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HOW ART, TECH, AND PEPSICO COLLABORATED, THEN CLASHED BIG IN AT THE 1970 WORLD’S FAIR BY W. PATRICK McCRAY JNL SH (PDF) (PDF) EAB WJ (PDF) (PDF) TSP by SAC SKM PER Please to: return MEK JK MM (PDF) HG ES EG (PDF) 2/6/20 @ 6pm BN / (PDF) DAS PROOF1 AN GZ EV BP MM RK 40 | MAR 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG PHOTOGRAPH BY Firstname Lastname SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | MAR 2020 | 41 Big in Japan

I. The and The Floats ON 18 MARCH 1970, a former Japanese princess stood at the tion. To that end, Pepsi directed close to center of a cavernous domed structure on the outskirts of Osaka. US $2 million (over $13 million today) to With a small crowd of dignitaries, artists, engineers, and busi- E.A.T. to create the biggest, most elaborate, ness executives looking on, she gracefully cut a ribbon that teth- and most expensive art project of its time. ered a large red balloon to a ceremonial Shinto altar. Rumbles of Perhaps it was inevitable, but over the thunder rolled out from speakers hidden in the ceiling. As the 18 months it took E.A.T. to design and balloon slowly floated upward, it appeared to meet itself in mid- build the pavilion, Pepsi executives grew air, reflecting off the massive spherical mirror that covered the increasingly concerned about the group’s walls and ceiling. vision. And just a month after the opening, With that, one of the world’s most extravagant and expensive the partnership collapsed amidst a flurry multimedia installations officially opened, and the attendees of recriminating letters and legal threats. turned to congratulate one another on this successful collab- Despite this inglorious end, the partici- orative melding of art, science, and technology. Underwritten pants considered the pavilion a triumph. by PepsiCo, the installation was the beverage company’s signal contribution to Expo ’70, the first international exposition to be The pavilion was born during a backyard held in an Asian country. conversation in the fall of 1968 between A year and a half in the making, the Pepsi Pavilion drew eager David Thomas, vice-president in charge crowds and elicited effusive reviews. And no wonder: The pavilion of Pepsi’s marketing, and his neighbor, was the creation of Experiments in Art and Technology—E.A.T.—an Robert Breer, a sculptor and filmmaker influential collective of artists, engineers, technicians, and scien- who belonged to the E.A.T. collective. tists based in City. Led by Johan Wilhelm “Billy” Klüver, Pepsi had planned to contract with Dis- an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, E.A.T. at ney to build its Expo ’70 exhibition, as it its peak had more than a thousand members and enjoyed gener- had done for the 1964 World’s Fair in New ous support from corporate donors and philanthropic founda- York City. Some Pepsi executives were, ART MEETS TECH: Artist and Thomas Mee created artificial fog by spraying pure water through narrow nozzles installed however, concerned that the conserva- tions. Starting in the mid-1960s and continuing into the ’70s, the on the Pepsi Pavilion’s roof [above left]. The system tracked wind speed and direction [above right] to ensure the fog was distributed over the group mounted performances and installations that blended tive entertainment company wouldn’t building’s surface. On the pavilion’s terrace, autonomous white “floats” built by sculptor Robert Breer [kneeling, below left] roamed about, electronics, lasers, telecommunications, and computers with produce something hip enough for the emitting soft sounds [below right]. artistic interpretations of current events, the natural world, and burgeoning youth market, and they had the human condition. memories of the 1964 project, when Dis- E.A.T. members saw their activities transcending the making ney ran well over its already consider- of art. Artist–engineer collaborations were understood as cre- able budget. Breer put Thomas in touch ative experiments that would benefit not just the art world but with Klüver, productive dialogue ensued, also industry and academia. For engineers, subject to vocifer- and the company hired E.A.T. in Decem- ous attacks about their complicity in the arms race, the Vietnam ber 1968. War, environmental destruction, and other global ills, the art- Klüver was a master at straddling the and-technology movement presented an opportunity to human- two worlds of art and science. Born in ize their work. Monaco in 1927 and raised in , Accordingly, Klüver and the scores of E.A.T. members in the he developed a deep appreciation for cin- United States and Japan who designed and built the pavilion ema as a teen, an interest he maintained considered it an “experiment in the scientific sense,” as the 1972 while studying with future Nobel physicist book Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology stated. Klüver Hannes Alfvén. He earned a Ph.D. in elec- pitched the installation as a “piece of hardware” that engineers trical engineering at the University of Cali- and artists would program with “software” (that is, live perfor- fornia, Berkeley, in 1957, and the following mances) to create an immersive visual, audio, and tactile expe- year he accepted a coveted research posi- rience. As with other E.A.T. projects, the goal was not about the tion at in Murray Hill, N.J. product but the process. While keeping up a busy research Pepsi executives, unsurprisingly, viewed their pavilion on some- program, Klüver made time to explore what different terms. These were the years of the Pepsi Genera- performances and gallery openings in tion, the company’s mildly countercultural branding. For them, downtown Manhattan and to seek out the pavilion would be at once an advertisement, a striking visual artists. He soon began collaborating with

statement, and a chance to burnish the company’s global reputa- artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Andy War- HERE GOES CREDIT GUTTER HERE GOES CREDIT GUTTER

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Big in Japan

ert Rauschenberg and tered not the building itself but a veil of words, the “key to the whole Pavilion,” II. The and Bell Labs engineer Fred Waldhauer, artificial fog that completely enshrouded and it dictated much of what was planned Experimenters founded Experiments in Art and Tech- the structure. At night, the fog was dra- for the interior. The research and testing nology. By the end of 1967, more than a matically lit and framed by high-intensity for the mirror largely fell to members thousand artists and technical experts xenon lights designed by Myers. of E.AT.’s Los Angeles chapter, led by had joined. And a year later, E.A.T. had On the outdoor terrace, Breer’s white Elsa Garmire. The physicist had done her WORK IN PROGRESS: The Pepsi Pavilion was overseen by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver scored the commission to create the floats rolled about autonomously like graduate work at MIT with laser pioneer [below right], who saw it as “an experiment Pepsi Pavilion. large bubbles, emitting soft sounds— Charles Townes and then accepted a post- in the scientific sense.” Dozens of artists and speech, music, the sound of sawing doc in at Caltech. engineers in the United States and Japan worked on the project, including [at right] From the start, E.A.T. envisioned the wood—and gently reversing themselves But Garmire found the environment for laser physicist Elsa Garmire [hoop earrings], pavilion as a multimedia environment when they bumped into something. Steps women at Caltech unsatisfying, and she Thomas Mee [moustache], and Fujiko Nakaya that would offer a flexible, personal- led downward into a darkened tunnel, began to consider the melding of art and [white turtleneck]. The pavilion’s elaborate audio system was designed by David Tudor ized experience for each visitor and that where visitors were greeted by a Japanese engineering as an alternate career path. [below center]. would express irreverent, uncommercial, hostess wearing a futuristic red dress After experimenting with different and antiauthoritarian values. and bell-shaped hat and handed a clear designs, Garmire and her colleagues But reaching consensus on how to real- plastic wireless handset. Stepping farther designed a mirror modeled after the Mylar ize that vision took months of debate and into the tunnel, they would be showered balloon satellites launched by NASA. A argument. Breer wanted to include his with red, green, yellow, and blue light vacuum would hold the mirror’s Mylar lin- slow-moving cybernetic “floats”—large, patterns from a krypton laser system, ing in place, while a rigid outer shell held rounded, self-driving sculptures powered courtesy of Whitman. in the vacuum. E.A.T. unveiled a full-scale by car batteries. Whitman was becoming Ascending into the main pavilion space, prototype of the mirror in September 1969 intrigued with lasers and visual percep- the visitors’ attention would be drawn in a hangar at a Marine Corps airbase. It tion, and felt there should be a place for immediately upward, where their reflec- was built by G.T. Schjeldahl Co., the Min- that. Forrest “Frosty” Myers argued for tions off the huge spherical mirror made nesota-based company responsible for an outdoor light installation using search- it appear that they were floating in space. NASA’s Echo and PAGEOS balloon satel- lights, his focus at the time. Experimen- The dome also created auditory illusions, lites. Gene Youngblood, a columnist for tal composer David Tudor imagined a as echoes and reverberations toyed with an underground newspaper, found him- sophisticated sound system that would people’s sense of acoustic reality. The self mesmerized when he ventured inside transform the Pepsi Pavilion into both floors of the circular room sloped gen- the “giant womb-mirror” for the first time. recording studio and instrument. tly upward to the center, where a glass “I’ve never seen anything so spectacular, “We’re all painters,” Klüver recalled insert in the floor allowed visitors to peer so transcendentally surrealistic.… The Rauschenberg saying, “so let’s do some- down into the entrance tunnel with its effect is mind-shattering,” he wrote. What thing non-painterly.” Rauschenberg’s laser lights. Other parts of the floor were you saw depended on the ambient light- attempt to break the stalemate prompted covered in different materials and tex- ing and where you were standing, and so a further flood of suggestions. How about tures—stone, wood, carpet. As the visitor the dome fulfilled E.A.T.’s goal of provid- creating areas where the moved around, the handset delivered a ing each visitor with a unique, interac- changed? Or pods that functioned as changing array of sounds. While a viewer tive experience. Such effects didn’t come anechoic chambers—small spaces of stood on the patch of plastic grass, for cheap: By the time Expo ’70 started, the hol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschen- Klüver’s supervisor, John R. Pierce, was Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, nearly total silence? Maybe the floor could have example, loop antennas embedded in cost of the pavilion’s silver lining came to berg, contributing his technical expertise tolerant and even encouraging of his activ- three dozen engineering colleagues rear-screen projections that gave visitors the floor might trigger the sound of birds almost $250,000. and helping to organize exhibitions ities. Pierce had his own creative bent, worked with artists to build an ensem- the impression of walking over flames, or a lawn mower. An even more visually striking feature of and shows. His collaboration with Jean writing science fiction in his spare time ble of wireless radio transmitters, carts clouds, or swimming fish. Perhaps wind The experience was deeply personal: the pavilion was its exterior fog. Ethereal Tinguely on a self-destructing sculpture, and collaborating with fellow Bell engi- that floated on cushions of air, an infrared tunnels and waterfalls could surround You could wander about at your own in appearance, it required considerable called “Homage to New York,” appeared neer Max Mathews to create computer- television system, and other electronics. the entrances. pace, in any direction, and compose your real-world engineering to execute. This on the April 1969 cover of IEEE Spectrum. generated music. Meanwhile, Bell Labs, Held at ’s 69th Regiment Eventually, Klüver herded his fellow own trippy sensory experience. effort was led by Japanese artist Fujiko Klüver emerged as the era’s most visible buoyed by the economic prosperity of the Armory—which in 1913 had hosted a path- E.A.T. members into agreeing to an eclec- Nakaya, who had met Klüver in 1966 in and vocal spokesperson for the merger of 1960s, supported a small coterie of artists- breaking exhibition of modern art—9 Eve- tic set of tech-driven pieces. The pavilion To pull off such a feat of techno-art New York City, where she was then work- art and technology in the United States. in-residence, including , nings expressed a new creative culture in building itself was a white, elongated geo- required an extraordinary amount of ing. Born in 1933 on the northern island Life magazine called him the “Edison- Lillian Schwartz, and Stan VanDerBeek. which artists and engineers collaborated. desic dome, which E.A.T. detested and engineering. The mirror dome alone of Hokkaido, she was the daughter of Tesla-Steinmetz-Marconi-Leonardo da In time, Klüver devised more ambitious In the midst of organizing 9 Eve- did its best to obscure. And so a visitor took months to design and build. E.A.T. , a Japanese physicist

Vinci of the American avant-garde.” projects. For his 1966 orchestration of 9 nings, Klüver, along with artists Rob- HERE GOES CREDIT GUTTER approaching the finished pavilion encoun- viewed the mirror as, in Frosty Myers’ famous for his studies of crystals.

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in deference to its patron’s conservatism, planetarium shows, the company named III. Inside E.A.T. specified it was “not interested in its product the “laserium,” which soon political or social comment.” became a pop-culture fixture. the Experience Meanwhile, though, Garmire shifted In sharp contrast to E.A.T.’s sensibilities, her professional energies back to science. Pepsi executives didn’t view the pavilion After leaving Caltech for the University of A PAVILION OF ONE’S OWN: The goal of the pavilion was to give each of the hundreds of as an experiment or even a work of art Southern California, she went on to have thousands of visitors a personalized, inter- but rather as a product they had paid an exceptionally successful career in laser active experience. Upon entering, visitors for. Eventually, they decided that they science and . She served as engi- were bathed in patterns of laser light [top, far right]. A giant spherical mirror at the pavil- were not well pleased by what E.A.T. had neering dean at Dartmouth College and ion’s center [right] made people appear to delivered. On 20 April 1970, little more president of the Optical Society of Amer- float on the ceiling. Visitors carried wireless than a month after the pavilion opened ica. Years later, Garmire acknowledged handsets [bottom, far right], which emitted sounds and noises depending on where you to the public, Pepsi informed Klüver that that working with artists influenced her stood in the pavilion. E.A.T.’s services were no longer needed. interactions with students, especially E.A.T. staff who had remained in Osaka when it came to cultivating a sense of play. to operate the pavilion smuggled the After Expo ’70 ended, Mee filed for a audio tapes out, leaving Pepsi to play a U.S. patent to cover an “Environmental repetitive and banal soundtrack inside Control Method and Apparatus” derived its avant-garde building for the remain- from his pavilion work. As his company ing months of the expo. grew, he continued his collaborations Despite E.A.T.’s abrupt ouster, many with Nakaya. And even after Mee’s death critics responded favorably to the pavil- in 1998, his company, Mee Industries, ion. A Newsweek critic called it “an elec- contributed hardware to installations tronic cathedral in the shape of a geodesic Nakaya designed for the Guggenheim dome,” neither “fine art nor engineering Museum in Bilbao. More recently, her but a true synthesis.” Another critic chris- Fog Bridge was integrated into the new n tened the pavilion a “total work of art”—a Exploratorium building in . Gesamtkunstwerk—in which the aesthetic Billy Klüver insisted that the success and technological, human and organic, of his organization would ultimately be and mechanical and electric were united. judged by the degree to which it became In hindsight, the Pepsi Pavilion was redundant. By that measure, E.A.T. was When E.A.T. got the Pepsi commission, Eventually, Nakaya decided that her pared it to the clouds found in Edo-period somehow embodied in a vehicle that really the apogee for the art-and-tech- indeed a success, even if events didn’t Klüver asked Fujiko to explore options fog would be generated out of pure water. Japanese landscape paintings. was flying about him at varying speeds,” nology movement that burst forth in unfold quite the way he imagined. At uni- for enshrouding the pavilion in clouds. For help, she turned to Thomas R. Mee, Tudor explained. the United States and abroad in the mid- versities in the United States and Europe, Nakaya’s aim was to produce a “dense, a physicist in the Pasadena area whom While the fog and mirrored dome were The audio system also served as an 1960s. This first wave did not last. Some dozens of programs now explore the bubbling fog,” as she wrote in 1972, for a Elsa Garmire knew. Mee had just started the pavilion’s most obvious features, hid- experimental lab. Much as researchers critics contended that in creating corpo- intersections of art, technology, engi- person “to walk in, to feel and smell, and his own company to make instruments den away in a control room sat an elabo- might book time on a particle accelera- rate-sponsored large-scale collaborations neering, and design. It’s common these disappear in.” She set up meteorological for weather monitoring. He had never rate computerized sound system. tor or a telescope, E.A.T. invited “resi- like the pavilion, artists compromised days to find tech-infused art in museum instruments at the pavilion site to collect heard of Billy Klüver or E.A.T., but he As designed by Tudor, the system could dent programmers” to apply to spend themselves aesthetically and ethically— collections and adorning public spaces. baseline temperature, wind, and humid- knew of Nakaya’s father’s pioneering accept signal inputs from 32 sources, several weeks in Osaka exploring the pavil- “freeload[ing] at the trough of that Events like Burning Man and its many imi- ity data. She also discussed several ways research on snow. which could be modified, amplified, and ion’s potential as an artistic instrument. techno-fascism that had inspired them,” tators continue to explore the experimen- of generating fog with scientists in Japan. Mee and Nakaya figured out how to toggled among 37 speakers. The sources The programmers would have access as one incensed observer wrote. By the tal edges of art and technology—and to One idea they considered was dry ice. create fog by spraying the water under could be set to one of three modes: “line to a library of several hundred “natural mid-1970s, such expensive and elaborate emphasize the process over the product. Solid chunks of carbon dioxide mixed high pressure through copper lines fit- sound,” in which the sound was switched environmental sounds” as well as lon- projects had become as discredited and And that may be the legacy of the pavil- with water or steam could indeed make a ted with very narrow nozzles. The lines rapidly from speaker to speaker in a par- ger recordings that Tudor and his col- out of fashion as moon landings. ion and of E.A.T.: They revealed that engi- thick mist. But the expo’s health officials hugged the edges of the geodesic struc- ticular pattern; “point sound,” in which leagues had prepared. These included Nonetheless, for many E.A.T. mem- neers and artists could forge a common ruled out the plan, claiming the massive ture, and the 2,500 or so nozzles atom- the sound emanated from one speaker; bird calls, whale songs, heartbeats, traf- bers, the Pepsi Pavilion left a lasting mark. creative culture. Far from being worlds release of CO2 would attract mosquitoes. ized some 41,600 liters of water an hour. and “immersion” or “environmental” fic noises, foghorns, tugboats, and ocean Elsa Garmire’s artistic experimentation apart, their communities share values The pure white fog spilled over the struc- mode, where the sound seemed to come liners. Applicants were encouraged to cre- with lasers led to her cofounding a com- of entrepreneurship, adaptability, and ture’s angled and faceted roof and drifted from all directions. “The listener would ate “experiences that tend toward the real pany, Laser Images, which built laser above all, the collective desire to make POST YOUR COMMENTS AT spectrum.ieee.org/pepsipavillion-mar2020 gently over the fairground. Breer com- have the impression that the sound was HERE GOES CREDIT GUTTER rather than the philosophical.” Perhaps light shows. Riffing on the popularity of something beautiful. n

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