A Brief History of Robert Whitman’s Early Experimentations in Art and Technology

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a non-profit organization established in the late 1960s by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg, emerged amid seismic political, social, and cultural change in the United States with the aim to foster collaboration and exchange between the worlds of art and technology. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, a prolific period for the collective, E.A.T.’s projects around the world charted new frontiers in installation, performance art, and design. Its activities also extended into lectures, publications, and a Technical Services Program for artists and engineers.

“What began as individual collaborations between artists and engineers grew into full-scale group endeavors that required scores of people working together,” writes scholar Kathy Battista, who guest curated the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s 2015 retrospective devoted to E.A.T. and its legacy. “The ethos of this organization, which included many artists and engineers renowned in the annals of history as well as those who have since faded into obscurity, was one of openness and experimentation.”

On the occasion of Whitman’s multifaceted program at Pace’s 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York—which spans in-person and online exhibitions, a performance series, and an NFT release—this text examines the artist’s role in E.A.T.’s development and wide-ranging endeavors, revisiting early explorations in technology that put him at the vanguard of a new mode of art making.

To learn more about Whitman’s latest presentation with Pace, please visit (opens in a new window) pacegallery.com/exhibitions/robert-whitman-american-moon.

9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering

In 1966, before E.A.T.’s formal establishment, an enterprising group of artists, dancers, musicians, and engineers organized the storied performance series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. Widely regarded as the collective’s most ambitious and celebrated project, the interdisciplinary, multi-day event featured performances engaging new technologies and unorthodox formats. The series included works by Whitman, Rauschenberg, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and other creative luminaries. These performances were produced as part of collaborations with engineers in what curator Catherine Morris describes as “a critical attempt to integrate the technology of the day into contemporary performative practices that went beyond simply utilizing gadgetry as a form of theatrical embellishment.”

On the origins of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, Morris writes, “At the core of this staggeringly complex project was a seemingly simple proposition, one that had been a driving force in engineer Billy Klüver’s thinking for several years: how could engineers directly participate in the creative process of art making? What effect would an incipient creative collaboration have on the practice of making works of art and on the practice of engineering?”

Whitman presented a third iteration of his theater work Two Holes of Water as part of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.

Staged with assistance from engineer Robbie Robinson, Two Holes of Water—3 incorporated seven cars, each of which was wrapped in plastic sheets, equipped with a film or television projector, and parked in front of a wall covered in white paper. Among the work’s live performers were dancers Trisha Brown and Mimi Stark, whose movements in front of a distorted mirror were captured by television cameras and sent to the projectors in the cars. Two Holes of Water—3 was set to the cacophonous sounds of auto tailpipes, live typewriting, and a nuclear disarmament speech by philosopher Bertrand Russell.

“I am after a work about the stability of a film image the immediacy of a newsflash,” Whitman once said of the performance. “The images are concerns—the whole piece makes an image.”

Dark at Pace Gallery in New York

In 1967, Whitman presented the solo exhibition Dark at Pace Gallery’s West 57th Street location in New York. Working with Eric Rawson, an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, the artist created two laser installations for the show: Wavy Red Line, in which a spinning red laser produced a fixed red line, growing and shrinking at specific intervals across four walls, and Solid Red Line, in which a laser drew and erased itself on the gallery’s walls. Solid Red Line also figured in the Brooklyn Museum’s 1968–69 exhibition Some More Beginnings: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

Pepsi Pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka

E.A.T.’s design of the Pepsi Pavilion for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan is a storied, if ill fated, chapter in the organization’s history. The domed pavilion was realized by a coalition of 63 artists, engineers, and scientists, with Whitman among the project’s lead artists. The finished pavilion’s exterior featured a mesmeric fog cloud—created by artist Fujiko Nakaya in collaboration with sculptor Forrest Myers and physicist Thomas Mee—as well as kinetic fiberglass sculptures by Robert Breer.

Whitman’s contributions to the pavilion were many, including the concept for the large-scale spherical mirror installed above the main space of the interior and a laser installation in a subterranean exhibition space. Due to “diverging priorities,” as curator John Tain puts it, between Pepsi and E.A.T.—likely stemming from a combination of budgetary, conceptual, and aesthetic concerns—the sponsor rescinded the collective’s creative control of the pavilion weeks after its initial opening.