back
straight up
"The new interface I will define is one in which the artist makes active use of the inventiveness and skills of an engineer to achieve his purpose. The artist could not complete his intentions without the help of an engineer. The artist incorporates the work of the engineer in the painting or the sculpture or the performance."
Jean Tinguely,  Homage to New York    

previous next

Click to play video John Cage discussing collaboration


Billy Klüver | Collaboration <1960>

In the late 1950s, the Swedish-born engineer Billy Klüver worked on laser systems for Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became the chief catalyst for the art and technology movement that was launched dramatically in the spring of 1960, at the Museum of Modern Art, with Jean Tinguely's infamous self-destructing kinetic sculpture, Homage to New York. Klüver's participation in this work, with its paint bombs, chemical stinks, noisemakers, and fragments of scrap metal, inspired a generation of artists to imagine the possibilities of technology, as the machine destroyed itself, in Klüver's words, "in one glorious act of mechanical suicide."

Klüver proposed the active and equal participation of the artist and engineer in the creation of the artwork. In this collaboration, he believed that the engineer required the participation of the artist, who as a "visionary about life" and an active agent of social change, involved the engineer in meaningful cultural dialog. At the same time, he felt that the artist, in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg's famous credo "to close the gap between art and life," had an obligation to incorporate technology as an element in the artwork, since technology had become inseparable from our lives.