The Foundation of Experiential Design

In the mid 1960s, two innovative programs were launched with the purpose of connecting artists with engineers at America’s leading technological companies. In 1966, on the West Coast, Maurice Tuchman, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), began facilitating collaborations through the Museum’s Art & Technology Program. A year later, on the East Coast, a Bell Labs Engineer named Billy Klüver (whose favorite pastime was visiting New York to attend art openings and befriend artists), and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman partnered to create the Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology Program (abbreviated as E.A.T.). Both programs were designed to break corporate barriers to collaboration, and see what an artist and an engineer would come up with if left to their own devices in a room filled with several million dollars worth of gadgetry. Recall that at the time we were deep in the space race. The Apollo Mission would eventually succeed in putting a man on the moon within the decade. One must assume that the very same optimism and determination, particularly amongst a group of white American men (recall also that things were not so rosy for all Americans at that time), must have injected these programs with a buzz of optimism and can-do determination.

Six years prior to the inception of the Bell Labs E.A.T. Program, Klüver and his colleagues had assisted the artist Jean Tinguely in the engineering of a mechanically controlled sculpture which made drawings, played a piano, filled an early-prototype weather balloon with helium, and produced noxious stenches. Starting the machine set in motion a series of devices which would lead to its ultimate destruction. These devices lit small fires and caused general mechanical havoc. The work was unleashed on the public in the Garden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on March 17, 1960. The NYFD put a stop to the event when the player-piano burst into flames.

In 1962, the artist Robert Rauschenberg came to his art-world acquaintance Billy Klüver to assist him in the technical aspect of embedding a remote-control AM receiver and speaker in each section of a five-panel painting. The receivers were intended to be controllable by the viewer. The technology involved was in its infancy, and the many kinks forced Rauschenberg to abandon the idea. From the wreckage of that attempt, Rauschenberg and his Bell collaborators made Dry Cell, in 1963. The piece housed a small microphone one could speak into. Electronic components mounted behind a collage of clear plexiglass transformed these sound waves into pulses of energy, and activated a toy helicopter motor which produced the sound of the viewers voice with its spin. Dry Cell became the first interactive work of art to incorporate advanced electronic technology.

The early Bell collaborations were organized into a multi-night happening at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan in October of 1966. Called 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, featuring works by Robert Whitman, Deborah Hay, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer and others, the event wowed viewers with visual experiments and theatrical experiences that the group had spent the previous 10 months developing. The resulting works employed the early use of now common technologies; Doppler radar translated movement into sound, an infrared camera produced images in total darkness, and portable FM transmitters broadcast the sounds of performers speech and motion to loudspeakers. The E.A.T. Program made itself official following this event, and has continued in various iterations to this day.

The Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Expo is considered the penultimate work of the Bell Labs Program’s initial era. Billy Klüver, along with artistic director Robert Breer and a team of 75 artists and engineers designed and built a Fuller-esque immersive dome, its exterior shrouded in a fog sculpture by the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. The interior of the dome was fitted with an enormous curving mylar mirror. The resulting visual effect, when a person walked into the space, produced a hologram-like reflected image on the ceiling of the dome.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Maurice Tuchman and the Art and Technology Program at LACMA were busy connecting artists and engineers as well. Tuchman paired Claes Oldenberg with Krofft Enterprises and Gemini G.E.L. to create Icebag (1971), a Volkswagen beetle-sized version of the generic variety found in drugstores, which slowly inflated and deflated, as though it were breathing. Engineers at the two corporations had assisted Oldenberg in the mechanics of the inflating and deflating sack, rigging a circuit with 6 timed fans in the sculptures base.

In 1968, Tuchman asked the LA-based artist Robert Irwin if he would like to participate in the program. Irwin was having trouble with the fabrication of his highly minimal clear acrylic disc and column works, and Tuchman thought that Irwin might be interested in the opportunity to work with engineers and scientists to get past the technical difficulties. Irwin, for his part, had no interest in creating “a large, winking, blinking version” of his previous works. However, the opportunity to work with a place like Lockheed or IBM was just too big, too wild of an idea for him to pass up.

Earlier in the summer of 1968, Irwin had met James Turrell, a young artist who had just graduated from Pomona College with a degree in experimental psychology. Irwin invited Turrell to join him as a partner in the program, and Tuchman paired the two with Garrett Aerospace Corporation. There, Irwin met Ed Wortz, an engineer working on the environmental control systems for the upcoming Moon landing. Through their resulting conversations, Irwin, Turrell, and Wortz found that they had a common interest in man’s sense-perception of his environment. They decided to devise a series of experiments and experiences they would put themselves through, intent on cleaning the slate of their perception, without the use of mind-altering substances. One of these experiments involved taking turns sitting in an anechoic chamber for 6 hours at a time. An anechoic chamber is a room which is completely blacked out — no sound gets in, no light is visible inside. Irwin reported that once the door was shut and the lights were turned off, he would begin to hear the functions of his own body — the electrical energy of the brain, the beat of the heart, the sound of blood moving through the veins. The main point of the trio’s experiments was to explore what happened to sense perception when all outside stimulus was removed. This is called “perception conditioning.” Turrell, in his notes on the project, wrote of his hopes of “allowing people to perceive their perceptions — making them aware of their perceptions.” I can say, from personal experience, that the work of both artists has been enormously effective in this aim. Though the collaboration did not yield any physical objects, the research that the three men engaged in went on to influence their lives and works in immeasurable ways.

Turrell decided to abruptly pull out of the collaboration a year later, in August of 1969. Irwin and Wortz remained friends and collaborators, and went on to co-host a symposium on habitability in long-term space missions from Irwin’s studio, for which Irwin prepared a series of perceptual installations. The A&T Program at LACMA came to an end in 1971. The group shared the fruits of their collaborations with the public at the 1970 Osaka World Expo, alongside their compatriots in the Bell Labs E.A.T. Program.

As I dug into this topic, I began, as one often does, with a question: what are the roots of experiential design in art? I was aware of the research that Irwin, Turrel, and Wortz had engaged in (thanks to Lawrence Weschler’s amazing book of interviews with Robert Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees). I was amazed to find that Robert Rauschenberg was not only an early advocate of tech-integration, but also viewer experience and interaction, and that immersive experiences were being discussed as far back as 1970 at the Osaka World Expo. I have a difficult time imagining where the burgeoning industry of experiential design would be today without the work of the pioneering artists, scientists, engineers, designers, coordinators, project managers, and fabricators that poured their intellect and creativity into these two organizations. They realized amazing projects, and at the same time, unbeknownst to themselves, laid the foundation for at least one entirely new creative industry.

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