|
In the late 1950s, the Swedish-born engineer
Billy Klüver worked on laser systems for Bell Laboratories
in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became the chief catalyst for
the art and technology movement that was launched dramatically
in the spring of 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art, with Jean
Tinguely's infamous self-destructing kinetic sculpture, Homage
to New York. Klüver's participation in this work, with
its paint bombs, chemical stinks, noisemakers, and fragments
of scrap metal, inspired a generation of artists to imagine
the possibilities of technology, as the machine destroyed itself,
in Klüver's words, "in one glorious act of mechanical suicide."
Klüver proposed the active and equal
participation of the artist and engineer in the creation of
the artwork. In this collaboration, he believed that the engineer
required the participation of the artist, who as a "visionary
about life" and an active agent of social change, involved the
engineer in meaningful cultural dialog. At the same time, he
felt that the artist, in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg's
famous credo "to close the gap between art and life," had an
obligation to incorporate technology as an element in the artwork,
since technology had become inseparable
from our lives.
|
