist.

A photographer might use a camera in conditions it was not designed for. A musician might route an instrument through equipment built for another purpose. An artist might take generated material into print, paint, collage or another process where it can be changed again.

If the second blank is difficult to fill, that tells you something about the relationship too. That may simply mean you are using the tool as intended, and your contribution comes from what you choose and how you use it.

[ sign off ]

The E.A.T. archive for Open Score includes Rauschenberg's original statement, photographs of the wired rackets and material from the 1966 performance.

Stay the one doing the noticing.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.