The Ledger
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Kuo: Artists using blockchain actively seek to subvert orthodox valuation and authenticity
“They actively want to subvert authenticity. And that's been something that, again, actually you could say almost the entire history of modern art is about challenging authenticity and authorship.”
Kuo: 1960s critics accused E.A.T. of complicity with the military
“So they actually came under a lot of flack. I mean, there are articles actually written in Artforum as well as elsewhere that essentially accused EAT of being complicit with you know, the military and taking that as far as you might even go.”
Kuo: E.A.T. left a voluminous paper trail but few traditional art objects
“Often what they created does not conform to traditional genres of sculpture or painting or drawings, and so a lot of what they made was either lost or some of it sitting in disrepair in, like, an engineer's garage somewhere or an artist's studio and so the pap…”
Kuo: Rauschenberg proved readymades can adapt to technological obsolescence
“And in a way, he's taking this idea of the ready-made, which is this revolutionary twentieth-century idea, and he's saying the ready-made itself can be updated. It can sort of change and adapt to technological obsolescence. And that is really You know, fascina…”
Kuo: Artists are countering tech acceleration by exploring traditional craft and perception
“I would say that people are interested right now in exploring The flip side of the acceleration of technology and its omnipresence , they're interested in also slowing things down in other kinds of perception or in even countering some of the kinds of media sa…”
Kuo: Dismissive skepticism toward new artistic mediums will remain a constant
“Yes, I'll probably never live to see the day when someone doesn't say my kid could do that.”
Kuo: The internet created atomized nodes rather than a democratizing utopia
“Everyone thought the internet was going to be that, you know, democratizing final utopia, and instead we've seen the flip side of that, which is the development of ever specialized, ever atomized, ever more esoteric and inward looking conversations, or even I …”
Kuo: Studying historical failures reveals future possibilities
“In our culture, we're often taught If it wasn't successful, then you shouldn't pay attention to it, but actually, I think the opposite is true, because then you'll never know what still might be possible in the future, and so you have to explore all of these, …”
Kuo: Non-tech people assume technology can already do everything
“Like any tech person knows, non-tech people think technology can do everything all at once already.”
Kuo: A Stockholm festival rejected E.A.T. for giving engineers too much agency
“EAT claimed later that it was because, ah, the performance festival didn't want to give, they didn't like the idea that the artist would give so much agency to the engineers and that they would kind of be this freewheeling thing.”
Kuo: Rauschenberg used classified military infrared cameras in a 1966 performance
“For example, in Rauschenberg's performance piece, to make a long story short, one of the technologies they got and used was infrared, and at the time, infrared was a classified military technology. They ended up getting infrared cameras from a Japanese supplie…”
Kuo: Rauschenberg's 1966 performance featured wired tennis rackets that extinguished lights
“Rauschenberg's piece basically set up, in this huge cavernous expanse of the armory, a tennis match. But it wasn't a regular tennis match. He set up a tennis court. He had the artist Frank Stella, who at the time was actually taking tennis lessons from a tenni…”
Kuo: E.A.T. Produced the First Artists' Cable Television Broadcast in 1970–1971
“One of the projects they did was actually convert A bunch of really experimental film pieces, two video, and then do the first cable broadcast of artists, television programming pretty much of all time, and this was in 1970, 71.”
Kuo: E.A.T. built a 1970 pavilion using telecommunication satellite Mylar technology
“They tested it in LA but they created a 180 degree hemispherical mirror dome that was inflated, made out of inflated mylar essentially, which was the same technology that was being used for the first telecommunication satellites.”
Kuo: Pepsi replaced E.A.T.'s experimental 1970 soundtrack with 'It's a Small World'
“Pepsi replaced all of these experimental sort of John Cage slash David Tudor composed soundtracks with It's a Small World.”
Kuo: Physicist Richard Feynman was a member of E.A.T.
“Richard Feynman was a member of EAT, so was Robert Irwin so were a lot of physicists”
Kuo: The Centre Pompidou's architecture acts like a Faraday cage
“Centre Pompidou is a very funny building. Again, to make a long story short it's a very weird piece of architecture, but it acts like a Faraday cage. So it was blocking all signal.”
Kuo: E.A.T. built an early teletype messaging network for NYC children
“So the artist Robert Whitman kind of spearheaded this project, and again, part of this is about with these new tools of communication, How can we explore democratizing communication and networks of communication? So they had this idea to set up, ah, multiple s…”
Kuo: E.A.T. Linked Global Cities via Telex to Discuss Future
“They explored telex communication with, they set up telex stations for adults on the occasion of another project In, ah, Ahmedabad, India, in Stockholm, in Tokyo, in New York, in LA, and they were Having people ask questions about what they thought the future …”
Kuo: E.A.T. was founded in 1966 by Rauschenberg and Klüver
“Experiments in Art and Technology was a group that was founded in 1966 by the artist Robert Rauschenberg, by an engineer named Billy Kluver, who was a research scientist at Bell Labs.”
Kuo: E.A.T.'s first Armory project paired over 40 artists and engineers
“It involved over 40 engineers and artists, and it was this performance series that took place in New York in at the Armory, which was a huge cavernous space, and basically to get, to make the performance, what became the performance pieces, they paired artists…”
Kuo: E.A.T. chose NYC Armory for five-second acoustic echo times
“The Armory was suggested as a venue because they wanted to test out literally physical scale, and in the Armory there are echo times of up to five seconds.”
Kuo: E.A.T. reached nearly 5,000 members at peak around 1970
“And so at their peak by around 1970, they had nearly 5000 members.”
Kuo: Hans Haacke manned a booth at IEEE to recruit engineers
“To artists, but then to go to IEEE, which was the, you know, engineering society, they had a, Hans Hacke had a booth, was manning a booth there and handing out flyers.”
Kuo: Rauschenberg's light trigger failed on opening night, requiring manual shutoff
“Of course, the first night, the rackets didn't work, so they were, or the lights, the trigger for the lights didn't work, so they were actually manually turning off the lights. You know, sort of jerry-rigging or, you know, retroactively, you know, making the p…”
Kuo: A self-destructing MoMA kinetic sculpture simply short-circuited and fizzled out
“Tang Lee actually was really one of the first works that Kluver, the EAT engineer, they collaborated on a piece that was basically a kinetic sculpture That destroyed itself in the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in of course, it didn't really, it sort of…”