pioneers and pathbreakers artist’s article @Caltech Art, Science and Technology, 1969–1971 S T e p h e n n o w l i n In 1969, the vision of a handful of professors at California Institute of nological achievements. Marshall McLuhan bombed pop Technology resulted in an initiative to bring artists and scientists together culture with The Medium Is the Message, and the Yale School to “see what happens.” The experiment embodied insurgent notions of of Architecture charted an emerging techno postmodern that era—ideas that would once again become manifest a generation ABSTRACT later in the young 21st century’s art-science fusion. Out of this venture landscape in its 1967 edition of the journal Perspecta 11. It came hints of new visual vocabularies and ways of making, as well was all exciting stuff. as an awareness of fault lines between the two cultures. To one young Virtually none of this was reflected in my classes at CCAC, student who found his way into it, the Caltech experience became a a testament to the difficulty for cumbersome institutions to transforming moment. keep pace with the nimble mischief of social change. So I left my Christmas-card assignment un-silkscreened and de- parted in the middle of a semester. Back in Southern Cali- In 1969 I was a college dropout, having rebounded to Los fornia I went to work for the Pasadena architectural firm of Angeles one semester before I might have graduated from Ladd & Kelsey, which had managed to acquire two of the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, most important West Coast architectural commissions of California. I had been living in Berkeley in the unruly 1960s, that era—the new building housing the Pasadena Museum amid the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement and an es- of Modern Art (which later became the Norton Simon Mu- calation of progressive art and ideas—among them a growing seum) and the new campus for California Institute of the sense that the right thing to do, in many emergent avenues of Arts (CalArts). CalArts was just beginning construction up endeavor, was to mix art and technology. Over in San Fran- Highway 5 in Valencia, and it appeared to be the antithesis cisco I saw the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform of the traditional schooling I had found so stifling. Muse- to sound compositions by John Cage—and from New York like, CalArts loomed in the mists of Sixties’ radicalism— ­­ the shockwaves of Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver’s avant-garde and experimental, emblematic of an expanding Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) reached west. I zeitgeist that had made it difficult for colleges, parents and had witnessed a few “happenings,” tunneled into electronic the proverbial “anyone over 30” to harmonize with the dy- music on a Buchla Series 100 synthesizer at the experimental namics of change taking place. Mills College Tape Music Center, and played with my first While at Ladd & Kelsey I had heard rumors of an art and b/w Sony Portapack. I had felt the tidal surge of young in- artist-in-residence program brewing across town at the then stinct that convinces youth a new path is unassailable, despite strictly engineering-minded California Institute of Technol- contrary advice imparted by various worried elders. ogy (Caltech), which intended to bring together artists and NASA astronauts were about to set foot on the moon. The scientists. I then headed over to meet with the program’s di- Whole Earth Catalog’s inventory of products and ideas for rector, South African artist Lukas Van Vuuren, who advised global ecological awakening was both a hallowed handbook that I would be unable to participate without having some and near-sacred text. And in the vast cultural delta of the official status within the Caltech community. Artists were in- 1960s’ hippie revolution, a back-to-nature mantra continued volved by invitation only and were required to be established to provide dissonance to the decade’s rousing chorus of tech- in their fields—and the only possible loophole available to me was to become a campus employee. Accordingly, I quit Ladd & Kelsey and found a job drafting computer parts for the Stephen Nowlin (curator, artist), Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design, 1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA 91103. Email: <[email protected]>. Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in Caltech’s Astro- See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/50/5> for supplemental files associated Electronics Lab (a lab that I would much later learn from with this issue. historian Patrick McCray had contributed significantly to the ©2017 ISAST doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01220 LEONARDO, Vol. 50, No. 5, pp. 443–447, 2017 443 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_01220 by guest on 23 September 2021 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.