Billy Kluver - Thanks !!! By Jerry Spivack, January 28, 2004 [consultant and ASCI Board Member]
There’s
a place where everything comes together as a totality. That place
is the universe we live in. But humans, with limited
perspectives, need innovative integrators to move them to higher
planes. Here they can discover a more integrated picture of their
world. In the 1960s, when most needed, one of these integrators
was Billy Kluver.
In the 60s many currents were transforming America. There
were economic advances which post-World War II peace dividends and
innovations spread across the country. Technology and new media
capabilities were providing new opportunities and new challenges.
Most
exciting of all was a sense of the unlimited capabilities of scientific
innovation. New possibilities, e.g. space travel, computer
interaction, etc., were transforming science fiction into reality.
In
the halls of research laboratories new ideas were supported – nowhere
more than at Bell Laboratories. And at Bell Labs, recognition was
dawning that one way to accelerate the possibilities of new innovations
was to meld the imagination of artists with these possibilities of the
future.
Max Mathews, the “Father of Computer Music,”
opened Bell Labs to artists, welcoming them into the inner sanctums to
try out the new technologies and see where they could take them.
While Max was bringing artists into the laboratory, Billy Kluver (also
at Bell Labs) was sending scientists out into the world, into the
workshops of the artists. He did this through his extraordinary
new institution E.A.T., “Experiments in Art and Technology.”
Billy
opened up the outside world to the scientists and technologists, not
only of Bell Labs, but of scientific institutions everywhere.
Billy had an infectious smile and a way of approaching life which
seemed to be an artistic statement in itself. When he spoke, his
European accent sent you into worlds far removed from your own.
Billy
was a poetic choreographer – able to transcend both art and science,
moving both artists and scientists into a creative dance
together. One of the most exciting of the activities was the
“Nine Evenings of Art in the Armory” [NYC]. The evenings were
filled with extraordinary visions of some of the best artists of the
time (Rauschenberg, Whitman, Cage, etc.), and a bevy of engineers and
scientists.
As the audience would enter the armory each
evening, the artists would throw their collaborating engineers into
total disarray, by deciding that they had an even more exciting idea
which they would like to add to their art/sci piece. But all of
the pieces were extraordinary, in that they took the arts AND the
sciences into places they had never ventured in the past.
One
intriguing piece involved the audience as they entered the dark armory
hall with television sets above their heads. The television
cameras were set up to take pictures in the dark of the entering
audience, and transmit these pictures to the TV sets above their
heads. Those who reached the seats were then able to see the
pictures of the audience in front of them on the TV sets, but not the
actual people who were right in front of them below the sets (because
of the darkness in the hall). It was a prescient warning of the
future role of our media, in which our own existence sometimes seems
not to be of consequence, unless we are on the TV set (Reality TV, 3
second political sound bites, etc).
Billy recently passed
away. The endless possibilities of the 60s also seem to have
passed away. Let’s hope that Billy’s spirit will revive soon, we
need to bring back that period of excitement and creativity – and
Billy, thanks for everything !!!
Related information on the ASCI website:
Oyvind Fahlstrom's piece for Nine Evenings, "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," /reviews/docs/09_27_97.html written in 1996
by Diana Meckley [composer, writer, educator, and consultant].
Billy was also a presenter at these ASCI public events:
