Nir Hindie: 0:00

Imagine working alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Merc Cunningham, and Jasper Jones, some of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. Today is a very special episode because we are going to speak with someone who has actually collaborated with these legendary artists. We'll be diving into the fascinating intersection of technology and art and how these artists approach it. A topic that's incredibly close to my heart in this podcast. So let's get started. For too long we have been told that innovation comes from engineering, from optimization, from technical solutions. But what if that's only half the story? What if relying only on logic means we are creating new, but not necessarily better? The leaders who build the most iconic companies understood something different. True innovation comes from the arts, from human connection, creativity, emotion. This is business art. Treating business not just as a system to optimize, but as a medium for creative expression. Renaissance thinking in practice. Our best ideas emerge when disciplines collide. And on this podcast, my guest and I will show you how technology, business, and creativity come together into work that resonates. You will learn that art is not an object, it's a mindset that you can adopt. I'm Nir Hindi, and you are listening to the Business Artistry Podcast. Hey podcast listeners, welcome back. Today's episode is very special. A while ago, I had the incredible opportunity to speak with Julie Martin, the director of experiments in art and technology, also known as EIT. This nonprofit organization was co-founded in 1966 in New York by the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, along with the engineers Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer. EIT was established to encourage and facilitate groundbreaking collaborations between artists and engineers, between art and technology. Julie joined them in 1967, and since then she was managing the organization. This conversation was recorded a few years back and it's the first time we are releasing it. And I am excited to finally share it with you. While the audio quality might not be perfect at times, the content is what truly matters. It's a rare chance to hear from someone who has played a pivotal role in one of the most legendary projects that bridges art and technology. I'm confident you will find it as fascinating as I did. So without further ado, let's dive in. Hey Julie, welcome.

Julie Martin: 3:01

Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be able to talk about the history of ETE.

Nir Hindie: 3:05

Julie, maybe you can tell us how did you start with EAT, Experiments in Art and Technology, these organizations that we are going to talk about today.

Julie Martin: 3:28

And then became head of EAT. And now I uh by default the director of experiments in art and technology, working on primarily history, the history of the organization, but still doing projects with some artists.

Nir Hindie: 3:43

Maybe it's actually a good moment to ask you what EAT is. Can you explain to our listeners what this organization was about?

Julie Martin: 3:54

EAT, that's the uh initials of the organization, experiments in Art and Technology, which is a not-for-profit charitable in America, whose goal was to um foster the collaboration between artists and engineers and scientists to enable artists to make work that um involved the new technology.

Nir Hindie: 4:14

So, you know, Julie, what amazed me always about EAT, and I've been following the work that you guys did over there, um, is that it was so relevant, so innovative at the time when it started in the 60s. And I'm kind of interested to hear from you what led to the formation of this collaboration between artists and engineers from your point of view, because you were there.

Julie Martin: 4:43

The story of EAT actually starts with Billy Kluber. Billy was born in he loved to say born in Monaco because his parents happened to be there, but very soon they went back to Sweden and he grew up in Sweden and um got his PhD in electrical engineering from the Technical Hog School there in Stockholm. And very soon after that, he emigrated to America and went to Berkeley and got a PhD in electrical engineering at Berkeley. He was recruited to join the staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which at that time was one of the premier um engineering scientific labs in the country because it supported the entire AT ⁇ T telephone system. So that the range of research at Bell Labs went from psychology, even music, to the uh invention of the transistor, et cetera. He graduated from Berkeley in 1957 and went to Bell Labs in 1958. And then soon after he was uh with the Bell Laboratories, um, actually in 1959, his friend Pontius Routin, who he had known in Stockholm at the Film Society, uh had become the director of Loderna Musea, and went to Sao Paulo for the Sao Paulo biennial, came to New York for the first time, and he and Billy went around meeting some artists and looking at art. And soon after that, Pontus wrote Billy and said, Jean Tingley, the Swiss artist, is coming to New York to do a project. Will you help him? So Billy got involved with Jean Tingley to do what Tingley wanted to do, a sculpture that destroyed itself. He'd done a series of works that had uh self-destructed, and he wanted to do one. Um, the first idea was to do it in a theater with a screen to protect the audience. But he soon met um Dory Ashton, who was at the Museum of Modern Art, and she uh arranged for him to do it in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

Nir Hindie: 6:43

So, Julie, you're actually speaking about the famous work Homage to New York that John Tigley did.

Julie Martin: 6:51

Yes, yes. So they worked together on this piece. Billy always said Tingley was a master engineer and could build anything, and so he built this very large sculpture. Uh Billy contributed the the uh a timer that triggered a number of destructive events so that the machine, over 27 minutes, the machine caught fire, something exploded, the smoke came out of it, pieces ran out, etc. etc. All on this timer. And uh during this during this time, Billy met Bob Roschenberg. Bob met Kingley and said he would contribute something to the to the machine, and he arrived in the garden with a little cart that would roll out into the audience at a certain time. So at this point, Billy began to meet artists in New York, and uh he had the idea that he would ask them is it something they wanted to do with technology. And as he met people, people had ideas, and he tried, he worked with himself and his colleagues to fulfill these ideas with technical support from Bell Laboratories. Jasper Johns wanted a neon letter to go with one of his paintings, and uh, but he didn't want any wires. So Billy and his uh assistant Harold Hodges, they developed a portable neon set up so that Jasper could have an R at the top of a painting, a neon R.

Nir Hindie: 8:18

Julie, just to get it right, what you are saying is that Jasper Jones actually wanted to develop a wireless neon, and this is probably in the uh 50s or beginning of the 60s, right? Yes, yes. From what you know and heard, how this request actually influenced Billy and the other engineers at Bell Labs.

Julie Martin: 8:44

It was always an idea of EAT, uh Billy, uh Billy Bomb and Fred, that not only would the engineer sites help the artist, but somehow the interacting with an artist would influence the engineer and how he or she worked. And so that it wasn't just you know handing over technology, but somehow, with a collaboration, the engineer would benefit in uh would give him insight or new way of approaching what he did. Uh, I think if this was part of this utopian idea, I I look at the E18 now very much as one of the uh a manifestation of sort of the utopian spirit of the 60s. Um, this idea that the individual can make a difference, that the individual could act in society and make a difference. And I think that for some engineers, interacting with artists did affect how they worked, did not change their lives, no, but somehow gave them insight and made them um more interesting engineers. I don't think it was general, and I don't think I don't think it's easy to quantify. I think for example, Fred Waldenauer, who was uh one of the founders of EAT and worked closely with Billy for many years, was very interested in music, jazz in particular, and then he worked a lot with David Tudor, but he went on to put down the first digital hearing aid, responding to his his grand his mother's deafness and some insight into sound. He invented the first digital hearing aid. So, you know, perhaps working with David and where and sound may have affected it may have given him insight into this, and um, and there are others that you that talked about being affected, so that and Billy, of course, changed what he did in his life. So I it's very hard to quantify and it's very hard to say, but it was a belief that we had that the engineer could benefit from exposure to the artist to working with an artist, to working with someone who thought differently and approached materials differently.

Nir Hindie: 10:53

Yeah.

Julie Martin: 10:54

Um, and you realize uh we were not in a digital age, we were still in the analog age, yeah. And we're still, although, in a sense, EAT came out of this incredible revolution in technology, which started with the development of the transistor, obviously the the uh invention of transistor, and then what what flowed from that. So that there was in in that period, there was there was a lot of technical innovation, and the and artists began to respond to that and be interested. Uh, we always said that uh some artists, their favorite magazine was Scientific American. So they were reading about these discoveries and this progress, and many of them wanted to be part of it or could see, could have the vision in their work how they could use it and how it could enhance their work. So um you did you did have the artists coming to the technology and and you had engineers responding. And I think some of them it did, it may have inspired or affected the way they work. But there's no um nobody did a study.

Nir Hindie: 12:00

Before we go back to the episode, I want to quickly share something relevant. If you know creativity matters at work but feel it's getting squeezed out by constant delivery and efficiency pressure, and you sense that artistry should have a place in your day-to-day work but aren't sure how to make it practical, listen for a moment. We have just launched Business Artistry, the online course I've taught until now only inside Fortune 500 companies. It's not a creativity class, it's a creative leadership program grounded in how visionary founders like Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Ed Cartmore, Edwin Land, and others actually thought and led. So if you want artistry and creativity to be part of your daily work, go to courses.com or check the show notes for more information. Now, back to the episode. Um, Julie, so I have a question. How easy was it to convince engineers to actually join and work with these artists?

Julie Martin: 13:05

For the ones that were interested, it was not hard to convince them at all. I mean, there were people who responded in the beginning, the beginning of EAT, when EAT was founded, we had the interest of the artists, of course. There was a meeting at the Broadway Central Hotel for the artists and engineers from 90. We used to talk about EAT and this new organization that would be for artists, and something like 300 artists showed up. And 70 of them already had requests, including, I love that I've always remembered Pete Seeger, the folk singer and activist. He wanted to a steel drum that you could tune so you could really play. Things like that, you know, things within their work that they saw that they there could be some kind of input from from technical people. But our first the first things we had to do was to attract engineers. And the AT began to do things like uh every Sunday was an open house where artists and engineers could meet at the AT space and talk together. Billy would give lectures, he traveled and gave lectures about the nine evenings and performances. We had a booth as an Institute of Electrical, Electronic Engineers, an organization of electrical engineers. Uh, and so we had a booth with side that set an artist there to talk to engineers. And and in some sense, the idea just took, it was the right time. It was the right idea at the right time. And engineers, the ones who were attracted were attracted. And and it was just sort of bringing this idea to the people responded all over the country. And we sort of said, yeah, find found an EAT group if you if you you know so basically now you started to have EAT gatherings all around the U.S. Yes, the in in in Washington, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, but it's very much people who responded to this idea and then wanted to do it. So I we certainly encouraged you. We even had a conference of local group people, and people came, we talked about the different experiences, but very much self-determined. And you're uh some places in Europe also responded, Canada. So yeah, I think it in one sense for the people who did respond to it, it it was the time, and people who responded responded. And if they didn't, you know, I think the idea very much, Billy's idea very much was that you you approached engineers as professionals. It's two professional, two professions collaborating together. The engineer didn't have to be artistic, the you know, there was nothing about being artistic or the uh the artist being a technical artist. It was really about two professional people coming together and collaborating on a project. And and which, although the artist would come with his or her idea, the goal, the ideological goal, or the goal would be that something might come out that neither of them had thought of in the beginning, that the artist could be his ideas would respond to some of the suggestions of the engineer, and that the work that came out would be a would be a collaborative. Although it's the artist's work, it would have benefited more than just plugging into his idea and making it real. It would become something else, something more.

Nir Hindie: 16:18

It's hard for me to explain how important DAT was. So maybe mentioning some of the names of the artists you work with, and these are including uh Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Jones, Maris Kellingham, John Cage, um Andy Warhol, and the projects that were taking place over there at the intersection of art and technology, were phenomenal. Um, I'd be happy to hear from you, Julie, maybe about the work that uh Andy Warhol did with the team, because I think it shows about the way artists think or how they actually bring new perspective to what they do.

Julie Martin: 16:59

I think those first collaborations, which were from 60 to 65, it really was pretty much Billy was the engineer, so to speak. It was Billy was who's beginning to you know go out to to see art, to to go to parties, uh, and et cetera. So become part of the art world. So it's very much he was talking to artists and asking if they had an idea. So I mean, Warhol is a perfect example of this idea that somebody came out. Um Andy said to Billy, he said, like a floating light bulb. And so, okay, floating light bulb. So Billy went back and uh he and his colleagues did some calculations, and the problem was with battery technology in those days. The bulb, the light bulb would have to be as big as a house. That really wasn't Andy's idea. But in the meantime, um, actually a neighbor of his had given him his material, a sealable mylar, which the army used to pack sandwiches for the soldiers, so the K rations and things. So Billy took a roll of this to Andy, and he said, Oh, let's make clouds. Back to the laboratory, Billy and his, uh, you realize there were no such thing as a balloon, et cetera. Uh, went back and they're trying to figure out how to heat seal curves that this was this was and and make the thing stand up. How did you have a cloud? How do you make the cloud formation stand up? Meanwhile, Andy just took the material, folded it over, sealed it, and said, This is a silver cloud, and filled it with helium, and then this is the silver cloud. So you have these square clouds that fill a room and float around. But that that was Andy's response to the material.

Nir Hindie: 18:38

Yeah, as you mentioned, it's a great example, uh, how artists think different. From one point, you have Billy and his team trying to solve it from a technological scientific way in the lab, and then you have Warhol just play with the material, kind of finding different ways to uh um make it happen. Um, and there is a beautiful picture that uh I will share in the show notes of Warhol in the room playing with these uh uh clouds that they uh they created. Beautiful one. Oh, I I'm not sure.

Julie Martin: 19:11

I'm not sure I know that photo.

Nir Hindie: 19:13

Ah, so yeah.

Julie Martin: 19:14

Can you share it with me?

Nir Hindie: 19:16

I'll definitely send that.

Julie Martin: 19:18

I have other photos. There's also a very funny one that uh uh I think Pong just was missing, Andy, and they took a whole roll of material and made a very long cloud and took it up to the roof of the building and these wonderful photos and then they released it.

Nir Hindie: 19:35

Yeah, I think I think I know this uh photo, and I will uh try to see if I can add this as well to the show notes. Um, so Julia, I want to ask you about uh a person that was a driving force with uh Billy at EAT, uh the artist Robert Rauschenberg, uh, one of my favorite artists uh at least, and I know you were also a very close friend. And actually. Actually, the reason you and I are talking is because of the team at the Rauschenberg Foundation, and it's a great moment to actually take the time and thank them for doing this connection. Um, and I wanna emphasize again how privileged I feel to actually have you over here, uh Julie. And Rauschenberg was a very experimental artist, liked to try different disciplines, collaborate a lot, and obviously you also worked with technology. And I'm interested to hear about the projects that you know that he did with technology.

Julie Martin: 20:35

It's very interesting. I mean, Bob was absolutely crucial. The collaboration between Billy and Bob was really crucial in formulating the ideas of EAT. Because as I said when Billy first started, he thought his idea was the engineer could be material for the artist. You know, would end up being full, the ideas would be folded into the work and what the engineer could contribute with these kind of ideas material. Bob always talked about collaboration. And he talked, even in his own work, he talked about he himself collaborated with the materials and that not impose a will, so to speak, but what does it say or how do you use it? But gather. And so he, when he and Billy started talking about EAT of his ideas, he talked about collaboration. He talked about that the artist and engineer collaborate with each other. And in a sense, Billy responded immediately, of course, yes, but he brought this idea of the equal partners and that they that it he worked together on a project. Uh, and so I think that Bob really contributed that idea to EAT and to the uh ideas and practices of EAT.

Nir Hindie: 21:46

One of the projects that uh Rauschenberg wanted to create was actually uh broadcasting painting. And I wonder what what was it about, or what other projects they kind of tried, or how did they start?

Julie Martin: 22:01

Actually, actually, uh the the first in the first one uh that where they worked on this was Oracle. Pop had done a piece called Broadcast, in which he put a radio behind the painting with little knobs on the front so that the viewer could change the knobs and change the station. Again, the viewer is collaborating with the artist to experience or finish the work. So they started out the idea of a painting, five panels. There would be a control panel, there'd be a radio on each one, and then there would be a control panel in front of the painting. But Bob again, I think he wanted no wires. So again, like Jasper Johns, somehow these artists intuited something that wasn't almost possible at the time, but they wanted it. So Bob wanted no wires to connect the control station with the painting. Oh, Billy got to work with his assistant Harold Hodges, who worked with him closely on this. And it was very difficult because, again, nothing at this point. Um he was existed, but uh, I think what Bob wanted two things. He wanted to be able to have the channel, the channel, the stations change constantly. So there would never be fixed on any any one station. It could go faster or slower, and he wanted the volume to be uh to be able to control the volume of uh was on the radio. And I think in the beginning, the interference from the motors that made the uh tuning dial move interfere with the sound. It was it was a real technical nightmare, it was a real challenge. Finally, Bob got uh it just took too long, so he just said the paintings are the paintings, and they went out as a five-painting piece, but they continued to work. And I think it was Heath Kid finally came out with a um short-range wireless system so that you could have the radio in the one of the sculptural pieces. Oh, Bob decided to do sculpture, yeah, and five-piece sculpture. He said gifts from the street, he just found stuff on the street that he built, these five sculptures. But you could have this the radio, the radios in one piece, and then you could broadcast a small case to the receiver in one of the uh each of the pieces. So they were able then to adjust or work work that system, make Oracle, and the control knobs were in a actually Bob had the staircase, there was a staircase, had that built, especially to build that, and so that was one of the pieces with some other stuff attached. But the viewer could then twist the knobs and in fact play play Oracle.

Nir Hindie: 24:40

And we are talking about the 60s, right? Beginning of the Oracle was made in 65.

Julie Martin: 24:47

Yeah, it was really started in 62, you're right, early 60s.

Nir Hindie: 24:51

It's amazing for me to think about how artists already experimented with wireless technology ideas without even having the technology available for them, or for everyone else, for that matter. So besides those projects, there is one, I would say, event that most recognizable with uh EIT, and that's actually nine evenings that took place at the Armoury Show in New York. Can you tell us about this, Julie?

Julie Martin: 25:25

Well, what happened was uh Knut Vicken, who was head of the uh Electronic Music Society in Stockholm, had the idea to do a festival of art and technology. And he asked Billy to put together a group of American artists to participate in Stockholm. So Billy and Billy went to Bob, and Bob said, of course, let's do it. And they asked their friends, of course, that you did in those days. So 10 artists, including two composers, John Cage and David Tudor, and artists from dance and performance, as well as Robert Whitman, who did theater pieces. They began to work. Billy recruited engineers from Dell Laboratories and talked about the artists, they began to uh have ideas about what they would like to do in performance. Uh Billy said to them, just anything you want, ask the engineers. Break the ice. And of course, they all wanted to float or fly. So uh that was never achieved, but this idea that was one of the dreams. And so they got down to work and they began to talk and he began to assign different engineers to different projects and they began to work on ideas. The relations with this with the Swedes kind of broke down over the summer. I think this wasn't exactly what the organizers had in mind, these full-fledged pieces. I think they didn't necessarily want the engineers to come, just send us the artist. And so, just ideologically, it was not in sync. So that broke down, and as in Hollywood movies, they said, well, let's let's put on the show ourselves.

Nir Hindie: 27:00

Yeah.

Julie Martin: 27:01

And so they decided they would do the performances. They'd gotten so far in the collaboration that they would do the performances themselves. And um they looked around, Simon Forte, at that time was married to Bob Whitman, found the armory. Incredible spaces, really big hall, 150 feet long or more long and tall, which was a grill hall for the army. There were these armories scattered over New York at the time and kept a standing force in the city. And so Senator Javit were able to lease the armory and uh get going.

Nir Hindie: 27:40

So they leased the armory show for nine evenings, and every night there is a show? Every night, two performances.

Julie Martin: 27:49

It was insane, of course. I mean, it really was in the sense of the ambition was very high, and the um night naivety as well. Because it was two performances every night, two different performances by artists over nine evenings. Uh the only break was the weekend. So that it was extraordinarily ambition and extraordinarily difficult. But for this, for these performances, the engineers had built, they realized that you had that artists wanted you to do performances. They had different demands on the sound and the light, so they began to build equipment that and portable equipment, portable amplifiers, um, pre-amplifiers, coders, and coders. A system that part of it could be on the floor of the armory, and part of it was in a control booth, and then you could control the sound and light this way. And O'Schneider, I think, came up with this AMP system that you could wire up each performance, and then you would just plug this into an AMP board, and it would be ready for the next performance, so that you could switch performances fairly easily.

Nir Hindie: 28:58

So basically, nine evenings, two shows every night, 18 performance shows that take place during those nine evenings of the Armory show.

Julie Martin: 29:12

One night was three to get in line because there were ten artists.

Nir Hindie: 29:18

Julie, out of curiosity, do you have a favorite show or one that you will define as memorable for you personally? You know, I can't.

Julie Martin: 29:28

I I can't. There's no such thing as favorite because number one, I was there. I I'd been working with Bob Whitman all in the summer. I was sort of stage manager, so to speak, ice, sweeping up uh broken glass and running projectors. But I'd been working with Bob Whitman, so of course I got involved through him and helping him with his piece. And then then you got everybody got involved doing wiring. So although the system was wireless, I think you needed wires of the uh speakers so you could control them. But there was piles of wiring here with little plugs, tiny plugs. So everyone from me to John Cage got involved doing wiring if we had a few extra minutes. Um, so I can't really say I remember that much about the actual events, but I've been working with the film so much, it's very hard to say. Um, it's very hard for me to have a memory because the memory's been in hand. And each piece is really interesting. The interesting part is they were so different. Each artist really followed his or her own ideas and then used the technology to fulfill them. Um so it's it's hard to say there's a I don't have a memory.

Nir Hindie: 30:40

So let's do something different. I will ask you about a project, one or two projects that I know about, and one that I want to start with is actually the Doppler sonar of Lucinda Childs.

Julie Martin: 30:54

Lucinda's idea was to um have her motion affect the sound. Uh this idea was she would perform or have uh motion and it would affect the sound. And so I think Peter Hirsch, I think, came up with the idea of uh Doppler sonar. In other words, as you move in front of a sonar, usually in in submarines and things, it made a ping ping, and you could locate the submarine. But he he he worked with it and built one that as she moved in front of it, it would change the, it would affect the sound and or it would make sound and make different sounds as she moved. And so then she got the idea that instead of herself moving, she had three bright red buckets filled with sand in front of this equipment. Oh, I know there was a limitation. The the equipment could only from what he built and what was able to be built at the time, for this purpose, it had a range of about 20 or 30 feet. So she couldn't involve the whole armory engine. So she had this idea of building a scapalty, having three red buckets hanging from it, and she was her performance was swinging the bucket, one of her one part of it, was swinging the bucket in front of the stoppless zone, and then creating the sound that was then broadcast throughout the armory.

Nir Hindie: 32:16

And Julie, can you tell us about the tennis game that Robert Rauschenberg created?

Julie Martin: 32:23

Yeah, Bob Bob did um Bob did a work called Open Score. So the idea was that the again, sound controlled the light, would control the light. So he asked his friend Frank Stella, who was who was a tennis player, and Frank Stella brought his tennis partner, play a tennis game on the floor of the armory. Um, Jim McGee and another engineer had um made a very small FM transmitter that they would fit inside the handle of the racket. So each racket had a small FM transmitter, the wire went around the head of the racket and a conjact mic at the top of the handle of the racket, so that each time the ball hit racket of the sound was transmitted to actually was to the receiver, was a FM radio that was about by the side of the court, and then that sound was then transmitted to the speakers. So each time a racket, the ball had a racket, you heard a long bong throughout the armory, and a light went off. So the the system was in place. The each sound would turn off one of the 112, 24 lights around the space, so that the uh players they played until they could no longer see at which point the game stopped. And then Bob had another system in which 500 people that he's recruited from the school nearby, a school in New York, came onto the floor of the army in the dark, and we had all said he wanted uh to be able to see in the dark, so that we had found uh Jim Harding. Um to see in the dark, right? To see in the dark audience to be able to see the performance, and so there was um infrared television equipment, which is classified by the army, so it was not on the open market, but I think on the engineers, Larry Hylos found a um a purveyor in South Jersey, Jim Hardy, who had an infrared equipment for Japan. And so he joined the performance, and then there were there was infrared cameras, the place was flooded with infrared light, and the images were projected onto three screens that were hung in front of the audience. So Bob had them do very simple movements. Oh, he he had a score or instruction, um, which was was cute through flashlights in the balcony. So three flashlights met, hug your partner, you know, two flashlights, wave a white handkerchief. Somebody else take off your jacket, put it back. So these very simple movements, which then could only be, you could always kind of hear it, but you could only be seeing on screens hanging above them.

Nir Hindie: 34:55

It seems to me that uh Rauschenberg was very much driven by invention and experimentation and experiences. And I wonder, Julie, what makes him such a great innovator in that sense?

Julie Martin: 35:13

Well, I just think he was a great artist. I mean, I think he was very much in this piece in this piece. What's very interesting, just just to finish the story of the piece. For some reason, he just uh in the first piece the lights go on and the and the crowd bowed. Performers, he felt it somehow he said he felt this was too harsh. So for the second performance, he changed it. The people left in the dark, and a light came on on Simone Forti in a burlap sack singing, no microphone, no nothing, but singing an Italian love song. She was an incredible singer. And so Bob picked her up and carried her, followed by the spotlight, to different places in the Army and put her down as she was singing. And so this sound reverberated throughout the armory. And when the sound, when the song finished, the lights went out. So it's so interesting that he it wasn't about the technology, it was really an idea that he had that he he performed, that he integrated into the piece. So I'm just thinking it's it's art. It really starts with the artist and his or her idea, not necessarily in night evenings in this early part. The technology was brought to them, but uh in a sense, because they it wasn't so much in the society. You didn't, you know, you didn't know about infrared cameras, you know. I think that actually Lucinda Child's father had been in the Navy. So in a later interview, she said, Well, yeah, I did know about sonar somewhat. So it was resonated with her, but it wouldn't be something that she would know to say, can we try? Do you know what I mean? So it really wasn't in the, it was the imagination, it was the ideas, it was the air.

Nir Hindie: 36:56

Yeah, totally.

Julie Martin: 36:57

It was in the air. Uh, and from this, the response of sort of nine evenings was focused on using technical means, but it was really the response of the engineer and ended up working together in these days that that brought these works about.

Nir Hindie: 37:11

EAT brought uh so many incredible projects. Um in the Nine Evenings is one of them, but another famous project is actually the design of the Pepsi Pavilion at Osaka 1970. And over there it was kind of an experiential pavilion that Pepsi wanted to create, and they invited uh all these uh uh artists working at EAT. And when I reviewed this uh project, right? So it's incredible energy of invention, creativity, uh, from the mirror they wanted to build to the balloon they needed to create, to the fog that was created and invented by Fujiko Nakaya and Thomas Mee. Um, and again, it's incredible that it's happened uh at that point in 1970. But what is it, this uh Pepsi Pavilion? Can you share your experience from this project, uh Julie?

Julie Martin: 38:10

Well, I I think again it's the it's the energy of the artist, and it's the vision of the artist. And well, I mean, what happened was through whatever. EAT was asked to to create uh the interior and the programming for uh for a pavilion at Expo 70 to be in Japan. And so Billy was working at this point with Bob. Bob Rauschenberg didn't have the time or to be involved. So um Billy worked more closely with Bob Rat Bob Whitman, and he and Bob chose two more artists to be the core artist. Robert Breer, and the connection had been with a neighbor of Robert Breer's who worked with Pepsi, and so Breer was the Justin Eight. So Robert Breer was one of the team, um David, they used David Tudor to be uh to because of sound, and then the fact that he was a composer and worked very closely with sound. Forrest Myers, again, a sculptor who worked with light on a very big scale, and he'd done pieces with searchlights and and other large pieces, and so the four of them sat down, and Billy kind of had this crazy idea that it's called a Delphi map, and that everybody would come up with ideas and then present them and he'd work on that. I mean, it didn't it didn't quite go that way, but the point was people had ideas that they contributed to the and and these ideas evolved over time until finally Robert Greer was a sculptor and who made uh these uh moving sculptures, he called them floats. This was going to be sculptures that moved very slowly around the on the plaza of the pavilion. Frosty Myers made a light sculpture, square light sculpture that surrounded the pavilion. And uh Bob Whitman didn't actually do a piece, but the concept of the mirror of the mirror, which started out as a just a ring of mirror material, and that was gonna be a rock band, and the rock band was gonna you could see them up. Whatever. But slowly, as the artists they talked, it morphed into this idea of a full-scale mylar mirror. Again, there's a lot of experimentation. The first idea was to do a hard mirror out of panels. So there would be something like 2,500 panels that you would adjust in a in a grid, in a dome-like grid, and you would adjust them so that you would create these real images in space. You know, a real image is an image of the mirror.

Nir Hindie: 40:29

So you just said 2500 mirrors. Panels. Mirrors. Yeah, it's actually a huge pavilion.

Julie Martin: 40:38

Well, maybe not 2500. Well, they weren't that big.

Nir Hindie: 40:41

It actually makes sense because it's a huge, it's a huge pavilion. It was 90 foot.

Julie Martin: 40:45

It was a 90-foot diameter mirror. 90 foot no 30 meter. 30 meters. I have one of the panels still is rusty in the dry, but they weren't that big. They were maybe two by three feet. So I don't know if it's 2500. It was a lot. And Elsa Garmar, who's a scientist at Caltech at Billy Net, began to calculate how you could do this and the whole idea of how you could test the mirrors. And but on a trip to Japan, when we saw Billy and another engineer, saw what the state of the production of these mirrors, it just would not have worked. It would not have worked. Meanwhile, the the group in California, E18 California, was helping uh with a lot of this uh material, very involved because the manufacturers of the lights, for example, for Frosty Myers, Chiltern Square were in California, other things. And they had been experimenting with inflatable domes, mylar inflatable mylar. And in fact, we had made one mylar dome to show it as a test to kind of show the Pepsi people what it was going to look like, or to test the properties of a dome so that when the when it was clear that the hard mirror wouldn't work, we went a mylar inflatable uh mirror. And then um, once we were there, I believe it happened then, or John Pierce, not the John Pierce from Bell Labs, an architect John Pierce who had come on board to manage the project, had the idea that instead of uh inflating the mirror from inside, which meant you had to airlocks and having people come in and out would be very uh difficult. The idea of building an inside dome inside the outside dome and then pulling a slide vacuum meant that you could then hold up a mirror by negative pressure. And those that so that's what we that's how the mirror was held up by negative pressure so that people could go in and out and there could be staircase going to the lower level.

Nir Hindie: 42:46

And I wonder, Julie, how did these Pepsi guys coming from corporate America responded to the crazy ideas, experimental ideas uh that the artist brought to them?

Julie Martin: 43:01

Well, I think it's certainly the hardware there really wasn't a problem in the sense that it was a world's fair, so everybody had on their technical innovation hats, and there were a lot of other pavilions that were really interesting. The American Pilvay was a an inflated structure, a berm. They had a moon rock, you know, and they also had some of some works from the California Art and Technology show, so they had our works there. So I think that part, the people, the T Pipsi people were very much, there was not a problem. We kept them involved. I think we did run into a problem with the with the programming. We had this idea that this was a space for artists to experiment and to program it. David Tudor had made the sound system, had this idea of a sound system where there's a control, there's a control panel on the floor of the pavilion, and there were 36 speakers in the ceiling behind the behind that Mylar Doll, arranging a rhombic grid so that you could move sound on a line around, you could focus sound, or you could have the whole space be filled with sound. And so the idea was that we invited artists two weeks at a time to come and learn the pavilion and then make pieces. And we had Japanese and American artists, I think the Japanese artists we worked with, Fujiko Nakaya, who we can talk about the phone, also who helped us meet and Toshi Ichinagi need and choose Japanese artists. And I think the first Japanese artist was quite radical, Hijikata. And um we somehow offended the sensibilities of the Japanese Pepsi people, and and they really they really didn't want the programming, and so our contract was canceled, and uh they just played the same music over and over again. I think it was the software when you know it. I think he had a a black crow crow flying around the pavilion, and he had funeral dress and wedding music. I mean, it was very quite exciting work, but it uh it was not uh offended somebody offended uh the uh sensibility. But also it's interesting. I mean, the other the other thing you talked about was Fuji's fog. That's what's interesting is the the one thing that was given when we started the project was the dome.

Nir Hindie: 45:17

Yeah.

Julie Martin: 45:17

And Bob Breer called it the buckle floor dome. And they really didn't like it, the artist. How can we cover it? And so the idea of fog did come up. So first, dry ice that would have attracted every mosquito in Japan of carbon dioxide, and the second was the idea um urea. You could use urea, but somehow the idea that that didn't go, the idea Pepsi would not like this idea of covering them. And the building of this kind of chemical. And so a little bit at a at a impasse when the first trip to Japan, uh Billy insisted that all the artists go to see the hole in the ground at that point, but to be able to see it, interact with each other, have ideas. And um Bob Rauschenberg said, Well, look up Gojukonakaya because she had helped them. She was a Japanese artist who had been very uh helpful with uh the Marse Cunningham tour in 1964, been born in Japan and but had gone to school in Northwestern. So she's you know spoke English and she was very well regarded. And her father was this great snow scientist. Yeah, he had grown the first artificial snow crystal in in captivity, and and so she there's a great lineage there. So they began, they met Fujiko, and she was helping out it, and she was at this point making kind of tiny fog sculptures of her own, atmospheric sculptures. And so Billy said, Pugico, do you want to do the fog? And so Pugiko, and she tells the story. I said no, I said yes immediately without even thinking about it. And so she began to research how do you produce fog.

Nir Hindie: 46:57

And that's when the connection to the engineer Thomas Mee in California actually took place.

Julie Martin: 47:04

Someone in California discovered Thomas Mee, and he had actually discovered these nozzles, and he thought you'd use fog for uh greenhouses to keep coal out, but he'd abandoned it because it wasn't uh he wasn't able to develop or didn't develop it, he didn't have the quote-unquote market for it. And so Fujiko came to him, and together it revived his idea of the nozzles and with the idea of making fog uh that would cover the pavilion. And so they began to work together.

Nir Hindie: 47:37

Pure water, fog, yeah, based on electricity.

Julie Martin: 47:41

Well, I mean, uh it was pumps.

Nir Hindie: 47:44

Yeah.

Julie Martin: 47:44

It was pumps pumping water through pipes, and uh uh each pipe had about 10 nozzles, and then the nozzle was such as the water went through it, it hit another obstruction, and then it broke it into small enough droplets. Very physical. I mean, it's physical and it's using the physical properties of water and to make the fog.

Nir Hindie: 48:03

Yeah, it's it's such a great example of for collaboration between artists and engineers. Uh, how the artists allow the engineer to see what they have developed in a different light, or even pose a question or a challenge that they can work with and try to uh tackle. And Julie, we already spoke about the nine evenings. We spoke about Pepsi Pavilion, and there is another project. Again, so many incredible projects. And the project I want to ask you about now, it's a project you called Project Outside Art. Now, maybe before we dive into this project, there is something that I liked about this project, and I see how it might um relevant uh to business, because today, and uh this is again a project that took place in uh 69. And uh today we like to speak about human-centric design. And what's amazing for me is that artists never needed a concept to understand what is the right thing to do. It doesn't matter if they develop technology or experience or education program like they did in the Anand project that in a second we'll hear from you. Human came first, and it was naturally. So tell me about this Anand project, please.

Julie Martin: 49:24

Yeah, I mean I think the Anand project almost came before it was a project outside of our before we had the name. During the pavilion into the 70s, Billy worked very close with Bob Whitman. So he and Bob were really collaborating on a lot of these ideas, and Bob was very active. And so this idea that artists could be part of a collaborative team that would address issues in society. She would bring their expertise in, you know, sense of scale, sense of material, sense of, you know, would bring this to a collaboration, and you would do projects that I mean, now human-century, but you do projects that would have this kind of input. And this whole idea of the artist being involved in society was something that we thought was very, very important and began to pursue into the 70s. So what happened with the uh with the Anan project is that uh the Billy met Vikram Sarabai, who was part of the Sarabhai's of one of the five most prosperous wealthy families in in India, and um source of their um work was textiles and in Ahmedabad and Gandhi, one of the sisters had been called Gandhi. So there was a long tradition of um reaching out and of doing the National Institute of Design was founded by them, etc. So uh Mikram uh talked to Billy about this idea that the US was going to loan a satellite, the ATSF satellite, to India for a year that they could use to for educational purposes and educational programs to the villages. And somehow Mikrom understood that he didn't really want some people from the BBC sitting in London to make these programs that this was not exactly, this wouldn't address the issue. And so he talked to Billy about the idea of putting a team from EAT together to go and investigate what suggestions they would have for programming this satellite. And so again, uh Billy and Bob put together a team of uh artists and and Fred Baldur went as a technical person, Ernie Rothkopf was his wonderful specialist in education at Bell Labs. So we put together this team, Peter Poole from the 18s, where I went, to go to India. So you went as well? I was there. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then to meet with people that worked with Bigrom at the Atomic Energy Commission. That was his official title, it's Atomic Energy Commission. And he had been very active in Pugwash and the anti-nuclear or anti-bomb. Uh, was very much against India getting a bomb. I didn't have it at the time. So he was a quite well-known, prominent scientist. So then we we did go and we went and we decided to focus on the uh unrolled dairy. I think the Danes had given India this very advanced dairy, I mean, cooperative equipment so that they could take milk, make cheese, pasteurize the milk, and distribute it uh throughout India. But the collection system was 1,500 different women every day, twice a day. You got a teeny bit of milk and you put it in the canisters and you took it to this to this facility. So the idea was to figure out to focus on the villages and how can you educate the women to be able to take better care of their cows or their buffalo, you know, for the mill. I actually got sick and so I wasn't there for a lot of it. I was in bed, so I can't tell the whole story. But essentially the idea came about that using half-inch video, which was just coming into use in 1969, you would go to the villages and begin to film, let people film themselves, make these practice tapes of their of you know, health or milking the buffer, whatever, so that the so that you saw what the idiom, the visual idiom of a village of a villagers were. And then you would take these tapes back to Omnivaj Studio and begin to make educational videos that really used the idiom of the village and spoke to these different villages. So that was the basic proposal that we did.

Nir Hindie: 53:34

So, Julia, I'm actually curious to know what happened after. Was it broadcasted or kept for the villagers?

Julie Martin: 53:43

The trouble, what happened was partly what happened was that Vikram died. Unexpectedly, he died quite maybe a year or so after that. So that we were not involved, but more recently, I've I've seen that the site SITE project did go about and they did broadcast. There was this idea of educational broadcast to the villages. I think his second in command carried it forward. Whether they went as far as to do this visual research in the villages, I don't know. But the site project did take place and there was this educational component to the villages, but but EAT was not involved, I think, probably because Virk Kron was not around anymore. But this gave us the idea to begin to do other projects like that in other areas, one of which was also communicated, it was called Children in Communication.

Nir Hindie: 54:33

Well, I guess I will need to go and search about this project Children in Communication. Uh but the Anand project, at least from what I read and researched and from what you are telling, was an incredible project. And what again kind of surprised me is that I remember reading that there was another project that came out of this initiative on Anand project, creating hydroponic rooftop gardens. And again, we are talking about um 70s uh ideas like visualizing content to villagers in India through satellites or hydroponic uh rooftop gardens, all of these in the early uh 70s, almost yeah, 50 years ago. And it kind of brings the question, uh Julie, at least something I'm interested to hear from you. What do you think? Do you feel that today we are more open to these type of collaborations, like in the 60s between artists and engineers?

Julie Martin: 55:33

One thing that is interesting today are artists collaborating with each other. So that are there are groups of artists that work together. That's very interesting. And I do think um the idea of an artist reaching out to an engineer or to a scientist is is um much more common. I mean, it's it's it's it's in the it's in the culture now. And it's what's interesting now is science. Is it um I think although we in the 60s we talked about artists, works engineers and scientists, it really was the focus, again, because I always think of Steve Paxton, the title of Steve Paxton's night and evening speech, physical things. You really were in those days dealing with physical things more. You weren't, it was not the digital age yet. You had you had some digital work, but even at Bell Labs, if you did something, you took your cards to the central place and they ran your program for you, and you got them this kind of thing. You didn't really have, it wasn't present in in life. And so the the focus really was a little bit on engineering and building them to build things, et cetera. I think one of the things that shifted today is that science itself has become more, as you want to call it, human-centric. I mean, their concerns of science aren't necessarily about uh, you know, what's still there, black holes in the space, et cetera, but then you know, the biological scientist and the you know, the whole thing, it's more focused on human, on the on the human being and again on the environment. So that the collaboration between artists and scientists is much more natural now than it would have been in the 60s because these concerns are the same. The focus of the science is the same.

Nir Hindie: 57:13

It's interesting that uh you kind of phrase the science in the context of the human-centric. Um I didn't think about it that way. Well, at least you know, for me, from an artistic standpoint, what artists often bring to the table is this art uh human approach. Art is always about humans, uh made for humans, by humans. So, in a way, artists don't need the human-centric concept because it's always there. It's natural for them, and I wish that it was the case in the technology sphere as well. Um Julie, we are getting into the end of our uh podcast, and uh first of all, again, I'm very appreciative of you taking the time and willing to share all these incredible stories. It's a wonderful, wonderful opportunity because you were there with all these important artists that basically changed uh global art as we know it. Um and Julie, before we finish, I do want to ask you a question. What will be your tip or advice for someone who works in technology and engineering or science that never thought about actually working with artists? Why would you encourage them to try to do that?

Julie Martin: 58:33

Well, the idea is if if if you're collaborating, if you can collaborate or work with an artist, number one, he or she will use the technology in a way that you never thought of, perhaps. In other words, they'll want to uh um you know see in the dark you know, use, you know, broadcast, do like Oracle, you broadcast within a room, for example, you know, or Andy Warhol, who would just use them and use the idea of floating and it didn't matter what it looked like necessarily. But the idea that you would engage with what the person, the scientist is doing in a very different way. And so it it and also it can be an intellectual challenge to you that could suggest doing something that you never thought of, or that would challenge you in your own field to do something new and different. So it's interesting. I think it's the idea of being challenged yourself, being stimulated yourself to use your knowledge and your expertise for slightly different hand, um, is what is is the challenge and the interest of working with artists.

Nir Hindie: 59:37

Yeah, 100%. I totally agree with you uh uh on that. I guess that uh that's what drove me or made me do what I do. Uh when I started my own kind of ventures uh back home, and every time I had a coffee with one of my artist friends, they used to ask me questions that I was like, What? How can they ask me this question? Questions. I mean, artists don't understand business. And this kind of conversation uh intrigued my interest to really try to understand why artists think that way. Uh, and obviously, one of my biggest learning is that art is a way of thinking, it's not about the object itself. And I think that uh that's exactly what artists often time uh do. They have these, as you said, brilliant ideas, and then the result of those ideas and their thinking uh process is the creation of an artwork. And I think there is a lot what to learn from this creative thinking process and creative doing process.

Julie Martin: 1:00:43

I just think good art has really good ideas. I mean, when you look at a work of art, any work, I mean, say Zan my God, um, but you know, that there's an intelligence there.

unknown: 1:00:53

Yeah.

Julie Martin: 1:00:54

Real intelligence. And so um the idea of two intelligences that come from different backgrounds. Coming together, something will happen that neither of them could have foreseen, I think. And I still I still think that. I mean, I still think that idea. The ideas of the AT and the aspirations, I think, are still are still valid and are still operative going forward. Because it's about people, it's about collaboration between individuals and respect for each other's uh input into a project. Um that doesn't change.

Nir Hindie: 1:01:29

Yeah. I really liked how you frame it. Two intelligences coming together. Julie, thank you very, very much for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it, and I think it's important that people will know how innovative artists were and are today in the realm of technology and invention. So, once again, thank you.

Julie Martin: 1:01:56

Thank you. I I enjoy I enjoy talking about it.

Nir Hindie: 1:02:00

And dear listeners, my recommendation after listening to this episode, go on the internet, Google, or search EAT, experiments and art in technology. We will make sure to add um some links on our show notes, but you will discover incredible ways of thinking when it comes to technology, science, engineering, and life. And experience it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, listeners, for being with us. See you on the next episode where we explore what business artistry actually means. We produce this show independently without any heads. So if today's episode was useful, we will really appreciate it if you rate it or leave a comment. It helps others to find Business Artistry Podcast. For show notes and links, check the descriptions. And if you are interested in bringing this way of thinking to your organization through a keynote or creative leadership program, email us at infot deartian.com. And if you are an individual, you can always explore the business artistry course at courses.com. I'm Nir Hindi. Thanks again for listening to the Business Artistry podcast.