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9 Evenings raised
an enormous interest in using new technology among the
artists in New York. Robert Whitman, Fred Waldhauer, Robert
Rauschenberg and I called a meeting at the Central Plaza
Hotel. Three hundred artists came to the meeting and we
collected eighty immediate requests for technical help.
We began to publish
a newsletter and spell out what E.A.T. was going to do.
Rauschenberg's and Whitman's involvement in creating E.A.T.
were crucial to the organization. Their belief that technology
is "a challenge and what can be created if two or three
people in diverse fields become collaborators?" This idea
of one-to-one collaboration between individual artists
and engineers or scientists was the basis of E.A.T. To
this was added my belief that artists' ideas and concerns
could influence the way we engineers approached the technological
or social problems we faced day to day. The principal
activity was to match artists who had technical problems
or projects with engineers or scientists who could work
with them.
The collaborations
could lead technology in directions more positive for
the needs, desires, and pleasures of the individual.
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