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Today one might think of realizing
Bob's idea by using neural network chips. Engineers have
already built wired houses that respond to you, learning
from your daily behavior to turn on lights, close doors,
make coffee etc. If you do something unusual like waking
up in the middle of the night, the system understands
that this is abnormal, and will not start making your
morning coffee.
However with the technology available
in the early 60's, Bob's idea could not be realized. After
many discussions, and years of work, in 1965 on the 15th
of May, Oracle opened at the Leo Castelli gallery. It
ended up being one of Bob Rauschenberg's most beautiful
works and is now at Beaubourg in Paris. Oracle is a sound
environment made up of five AM radios, where the sounds
from each radio emanates from one of the five sculptures.
The viewer can play the sculpture as an orchestra from
the controls on one of the pieces, by varying the volume
and the rate of scanning through the frequency band. But
they can not stop the scanning at any given station. The
impression was that of walking down the Lower East Side
on a summer evening and hearing the radios from open windows
of the apartment buildings. All of the material for the
sculptures Bob had found on the streets of New York. Although
this sounds simple, the electronics behind the piece as
it now works at Beaubourg is very complicated.
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