Turning to Technology: legendary engineer billy kluver on artist-engineer collaborations, HANS ULRICH OBRIST

Swedish engineer Billy Klüver is known for his important collaborations with some of the most influential artists in recent time. Eager to make new technology available to more artists, Klüver co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology in 1966. Here he talks to Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist about his work with artists and the activities of E.A.T.

Special thanks to Julie Martin


PART I (III)

HUO: Could you tell me about the beginning of your art and technology projects, the first dialogues with artists and how it all started.

BK: I will say it started by instinct. There was no dialogue. It's like LUCY three billion years ago. I don't think it had anything to do with dialogue between Art and Science. The artists were looking for new materials; they have always done that: the people who found marble in Italy, the guys who invented oil paint in Holland, stretching canvases, using silk-screens and Rauschenberg's following it up as part of painting... or Duchamp choosing the snow shovel. In terms of artists expanding their means, I don't see much difference between that and including technology in the work.

In the 60s the new technology expanded at a phenomenal rate, and at Bell Labs I was in the middle of it. At the same time there was an explosion in New York City in art. Abstract Expressionism had run its course, and what was needed was a new way of finding motifs and subject matter, and the American environment was the one that came closest at hand. The American environment was there: the pastry in the window, the stockings, the comic strips. They were close at hand, and the Americans didn't have this intellectual overlay of critics and others that decided in which direction artists should go. In the sixties in Paris, you had to belong to a movement or specific direction in art. I had artist friends who were agonizing if they should sign a manifesto drawn up by what was essentially intellectuals who had nothing to do with art, people who found it a great, fun thing to behave like little dictators over an art movement. And so for my friends in Europe the United States became the area of freedom, where you did not have to be concerned with any intellectual overlay. And for the New York artists too.

"It all began in 1960 when Jean Tinguely asked me if I would help him to build a machine that would destroy itself at the Museum of Modern Art."

HUO: Was that the reason you moved to America from Sweden?

BK: That had nothing to do with my moving to this country. I moved to this country because I had seen so many movies and I wanted to see what it looked like. I had to wait until I was twenty-six otherwise I would have to do another two years of military service. So I got here in 1954, in the middle of the atmosphere of fear and terror that Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations of supposed Communist infiltration were generating in the technical community. So I decided that I couldn't go and work for RCA or General Electric, which were prime targets for investigation. I found out that the best way to get around this problem was to get a Ph.D., which I did at U.C., Berkeley, and continued on to Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill,in New Jersey in 1957, where I did research on electron beam motion in crossed electric and magnetic fields and plasmas and later lasers.

At this time I began to work with artists in New York. and of course I had all the resources from Bell Laboratories behind me. I could use my assistants, I could use the guy who worked in the lab next door to ask a specific question. It all began in 1960 when Jean Tinguely asked me if I would help him to build a machine that would destroy itself at the Museum of Modern Art. He had been given the garden to build a sculpture but he didn't know what to do: he didn't know how big it should be or how to get parts. So I asked him "What do you want?" and he said, "Bicycle wheels". Well I walked down to the local bicycle shop and I asked, "Do you have old bicycle wheels?", and the guy said, "Yeah. I've got a lot of bicycle wheels," and he took me down to his basement and there were piles of old bicycles. I loaded them up in my Chevrolet convertible and carted them in to the museum. Jean Tinguely got enormously excited and after three weeks he had built this enormous construction. My colleagues at Bell Labs and I had devised timing and triggering devices and various ways for it to break apart; smoke, smells and fire would come out of it and others things would happened to it during the time it took to self- destruct. On the 17th of March, 1960, Homage to New York destroyed itself in front of all the invited people from the Upper East Side.

"In 1961 there was an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm entitled "Art in Motion" which was enormously important and Pontus asked me to organize the American contribution. I went to every artist I could think of in New York and asked, "Do you have a work that moves?"

While we were working on the machine, other artists in New York came around and looked at us. I thought at that time that I could contribute to artists in the sense of giving them more possibilities through technology. But what happened was that Robert Rauschenberg saw the whole operation as a collaboration between the artist and the engineer. And that was a new starting point, because I immediately understood that if an artist and an engineer collaborate on a project on an equal basis, then something interesting and unexpected might really come out of it.

HUO: And what was the first project you did with Rauschenberg?

BK: In 1961 there was an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm entitled "Art in Motion" which was enormously important and Pontus asked me to organize the American contribution. I went to every artist I could think of in New York and asked, "Do you have a work that moves?" Rauschenberg made a painting, Black Market, in which visitors were asked to move objects in and out of the work.

Meanwhile Bob had asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him on a project, and he had some ideas about an interactive environment, where the temperature, sound, smell, lights etc. would change as a person moved through it. Of course we coundn't do it with the technology available in the early 60's. And four or five years later after many discussions and a lot of work it ended up in Oracle, the five piece sound sculpture which is now on tour with the Rauschenberg retrospective. This piece took us several years to build. It was quite complicated. It doesn't look complicated, the electronics and the ideas are not very complicated, but when it came down to actually realizing it, it was. This was because of two restrictions, Bob didn't want any wires connecting the five pieces and he wanted all the controls in one of the pieces. So we had to build wireless transmitters from scratch and this produced interference and other problems.

In those days I had to operate outside my normal work, outside my normal operating procedures, so it was basically a six to midnight job. I had the co- operation of the people in the laboratory, my assistants and the other people, and everybody helped. There was never any problem with all of this. They liked it and everybody helped solve the problems.

HUO: That lead us to the 9 Evenings you organized which are collaborations between artists and engineers from Bell Laboratories. What did trigger these evening which now are a milestone of performance history?

BK: Well, as I said, Oracle took several years, in 1965 it was first shown at Leo Castelli's gallery. Meanwhile I had worked with Merce Cunningham on a dance with John Cage's music where the dancers triggered the music; with Jasper Johns on two paintings with a neon letter where he wanted the neon to be driven by batteries. My working with the dancers and composers on these projects finally led to a large-scale collaboration with Rauschenberg and other artists and to something new in the history of art and technology. And like any history a lot of parallel things happened at the same time, like the performances by Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, everybody...at Judson Church which were going on full blast with the same two hundred people coming to see the performances there.

By 1966 two things came together which really had nothing to do with each other -- the frustration of having such a small audience and the huge interest in new technology -- that ended up in the "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering."

The sequence of events was that Knut Wiggen from Fylkingen, the music society in Stockholm, asked me to help organize the American participation in an Art and Technology Festival. I proposed the idea to Bob Rauschenberg, who liked the notion of the collaboration between artists and engineers. We invited a group of artists and I invited a group of colleagues from Bell Laboratories and the artists and engineers began to meet together, and after listening to the aritsts' ideas the engineers began to build equipment that the artists would use. During the summer the project with Sweden broke down, and we all decided to continue working together and to hold the performances in New York City. It was Simone Whitman who found the Armory on Lexington Avenue.

"More than thirty engineers from Bell Laboratories were working on this with us, and a huge number of artists in New York participated as performers or helpers in the ten pieces and it made an historic change in the whole business of art and technology."

In October 1966 we held a a series of nine evenings of ten artists' performances; each artist performed twice. This became a huge operation which 10,000 people attended. Now to go from 200 people to 10,000 in a few months was an enormous undertaking. More than thirty engineers from Bell Laboratories were working on this with us, and a huge number of artists in New York participated as performers or helpers in the ten pieces and it made an historic change in the whole business of art and technology.

The films from 9 EVENINGS, which I've been storing in my basement, are now being put together to document each artist's work as much as possible. There are two films completed already, Öyvind Fahlström's Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and Rauschenberg's Open Score and the next one is John Cage's Variations VII. We hope that in about a year-and-a-half all ten of the films will be ready.

HUO: Could you tell me about the beginnings of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology)?

BK: During the 9 Evenings, there was an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm and we had lots of meetings in the bar in the basement of the Armory and around Rauschenberg's kitchen table and out of these discussion, Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Fred Waldhauer and I decided that we needed a foundation to continue the kinds of artist-engineer collaborations that 9 Evenings had developed. Because of the tax structure in the United States, we needed a non- profit, tax-exempt foundation, thus Experiments in Art and Technology was founded. The name was invented by our lawyer. None of us liked the name because the word "experiments" doesn't denote something that was a finished work. Artists don't experiment. But there it was.

Soon after 9 EVENINGS we called a meeting at the Central Plaza Hotel to see if artists in New York would be interested in something like E.A.T. Three hundred artists came to the meeting and we collected eighty immediate requests for technical help.

HUO: Could you describe how do you conceived the functions of this organization? In the text you talked about the organization of services. How exactly was Experiments Art and Technology defined as an organization.

BK: The principal activity on E.A.T. was to match artists who had technical problems or projects with engineers or scientists who could work with them. The basis of it is that you have one engineer and one artist and you set up a situation where they can work together. Now, the engineer works inside a company, so he has access to all the information and equipment he wants. So you don't need a place, a building, a laboratory or a space. From the very beginning we were against that. You only needed a space for the engineers and the artists to meet, and you needed a matching system for one to contact the other. But otherwise there was nothing else to it.

"Now the idea of matching artists and engineers and establishing artist- engineer collaboration is obvious. But in the early days of E.A.T. these ideas were completely new and different and you had to convince engineers to do it."

HUO: How did you build of a network of engineers? Was it easy to find engineers and to convince them to participate?

BK: We did all kinds of things to attract engineers. We held a competition where we put ads in the technical journals and in the New York Times for the best work of art from a collaboration where the prize went to the engineers.

We also went to engineering conventions, where we set up a booth with artists to talk to the engineers and sign them up. And then I gave talks at the engineering conventions; that way I got articles in technical journals like IEEE Spectrum. Within a few years, we had made contact with thousands of engineers, and we had two or three thousand engineer members who wanted to work with artists. Ultimately it was not a problem.

We established a system for finding an engineer to work with an artist with a specific technical problem: edge notch cards and knitting needles. We had one person in charge of the matchings. Now the idea of matching artists and engineers and establishing artist- engineer collaboration is obvious. But in the early days of E.A.T. these ideas were completely new and different and you had to convince engineers to do it.

reproduced from: http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue3/i_kluver/i_kluver.html

Turning to Technology: legendary engineer billy kluver on artist-engineer collaborations

BILLY KLÜVER, PART II (III)

"I mean there is nothing mysterious about this whole process of matching artists and engineers."

HUO: Did Experiments in Art and Technology have a board of directors, or a team of artists and scientists acting as advisers?

BK: Of course, we had to have a board of directors. Rauschenberg was Chairman of the Board and I was president. And we assembled what we called a Council of Agents, individuals from industry, labor, politics, the technical community and the art community who would help us in our projects and activities.

HUO: How did you concretely proceed in order to have these hybrid teams of artists and engineers collaborating on projects?

BK: I mean there is nothing mysterious about this whole process of matching artists and engineers.

There are some things we avoided with E.A.T. We never codified the artist- engineer collaboration in a building or in a separate laboratory environment. That might have helped industry and engineers understand what we were talking about, it could help to educate them. On the other hand when you codify a process like this you turn away artists and turn away creativity. We decided to concentrate on the collaboration between individuals. The artists would work with engineers who were full time in their profession and the industry support would come for these collaborations.

We did not focus exclusively on placing artists in industry. Of course for E.A.T. the backing of the industry was very important. The engineers themselves chose to work on projects with artists that interested them but also we needed recognition from the companies they worked for. And that recognition comes easier today. When we worked with Sennheiser to use their wireless microphones in the upgrade of Oracle this year, the company immediately wrote it up in their newsletter.

As for matchings, we decided that E.A.T. would help everybody. But of course, some projects are more serious than others. Nowadays when people call me it's very easy to separate out the serious artists by a couple of questions. First I ask them "How big is it?" and then they say "well maybe it can be big or it can be small". So I say "is it inside or outside?" And they say "well it can be inside or it can be outside", and then I say "How many people are going to see it, two people or two hundred?" "Well, any number of people can see it..." Then I know that the person doesn't know what they're thinking about, and although I give them technical advice on what to do, I know the project will just slide.

"If I had been really involved in the philosophy, I wouldn't have been able to understand that an engineer had to be an engineer and the artist had to be an artist."

HUO: Are such collaborations between an artist and a scientist predictable?

BK: Of course not; it's totally unpredictable. You never know.

HUO: Everything can happen because nothing has to happen.....

BK: One thing that is predictable is when you are doing something that is new or different, you have to wait: wait for the artist to decide something, wait for a piece of equipment to be built, wait in line to buy a part. You have to ready for this kind of waiting. Then something will happen.

HUO: I have observed that there have been lots of discussion panels and conferences recently in Europe about Art and Science and the outcome has never been really fruitful. And people don't really exchange, everybody just has his or her discourse. We have organized this Art and Brain conference, everything was meticulously planned to not have the conference. The event consisted of coffee breaks.

BK: At Bell laboratories everybody always said that the things happened by meeting somebody in the hallway or at ten o'clock at night somewhere.

"Just listening to Bob Rauschenberg talking about or responding to some of these philosophical ideas, I realized how stupid they were, how ridiculous. It did not have anything to do with what he was doing."

JM (Julie Martin): John Cage summed up the operating idea of E.A.T. when he said, "It's not about artists and engineers talking; it's about hands on, working together".

BK: Yes, the whole philosophy is hands on. It is not about talking. I mean everybody goes out afterwards to have a beer, but first you have to work. As far as the philosophy behind art and science I've gone through it, but it never interested me deeply. If I had been really involved in the philosophy, I wouldn't have been able to understand that an engineer had to be an engineer and the artist had to be an artist. Just listening to Bob Rauschenberg talking about or responding to some of these philosophical ideas, I realized how stupid they were, how ridiculous. It did not have anything to do with what he was doing.

HUO: Could you tell me about the Nehru Foundation project in the late 1960's? The projects in India.

BK: In the late 1960's we got interested in multidisciplinary porjects where the artists could work on a broader social level, outside of purely making art.

In late 1968, Pepsi-Cola asked E.A.T. to design and program a Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. The original four artists who began the collaborative design of the pavilion were Robert Breer, Robert Whitman, Frosty Myers and David Tudor. As the design of the Pavilion developed, engineers and other artists were added to the project and given responsibility to develop specific elements. All in all 63 engineers, artists and scientists in the United States and Japan contributed to the design of the Pavilion.

So for almost two years we were going back and forth to Japan and had to stop somewhere, so we ended up stopping in India. And, way back in Sweden before I came to the USA I was interested in instructional television, and actually made a film on the Motion of Electrons. The United States was putting an experimental satellite over India, ATS-6, which would be used for educational purposes, so that there could be instructional television programming broadcast direct to the thousands of villages in the countryside. And we met Vikram Sarabhai, who was head of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, which was responsible for the satellite project. He invited E.A.T. to organize a group of people to make a proposal on how to generate instructional programming for the satellite system. And that is how we ended up in Delhi and Bombay proposing what is now known as the SITE project.

Our group included educational specialists, engineers and an artist, and the subject in this case was about women who owned the milk producing buffaloes at Anand dairy cooperative in Baroda, in Gujurat state. The buffaloes die because they were underfed or the lactation was wrong, or something else would go wrong. The women had to understand the basics so that the buffaloes would survive and provide the maximum milk and wouldn't be slaughtered and sold to Bombay.

We proposed to use half-inch video tape to record what the women actually did with the buffaloes, then take that material and go back to the studio, make a program and then take it back to the villages for testing. This sort of feedback and local involvement with the technology was possible with the new video technology. The people in Bombay and Delhi said "you can't do that" because in those days they had two-inch tape and big air-conditioned studios in Bombay and Delhi and that's where everything was supposed to happen. And nobody learns anything.

The professional television people in Delhi did not think that you could give a camera to a peasant. We knew it was essential in order to find out what they were actually doing with the buffaloes and what the visual clues were that can feed into educational programs. How can somebody who comes from Delhi know about a village thousands of miles away? What we did was to introduce the notion of local aspects of production.

We met the same attitudes in El Salvador where we were invited to devise ways of recording indigenous culture for the educational channels there. These half-inch Sony cameras had recently come on the market. They were heavy, but still you could go out in field with them.

"Whitman describes it perfectly that the artist is the professional who carries with him the least cultural baggage or preconceptions. And this is the kind of openness and responsiveness you want if you end up in that small village in India."

HUO: In how far was this linked to artists?

BK: It was the artist's idea to make full use of 1/2 inch video technology to make what we called "visual research notes" and build educational programming up from local input in the process.

JM: Robert Whitman was part of the team. The whole idea was that artist can be active in projects outside art, in other areas of society.

HUO: Art as an applicable model?

BK: No. Artists as thinkers, as a brain. Whitman describes it perfectly that the artist is the professional who carries with him the least cultural baggage or preconceptions. And this is the kind of openness and responsiveness you want if you end up in that small village in India. That's the whole point. It had nothing to do with any kind of artistic endeavor. In the non-art projects that E.A.T. undertook, at least one artist was part of the interdisciplinary team and we put a high value on the expertise the artist brought to the project.


reproduced from: http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue3/i_kluver/i_kluver2.html

BILLY KLÜVER, PART III (III)

HUO: There were a number of American artists who had a grant to go to India.

BK: E.A.T.'s project of sending artists to India was to expand their vision. We did that with a dozen or so artists, like Trisha Brown, Jed Bark, Yvonne Rainer, Jeffrey Lew, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela. We had a grant from the JDR III Fund to ship them there, let them travel and do what they wanted, and then ship them back.

HUO: What did the artists do there?

BK: I have no idea (laughs). The idea wasn't to see what they did. Maybe they were sitting and drinking, I don't know. The point was not to create something. This was the inverse of the buffalo project.

"Bob Rauschenberg and I always said that if E.A.T. was successful it would automatically disappear, because once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist."

HUO: Another project we've not yet spoken about is the Automation House.

BK: Automation House was a building on East 68th street. Theodore Keel, a labor mediator who was involved of the impact of automation on workers, was on the Board of E.A.T. He invited us to have our office there. We held events and exhibitions there, but mainly we used it as office space.

HUO: So it was more like a platform from which you organized the activities.

BK: Yes.

HUO: Could one say that Experiments in Art and Technology acts as a trigger? A catalyst? Because a catalyst catalyzes something and then disappears, only to reappear to catalyze something else.

BK: Bob Rauschenberg and I always said that if E.A.T. was successful it would automatically disappear, because once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist.

JM: We did the Telex project from Automation House.

BK: That was in 1971. We did "Telex: Q and A" together with Pontus Hulten, who had an exhibition at Moderna Museet on the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871, called "Utopia and Visions," and we had telex machines at the museum in Stockholm, at Automation House, at the Design Institute in Ahmedabad India, and at a large public center in Tokyo organized by Fujiko Nakaya for E.A.T.-Tokyo.

People in all four places could telex questions to all other places about what the world would look like in 1981. We gathered answers from both experts and the general public to all the questions and telexed the answers back. Everyone in all four places around the world answered the same questions, and anybody could ask a question to anybody else. And we got the answers to everybody else. This material has not been analyzed.

HUO: So that's a book to be done.

BK: For somebody.

HUO: What were the answers like?

BK: All different. The Indians were very theoretical. The Japanese were extremely positive.

HUO: Where did you send the telexes from?

Julie: We had a telex machine at Automation House. But heavy rains flooded the switching boxes. The only telex office that stayed open at night was on the ground floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, so we would we would go there at midnight and send telexes.

"For me personally, I believed that artists could have an influence on television and that it was a medium which artists could use. Not just as experimental television or video, but commercial television."

HUO: Can you tell me about the early projects of Artists and Television? In seems almost incredible that in the history of television there were so few projects accomplished where artists can do TV. Usually TV broadcasts about art but there are very few TV exhibitions. In Germany there is Gary Schume in the late 60s early 70s.

BK: For me personally, I believed that artists could have an influence on television and that it was a medium which artists could use. Not just as experimental television or video, but commercial television. I wanted artists to be involved with broadcast television and with the realities of broadcast television. And when cable television came to New York in the eary 1970s, it seemed to make this a possibility.

BK: I even testified before the FCC on the importance of artists having access to cable channels.

Then we did have a headend at Automation House to originate programming for cable and that was the most interesting part. You could actually feed programs onto the cable public access channels and the idea of Artists and Television was for artists generate programming and feed it into cable. We would have our own television network. As a beginning, we showed video tapes that artists had already made, Les Levine, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra.

JM:One of the things E.A.T. did was to ask artists to make proposals to produce video tapes for broadcast on cable.

BK: Yes, we actually proposed producing artists' programs to the NEA directly but they turned it down.

The idea is that there were great possibilities, and I think the reason a lot of it didn't happen is that anything like that has to somehow get the interest of enough people to become self-sustaining. I really don't know. Maybe the interest from the artist wasn't enough to carry it. I tend to believe that; an idea like that sounds terrific, but maybe the artists really don't want to get involved with television. Anyway, you try to open the door, and if they don't want to take advantage of the open door there is nothing you can do about it.

"We wanted to go one step farther by using simple technical equipment together with artists to record and make programs about culture that was being lost."

HUO: Another question about television: very early, in the late 1960's, you had ideas about cheaper, more flexible ways of producing television programs. It was in the context of the United Nations when you proposed that super-8 could be used for television. That seems like an incredibly interesting idea in today's context where this becomes reality with digital cameras and very cheap TV can be produced. Can you tell me about this pioneering idea of "do-it- yourself" television?

BK: It came from our experience in India and the "buffalo" project I talked about earlier. In El Salvador it had to do with preserving the culture.

In 1972 the Division of Culture of The Ministry of Education in El Salvador, invited us to develop mobile broadcast television production equipment to travel around the country and record the culture and make programs for the educational channels. The idea is that you use inexpensive recording devices to preserve the local and indigenous culture which is disappearing all over the world. Culture programming is a matter of recording, hearing stories or what have you. We also worked in Guatemala.

We also proposed a project for the celebration of bicentennial of the United States in 1976, called U.S.A. PRESENTS, combining Super -8 production with satellite broadcasting capability in which we would provide Super-8 cameras to individuals and groups all over the United States who would make short 3 minute films of their life and activities which would then be sent to satellite uplink centers and be broadcast to dedicated VHF, UHF or cable channels on a 24-hour basis all year long.

Dr. Wilbur Schramm was the great guy at Stanford University who pioneered instructional television in developing countries. We wanted to go one step farther by using simple technical equipment together with artists to record and make programs about culture that was being lost. For example, one project was to record the Bhai women, a group of woman in Benares, India, like Geishas, who were disappearing. We tried to get funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to go there and simply film them, preserve their music and singing. Ideas like that.

HUO: It was really a presentiment of how now new television shows are invented at a very low cost; people like David d Heillys practices show that in the 90s everybody can do his or her own television program basically.

BK: Right. Then you get into more interesting questions which have to do with editing and how do you use television teach people, which is what Wilbur Schramm was involved with at Stanford. How do you actually present the material so that people actually learn from it.

"All these machines were there and the kids could use them any way they wanted -- type or write messages, send photographs or just talk on the telephone -- and make friends without ever meeting or seeing each other."

HUO: What about the children's projects you did? There are two or three of them, I think.

BK: The project was called "Children and Communication." We thought that children from one part of the city should know children from another part of the city without having to travel out of their own neighborhoods. Of course this could happen any two places between any two cultures, or the kids could be of the same culture with the same background. We collaborated with educational specialists from New York University to shape the project; and Robert Whitman built two environments, one at Automation House and one at Sixteenth Street connected with fax machines, telephones, machines that you could write with a pen on, telex machines. All these machines were there and the kids could use them any way they wanted -- type or write messages, send photographs or just talk on the telephone -- and make friends without ever meeting or seeing each other.

HUO: This sounds like a sketch for connected schools ages before the emergence of the internet!!!!! It is another presentiment.

HUO: Was this published somewhere?

BK: No. Very little has been published. There has been one Ph.D. thesis in the 1970s and now Susan Hillman is working on a thesis on E.A.T.

"I have always thought that museums should have an engineer as a technical curator in charge of pieces with technology, on the level of the other curators."

HUO: I would also like to ask about your relationship to museums. Throughout the 60s you have been very strongly involved with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm...if you could tell me about this and also about your relationship to American museums. It seems that museums are more and more embracing the technological concepts in art, but I can imagine that in the sixties or seventies there was some resistance to these concepts or forms.

BK: There probably isn't a museum in any city I have been in where I haven't been in the cellar or somewhere in the storage place crawling around on the floor. I find it very easy to work in museums; I never find any problem. You have to get the work done. The opening happens and when it happens you have to be ready and everything has to be clean and the labels have to be on the wall. There are always people who are willing to help you if you need it.

There has always been some difficulty doing technical work in a non-technical environment, like a museum. In a museum there is always time pressure and the curtain is going up, the show is going to open. And the works that incorporate technology often fall outside the expertiese of many curators. I have heard this from many artists -- that the curators would be up in arms against technological works because they can't handle them -- it's too complicated, too difficult.

A new generation of curators has to learn how to deal with these works, and that's going to be a challenge, because curators can't really be engineers. At Beaubourg Paris, for instance, they have very good technical guy, Alain Peron, who works freelance with the museum. The Menil Collection in Houston also has an excellent person. I have always thought that museums should have an engineer as a technical curator in charge of pieces with technology, on the level of the other curators. Or perhaps museums you will develop people from the outside who can consult so to speak.

"I don't see the museum as a producer of pieces. But they have a responsibility to show, maintain and conserve work that incorporates new technology."

HUO: Besides the Moderna Museet, have you worked with American museums in the production of works or have they been a place where the completed pieces have been exhibited. Can the museum be a producer of such things?

BK: I don't see the museum as a producer of pieces. But they have a responsibility to show, maintain and conserve work that incorporates new technology.~

August 3, 1998

above reproduced from: http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue3/i_kluver/i_kluver3.html