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Cover art: Pantelis Xagoraris, untitled (1974). Created during a fellowship at the MIT Center for Ad-vanced Visual Studies. Reprinted by permission of MIT.

ART HISTORY MEDIA STUDIES HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY

In Technocrats of the Imagination John Beck and Ryan Bishop explore the collaborations between the Amer-ican avant-garde art world and the military-industrial complex during the 1960s, in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. For artists, designers, and edu-cators working with the likes of Bell Labs, the RAND

Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, experiments in art and technology presaged not only a new aesthetic but a new utopi-an social order based on collective experimentation. In examining these projects’ promises and pitfalls and how they have inspired a new gener-ation of collaborative labs populated by artists, engineers, and scientists, Beck and Bishop reveal the connections between the contemporary art world and the militarized lab model of research that has dominated the sciences since the 1950s.

“In teaching art and technology history now, the hardest tasks are to problematize innovation and to explain with precision the ways in which the midcentury artistic avant-garde in the United States was entangled with managerial elites and the military-industrial complex. John Beck and Ryan Bishop convey this history, keeping front and center the urgency of its political implications for present-day work in art and technology. I will recommend this book to every artist and researcher I know who works across art, science, and technology.”

—Lisa Cartwright, coauthor of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

“John Beck and Ryan Bishop’s sustained, in-depth engagement with the history of artistic and techno-logical forms cuts back to the fundamental paradigms established through the computational advances during the Cold War, offering historical insights that are paramount for critical and political thought. Tech-

nocrats of the Imagination is an incredible achievement and an important contribution. I could not recommend it more highly.”

—Jordan Crandall, Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Duke University Press www.dukeupress.edu

a Cultural Politics BookA series edited by John Armitage, Ryan Bishop, and Douglas Kellner

Duke

Beck_pbk_cover_02.indd All Pages 1/14/2020 8:13:27 AM

Technocrats of the Imagination

Art, Technology, and the Military- Industrial Avant- Garde

John Beck and Ryan Bishop

Duke University Press Durham and London 2020

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© 2020 Duke University PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞Designed by Aimee C. Harrison & Drew SiskTypeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication DataNames: Beck, John, [date] author. | Bishop, Ryan, [date] author.Title: Technocrats of the imagination : art, technology, and the military- industrial

avant- garde / John Beck, Ryan Bishop.Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020 | “A cultural politics book.” |

Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: lccn 2019023962 (print) | lccn 2019023963 (ebook)isbn 9781478005957 (hardcover)isbn 9781478006602 (paperback)isbn 9781478007326 (ebook)Subjects: lcsh: Technology and the arts— History—20th  century. | Arts— United

States— Experimental methods. | Military- industrial complex— United States.Classification: lcc nx180.t4 b43 2020 (print) | lcc nx180.t4 (ebook) |

ddc 700.1/050973— dc23lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2019023962lc ebook rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2019023963

Cover art: Pantelis Xagoraris, untitled (1974). Created during a fellowship at the mit Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Reprinted by permission of mit.

Contents

Acknowl edgments vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Science, Art, Democracy 17

Chapter 2 A Laboratory of Form and Movement: Institutionalizing

Emancipatory Technicity at MIT 46

Chapter 3 The Hands- On Pro cess: Engineering Collaboration

at E.A.T. 77

Chapter 4 Feedback: Expertise, LACMA, and the Think Tank 107

Chapter 5 How to Make the World Work 133

Chapter 6 Heritage of Our Times 164

Notes 193

References 201

Index 221

Acknowl edgments

This book grew out of an earlier proj ect of ours entitled Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (2016). As we were writing the introduction to that volume, it became clear that the issues addressed there needed more space. The pre sent book is an attempt to find that space. So in the first instance, we wish to thank all the contributors to that collection for their help in shaping the ideas that emerged here: Ele Carpenter, Fabienne Collingnon, Mark Coté, Dan Grausam, Ken Hollings, Adrian Mackenzie, Jussi Parikka, John Phillips, Adam Piette, James Purdon, Aura Satz, and Neal White. We would also like to thank our respective institutions and research centers for support to visit archives at the Getty Research Institute and the Buckminster Fuller archive at Stanford University. We owe a special thanks to Jussi Parikka, Lori Emerson, and Darren Wershler, who are currently writing a book on media and technology labs and have been in dialog with us about the many overlapping issues and materials. Courtney Berger, our excellent editor at Duke University Press, the excellent and insightful reviewers, and every one at the press involved in realizing this book, as well as those who constantly provide support and steerage for the Cul-tural Politics book series and journal, deserve our most profound appreciation.

John would like to thank the Department of En glish, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster for financial and logistical support, with a special mention to Sharon Sinclair for her patient navigation of all manner of administrative knots. John is grateful for the award of a Library Research Grant from the Getty Research Institute, which made it pos si ble to consult the Experiments in Art and Technology archives. Thanks also to the Balch Art Research Library of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for making archival materials available at short notice. The warmth and efficiency of the staff at the Getty and the Balch are much appreciated. Many thanks to Douglas Kahn for sending over, unsolicited, some marvelous audio material. For their continued support and friendship, thanks to Matthew Cornford,

viiiAcknowl edgments

Mark Dorrian, and Neal White, and for providing deep context, thanks to Lucy Bond, Georgina Colby, David Cunningham, Rob La Frenais, Alex War-wick, and Leigh Wilson. To Paula and Ed, the ultimate combination of art and tech.

Ryan would like to thank the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, for its continued intellectual support for this proj ect. Many col-leagues contributed directly to the shape of this book, including Ed d’Souza, Jussi Parikka, Sunil Manghani, Victor Burgin, John Armitage, Joanne Rob-erts, Jonathan Faiers, Seth Giddings, Mihaela Brebenel, Jo Turney, Alessan-dro Ludovico, Daniel Cid, Dan Ashton, and Valentina Cardo. Others whose input and friendship found its way into this volume include, in no specific order, John Phillips, Sean Cubitt, Mike Featherstone, Couze Venn, Kristoffer Gansing, Daphne Dragona, Tania Roy, Tiziana Terranova, Ben Bratton, Jordan Crandall, Ed Keller, Geoff Winthrop- Young, T’ai Smith, Ken Wark, and Elena Lamberti among many others. Fi nally Ryan would like to extend infinite grati-tude to his dearest collaborator, Adeline Hoe.

01Science, Art, Democracy

The danger is in the neatness of identifications.— Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce”

The art- and- technology proj ects of the 1960s mark the meeting point of the post- formalist experimentalists of an ascendant American art and the federally funded military- industrial university r&d machinery of the Cold War superpower. What these very dif er ent constituencies share is a commitment to continuous innovation in the de-sign and application of technology, an understanding that

this pro cess requires collaborative experimentation, and that such a pro cess is, broadly speaking, a social good, whether that means enhanced national secu-rity and an improved standard of living, or new modes of experience and un-derstanding. Without this broadly sympathetic outlook, it is hard to imagine organ izations like Bell Labs or the companies involved in lacma’s Art & Technology Program (a&t) allowing artists, however grudgingly, on- site. Nor is it likely that artists would have participated so willingly without some in-kling that science and industry ofered, beyond merely technical expertise and access to materials, opportunities to explore new modes of working. It is true that in some cases the main draw for artists was the prospect of being able to scale up their work using skills and resources other wise unavailable to them. It is equally the case that the presence of artists in some companies and institutions was seen as a burdensome interference with business as usual. Nevertheless, a

24chapter one

centerpiece, are achieved facts soon enough. By this point, thanks in no small part to Barr’s advocacy, the Bauhaus had entered the American bloodstream and, alongside other selected strains of the Eu ro pean avant- garde, become a de-fining influence on some of the most adventurous and utopian aspects of Cold War US culture. As a weaponized avant- garde, front- loaded with a US modern-ism synthesized out of the thwarted experiments of the recent past and packed into a sleek projectile, Barr’s torpedo foreshadows what will become a familiar postwar US narrative: the inheritor and guardian of the best of Eu ro pean inven-tiveness has reengineered its components and rendered them battle ready.

The movement Barr makes from the “laboratory” of Harvard’s Fogg Museum to the Dessau Bauhaus and then on to establish MoMA as a prime disseminator of Eu ro pean, and then American, modernism is in many ways a capsule lesson in how the Eu ro pean avant- garde found an institutional and cultural place in the postwar United States. The stress on an expanded defini-

Figure 1.1. Alfred Ham-ilton Barr’s “torpedo” diagrams of the ideal permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, as advanced in 1933 (top) and in 1941 (bottom). Prepared by Alfred H. Barr Jr. for the “Advisory Committee Report on Museum Collections,” 1941. Offset, printed in black, 8� × 11 in. (20.3× 29.2 cm). Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, 9a.15, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. MA70. © 2019. Digital image, Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

References

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Abella, Alex. 2008. Soldiers of Reason: The rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Adamic, Louis. 1936. “Education on a Mountain.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 172: 516–530.

Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel- Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.

Albers, Josef. 1935. “Art as Experience.” Progressive Education 12 (October): 391–393.Albers, Josef. 1938. “Concerning Fundamental Design.” In Bauhaus: 1919–1928,

edited by Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, 114–121. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Alexander, Thomas M. 1987. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Allen, Michael Thad, and Gabrielle Hecht, eds. 2001. Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes. Cambridge, MA: mit Press.

Amadae, S. M. 2003. Rationalizing Cap i tal ist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Amadae, S. M. 2015. Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Po liti cal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anon. 1944. “Modern Laboratory.” Life, September 18, 79, 81, 82.Anon. 1967. “Art and Science: Two Worlds Merge”. Bell Telephone Magazine,

November/December, 13–19.Antin, David. 2011. “Art and the Corporations.” In Radical Coherency: Selected Essays

on Art and Lit er a ture 1966 to 2005, 61–77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Apollinaire, Guillaume. 2002. The Cubist Paint ers. Translated by Peter Read. Forest

Row, UK: Artists Bookworks.Arrow, Kenneth J. 1962. “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing.”

Review of Economic Studies 29.3: 155–173.asc (American Society for Cybernetics). n.d. “History of Cybernetics, Chapter 2:

The Coalescence of Cybernetics.” Accessed April 30, 2019. http:// www . asc - cybernetics . org / foundations / history2 . htm.

Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1996. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6.1: 44–72.