Episodes

What do engineers get out of working with artists? In a series of talks designed to attract new engineers and artists to the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), engineers Fred Waldhauer and Robby Robbinson discuss how working with artists turned them from “aesthetic primitives” to true collaborators, even if they never quite fit in with the “arty crowd.” Hear how they approached their work in this bonus episode, featuring a longer clip from the archival tape.

What makes good art good and what makes that experience stick with you? Engineer Billy Klüver, who co-founded the nonprofit group Experiments in Art and Technology, has a great answer to that question—but we couldn’t fit it in our third season. In this bonus episode, we’ll hear Klüver talk about discomfort, threats, and the power of good art. Stay tuned for more bonus episodes.

Did you know Robert Rauschenberg was fired by John Cage? Us either—until we heard Rauschenberg telling his side of the story to Barbara Rose in one of the interviews in Getty’s archives. We’re sharing clips from the archive as bonus episodes while you’re waiting on season four. In this first episode, you’ll hear Robert Rauschenberg explain how he stopped designing stage sets for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company all while gaining a better sense of his brusque yet charming personality. Stay tun...

Check out Getty’s newest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present. In this inaugural episode, host and producer Jaime Roque shares a heartfelt journey through his family’s history and the role of food in preserving cultural heritage. Hear the rest of the series and learn more at getty.edu/recurrent. Look for it and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century, in part because he never stopped exploring new mediums and styles. His work with new technology, however, is often overlooked. In 1960, a chance meeting with Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver led them to eventually co-found Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a nonprofit that paired artists with scientists and engineers to use the most cutting-edge new technologies. But E.A.T.’s projects were not always a critical su...

Laser physicist Billy Klüver had always been interested in art. So when he started working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the late 1950s, he began going into Manhattan and meeting artists—and in short order he was collaborating with them. He co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to facilitate these partnerships and worked to find corporate sponsors, with mixed success. In this second episode of the season, we get to know Klüver’s role as a kind of translator and middleman between...

Artist Fujiko Nakaya is best known for her ethereal sculptures made with fog. But her very first fog sculpture, which kicked off decades of working with this unusual and highly technical material, came about almost by chance—and thanks to her ties to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). At 91, Nakaya is still making fog sculptures that compel audiences to consider the environment and our impact on it in new ways. In this third and final episode, we trace the development of Nakaya’s iconi...

In season three of Recording Artists, artist and futurist Ahmed Best examines the groundbreaking art-science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Through the stories of E.A.T.’s co-founders, artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, as well as artist Fujiko Nakaya, who continues to make technology-inflected artworks, this season investigates how artists and engineers collaborated to explore the creative potential of new technologies. Learn about this inn...