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ABSTRACT to provide dissonance to the decade’s rousing chorus of tech- 1960s’ hippie revolution, a the back-to-nature of mantra delta continued cultural vast the in And text. near-sacred and global ecological awakening was both a hallowed handbook Catalog Earth Whole contrary advice imparted by various worried elders. stinct that convinces youth a new path is in unassailable,young of surge despite tidal the felt had I Portapack. Sony b/w first my with played andCenter,Tape Music College Mills music on a Buchla Series 100 synthesizer at the experimental “happenings,”few a electronicwitnessed into tunneledhad Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) reached west. I Kluver’sBilly and Rauschenberg Robert of shockwaves the YorkNew from Cage—andJohncompositions bysound to cisco I saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform endeavor,was to and art mix technology. Sanin Fran Over - sense that the right thing to do, in many emergent avenues of calation of progressive art and ideas—among them a growing amid the aftermath ofthe Free Speech Movement and an es- California. I had been living in Berkeley in the unruly 1960s, Oakland, in (CCAC) Crafts and Arts of College California from graduated have might I before semester one Angeles Los to rebounded having dropout, college a was I 1969 In moment. transforming student whofoundhiswayintoit,theCaltechexperiencebecamea as anawarenessoffaultlinesbetweenthetwocultures.To oneyoung came hintsofnewvisualvocabulariesandwaysmaking,aswell later intheyoung21st century’s fusion.Outofthisventure art-science that era—ideaswouldonceagainbecomemanifestageneration to “seewhathappens.”Theexperimentembodiedinsurgentnotionsof Technology andscientiststogether resultedinaninitiativetobringartists In 1969, Instituteof thevisionofahandful ofprofessorsatCalifornia e l c @Caltech i t r a s ’ t s i t r a ©2017 ISAST with thisissue. See
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- historian from Patrick McCraylearn had later contributed much significantly would tothe I that lab (a Lab Electronics Mount the Wilson for and parts Palomar computer Observatories in drafting Caltech’s job a Astro- found and Kelsey & was to become a campus employee. Accordingly, I quit Ladd in their fields—andthe onlypossible loophole available to me volved by invitation only and were required to be established officialstatus within theCaltech community.Artists were some in- having without participate to unable be would I that VanLukas rector,artist African SouthVuuren, advised who program’s the with over meet to headed then scientists.I di- and artists together bring to intended which (Caltech), ogy Institute California engineering-minded strictly ofTechnol - artist-in-residence program brewing across town at the then namics of change place. taking dy- the with harmonize to “anyoneproverbial30” the over and parents colleges, for difficult it made had that zeitgeist avant-garde and experimental, emblematic of anradicalism— expanding Sixties’ of mists the in loomed CalArts like, Muse- stifling. so found had I schooling traditional the of antithesis the be to appearedValencia, it andin Highway5 upconstruction justbeginning was CalArts (CalArts). Arts the of Institute California for campus new the and seum) Nortonlater the (which of became ModernArt Simon Mu - Museum Pasadena the housing building new era—the that of commissions architectural Coast West important most the of two acquire to managed had which Kelsey, & Ladd wentPasadenaworkarchitectural toforI fornia the of firm - Cali Southern in semester. Back a of middle the in parted left myChristmas-card assignment un-silkscreened and de- I So change. social of mischief nimble the with pace keep institutions cumbersome to for difficulty the testamentto a excitingwas all stuff. journal the of edition 1967 its in landscape postmodern techno emerging an charted Architecture of culture with pop bombed McLuhan Marshall achievements. nological Virtually none of this was reflected in my classes atCCAC, While at Ladd & Kelsey I had heard rumors of an art and art an ofrumorsheard had I Kelsey & Ladd atWhile The Medium Is the Message, and the Yale School LEONARDO, Vol. 50, No.5,pp.443–447, 2017 Perspecta 11 Perspecta . It .
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pioneers and pathbreakers transition from analog to digital processes that profoundly place in the declining industrial pre-digital niche. But many changed both the culture and the science of astronomy). of the scientists, to my surprise, appeared to be more inter- Van Vuuren told me the artist-in-residence part of the pro- ested in escaping the isolation of their labs and notebooks gram was to be patterned after the E.A.T. model. At about the by pursuing a kind of bohemian stereotype of an era that,
pioneers and pathbreakers same time, Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA’s) to my thinking, belonged to the Paris Left Bank of a century Senior Curator Maurice Tuchman launched an ambitious earlier or the rough-hewn Cedar Bar of New York in the project to bring artists and corporate engineers together 1950s. This cliché seemed to remain in the science commu- in the museum’s Art and Technology Program, 1967–1971 nity as an impression of what avant-garde artists and their (A&T), which resulted in some artworks being displayed at output were supposed to look like. Such an impression was the avant-garde E.A.T.–designed American Pavilion for the reinforced for me by a chance encounter with the otherwise 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. It also spawned an instrumental convention-breaking Feynman, who gravitated to the artis- publication and major LACMA exhibition in 1971 [1]. While tic atmosphere gathering around the new art program, and Caltech physicist Richard Feynman and Caltech trustee/in- to whom I had been casually introduced. We passed in a dustrial designer Henry Dreyfuss were involved as advisors hallway and nodded a mutual hello, me on my way to write to A&T, there seems to have been no formal relationship be- code in the computing center, he on his way to draw like tween the LACMA and Caltech programs. Robert Rauschen- Degas in the live-model class. Eventually my relationship berg and Robert Whitman, cofounders of E.A.T., were both with Feynman would deepen, not through personal contact involved with Tuchman’s A&T, and Caltech’s Van Vuuren was but through his writings, in particular his opposition to the described in a 1970 publication as “a member of Experiments notion that by observing nature through the material lens of in Art-Technology” [2]. But again, there were no direct con- science, we are denied a sensation of the poetic: nections to be found nor records of any discourse between It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about E.A.T. and Caltech. Art and technology was in the air, nation- it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of ally and internationally—and Henry Dreyfuss was a trustee the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not of both LACMA and Caltech. It’s not difficult to imagine speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter there might have been some competitive impulses at play if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere behind the scenes. of methane and ammonia must be silent? [4] At Caltech, Van Vuuren appropriated the abandoned Ear- hart Plant Research Lab for offices and studios, and as time My impression of the rupture in mutual perceptions of went by I began meeting a few people. The program included each other by artists and scientists has become somewhat conventional art classes, artists-in-residence, an exhibition more reconciled over time—and, if not changed substan- series and a proposal to acquire works of contemporary art tially, it has at least acquired a crust that makes the divide for display on campus. I felt I’d already had my fill of conven- seem less troublesome. Some, or even most, in the science tional classes and wanted instead to probe the use of technol- community may still have the impression that art represents a ogy, which for me was becoming a metaphor for science. And therapeutic, playful or even hedonistic escape from what they science was emerging as the symbol for a more complex kind consider to be the more rigorous and serious endeavors of of beauty in nature, one without authorship. The very act of science. But on the other side of the fence, artists who claim rejecting conventional artistic materials and processes and to be inspired by science too often grab the low-hanging fruit choosing instead to seek poetic expression in science—which of decorative imagery and neglect to drill into the deeper society had largely stereotyped as an emotionless diagram- ontological implications of a scientific worldview—the rich matic domain of tedious research and practical results—had fertile content that is critically important to a broad spectrum great emotional and intellectual appeal for me, as if such a of human ideas and interactions. choice was in itself a declaration of separation from an ex- While the schism I discovered early on was unsettling ap- hausted and fading worldview. ropos of C.P. Snow’s famous recognition of the Two Cultures At the same time, I became increasingly aware that many estrangement, the reality that these two domains persist in of the Caltech folks did not share this sense of romance about alternate spurts of handholding and conflict may ultimately science and were among the conventional art classes’ most be judged a good thing, or at least nearly a nonissue. The avid students. Program director Van Vuuren, I discovered solution to Snow’s lament may be simply to embrace the rift. much later, concurred: Art and science do not melt frictionless into one another; the border of their contact is more like an uneven fault line Many faculty members and students did not want to ap- than a straight seam. The magisteria overlap, and someone is proach art from a technical viewpoint; they wished to certain to trespass. What is unearthed there might otherwise approach the subject traditionally and academically as remain hidden from view, were it not for the intuition that its a change from their daily occupation in technology and probing will lead somewhere profound, to greater insights or science [3]. yet-to-be-understood scales of harmony. By “change,” Van Vuuren meant “as a relief from.” The in- The Caltech Art Program first emerged in 1969 after a year vited artists desired to work with computers and electron- of planning, mostly from within the institute’s Humanities ics or to investigate synthetic materials, as new palettes of Division, and it lasted through 1971. It was described by one form and potential symbols for the change dynamic taking of its principal organizers, English professor J. Kent Clark, as
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of our status in the overall Caltech hierarchy. For NNON, I pioneers and pathbreakers started the camera-computer interface at about midnight and then periodically slept in my Volkswagen bus while it ran. The rig was a basic 35mm animation movie camera Whit- ney had retrofitted to point at a black-and-white CRT and communicate with the huge IBM that was sending images to the screen. The CRT displayed the images one at a time. Each transfer to the screen of a new image from the com- puter also triggered the movie camera’s shutter, which then signaled the IBM to compute the next image, display it and trigger the shutter again. This went on and on and on—one frame of film at a time—for 11 hours to capture what would ultimately become three minutes of seamless motion when projected at 24 frames per second. The computer interface for building the linear figures I filmed was hand-typed code based on functions of expansion, rotation and translation across a Cartesian plane. Our basic vocabulary with which to work was a single point located at the intersection of the x and y axes, and the program further allowed us to build
Fig. 1. Stephen Nowlin, NNON, 35mm computer-generated film, 3 minutes, up layered complexities by applying the same functions to 1970. Hand-keystroked code used to generate linear figures for the film previously created figures (Fig. 1). NNON, which explored the notion of nonsubjectivity and randomness in NNON began as a single figure consisting of 25 line seg- creating artistic form. Produced at the Booth Computing Center, California ments of equal length, forming an octagon embedded with Institute of Technology, as part of the Caltech Art Program, 1970. (© Stephen Nowlin) three isometric cubes, each of which shared planar facets with its neighbor in a continuous optically illusionistic in- terplay (Fig. 2). The octagon was then rotated using a single a desire “to bring scientists and artists together in a dynamic, outer vertex as the center point and repeated every 30 degrees informal relationship and see what happens,” and its focus until 12 overlapping identical octagons formed a mandala- was on experimental hands-on collaborative art-making. like figure consisting of 300 line segments (Fig. 3). The com- Analysis would come later, when results had earned it. “What puter was then programmed to make each line segment we’re not going to have is a lot of hifalutin’ seminars on the nature of art and science,” Clark said [5]. In addition to Clark, the Art Program’s committee of or- ganizers and avid supporters included humanities professors David Smith and Robert Rosenstone, as well as physicist Feynman and trustee Dreyfuss. Beyond its Earhart Lab head- quarters, the project maintained a part-time gallery in the Dabney Humanities building, and it spawned another full- time gallery that opened at Baxter Hall in 1971 and contin- ued until it was abruptly closed by Caltech president Marvin Goldberger in 1985. There were clear successes within the program, includ- ing positive critical responses to exhibitions and promising E.A.T.–inspired collaborations between scientists and invited artists. The latter included light and space artists Peter Alex- ander, Robert Bassler and Helen Pashgian exploring acrylic casting, poured resin and plastics; filmmaker John Whitney pioneering computers as a source of motion graphics; and Van Vuuren researching holography. After a while, Van Vuuren invited me to work with Whit- ney. This was before any computer-generated graphics re- Fig. 2. Stephen Nowlin, NNON, 35mm computer-generated film, 3 minutes (detail), 1970. An enigmatic octagon with embedded illusionistic cubes in ally existed except experimentally, and Whitney wanted to which every line segment is of identical length, created by the author in 1968, explore possibilities using computers the size of refrigerators formed the basic geometric figure from which the film NNON was generated. that were housed in Caltech’s Booth Computing Center. I was (© Stephen Nowlin)
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Fig. 3. Stephen Nowlin, NNON, 35mm computer-generated film, 3 minutes (detail), 1970. The computer program that generated NNON allowed for building progressively more complex figures. This final configuration, which b is the polygon in Fig. 2 rotated and repeated 12 times using a single one of its outside vertices as the rotation’s center point, became the beginning and ending frame for the film. (© Stephen Nowlin)
rotate 180 degrees counterclockwise around its own center at one degree per second. It thus took three minutes for each line to end up in the same mirror-symmetric orientation as it had begun—and in between, what all these rotating kalei- doscopic lines looked like was surrendered entirely to the math (Fig. 4). I called it NNON because it was really about being nonsubjective, about squeezing subjectivity out of the aesthetics and surrendering personal choices to the logic of the geometry—which I thought of as being a metaphor for what science reveals about the sources of diversity in nature and which, in turn, reflects upon our notions of beauty. The film echoed biologist D’Arcy Thompson’s observation that “form is a diagram of forces,” and echoed as well the work c of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne, who were beginning to explore the aesthetics of algorithmic form. In separate two-year progress reports to Caltech’s formal Art Committee and upper administration, both Clark and Van Vuuren attempted, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to make the case for securing funding and campus facilities that would sustain the workshop program and artist residencies beyond 1971. In his report, I would discover decades later, Van Vuuren noted that During his year of residence Mr. Whitney not only pro- duced an elegant computer graphics film but also worked closely with graduate students Doug Reese, Norton Green- field and Steven Nowland [sic]. As a result of this program, Nowland was accepted by the California Institute of the
Arts as a graduate student in design [6]. Fig. 4. (a-–c) Stephen Nowlin, NNON, 35mm computer-generated film, I can only speculate that Van Vuuren intentionally worded 3 minutes (detail), 1970. With each line segment in the figure poised to rotate 180 degrees around its own center, the moving imagery of NNON the report to imply that I was a Caltech graduate student in emphasized geometry over artistic subjectivity. The variations in a–c are order to help promote the program as a relevant and valu- individual frames from the film. (© Stephen Nowlin)
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grad student away from Caltech and into the arts at a differ- pioneers and pathbreakers ent college. I was not a Caltech student—it was true, however, that I went on to finish my undergraduate degree at the fabled CalArts Design School in 1971 and that the Caltech work ap- peared in my CalArts application. In an enterprise parallel in spirit to the art program, Caltech was proactively involved in celebrating the very first Earth Day on 22 April 1970 (Fig. 5), showing serious con- cern for the good that could come from collaborations in science, technology and ecological activism. The burgeon- ing ecology movement reconsidered nature as a scientifically understood system of fragile symbiotic relationships rather than as a human possession for exploitation. This new para- digm dovetailed with the same era’s embrace of technology and science as aesthetic rather than only materialistic. The creative mindset inherited from the tandem ecology and E.A.T. movements of the 1960s–1970s can be cited as his- torically foundational to the present flourishing theme of art- science in the 21st century. For a few years at a critical time, Caltech was involved in its own visionary contribution to the genesis of that still-evolving practice. Caltech continues to collaborate in inventing new cultural and technological enterprise, and embracing the arts and enlightened design Fig. 5. Poster presenting Caltech’s Earth Day programs, 1970. thinking. Looking back at a unique moment for an institu- (© Stephen Nowlin) tion with many moments of brilliance, however, the Caltech Art Program of 1969–1971 was summed up by J. Kent Clark two decades later: “This was one of the finest experiments Caltech ever did, I think” [7].
References and Notes Stephen Nowlin is a vice president at Art Center Col- 1 Maurice Tuchman, A Report on the Art and Technology Program lege of Design in Pasadena, California, a maker/curator and of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (Los Angeles founding director of the Art Center’s Alyce de Roulet William- County Museum of Art, 1971). son Gallery, where he has initiated multiple curatorial projects 2 “Greenhouse Art,” Summer at Caltech (Caltech newsletter, 1969) at the intersection of art and science, most recently REAL- p. 29. SPACE, 2014–2015 (
Manuscript received 17 November 2014.
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