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Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America

Department of Communication, Stanford University, McClatchy Hall, Bldg 120, Stanford, CA 94305-2050, USA, fturner{at}stanford.edu

In the wake of the Second World War, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and other members of the New York art world helped transform popular understandings of what it might mean for human beings to work alongside information machines. This article shows how. Drawing on archival research, interviews and a survey of secondary sources, it follows Cage and Rauschenberg from Black Mountain College into their 1960s collaboration with engineers from Bell Laboratories in an organization called Experiments in Art and Technology (or E.A.T.). It then shows how, in 1970, at a Manhattan mansion packed with electronic media and christened `Automation House', E.A.T. modeled a fusion of artistic collaboration and automated labor for the captains of American industry. In the process, the article concludes, E.A.T. helped set the stage for a re-imagining of computing in the workplace as a bohemian practice and of computers as tools for creative, peer-to-peer collaboration.

Key Words: art • automation • Billy Klüver • Experiments in Art and Technology • John Cage • Robert Rauschenberg

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1, 5-26 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412907087201


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