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"Rauschenberg and I decided to form Experiments in Art and Technology as a service organization for artists, engineers and scientists."
Billy Klüver speaking at the first meeting of E.A.T.

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E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) <1966>

9 Evenings raised an enormous interest in using new technology among the artists in New York. Robert Whitman, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg and I called a meeting at the Central Plaza Hotel. Three hundred artists came to the meeting and we collected eighty immediate requests for technical help.

We began to publish a newsletter and spell out what E.A.T. was going to do. Rauschenberg's and Whitman's involvement in creating E.A.T. were crucial to the organization. Their belief that technology is "a challenge and what can be created if two or three people in diverse fields become collaborators?" This idea of one-to-one collaboration between individual artists and engineers or scientists was the basis of E.A.T. To this was added my belief that artists' ideas and concerns could influence the way we engineers approached the technological or social problems we faced day to day. The principal activity was to match artists who had technical problems or projects with engineers or scientists who could work with them.

The collaborations could lead technology in directions more positive for the needs, desires, and pleasures of the individual.