Twenty Years of Arts Computing
CHArt Twentieth Annual Conference
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FUTURES PAST: Twenty Years of Arts Computing |
Jennifer Gabrys, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Machines Fall Apart: Failure and Collapse in Art and Technology
"The self-destruction or self-elimination of the machine is the ideal of good machine behavior." --Billy Klüver in "The Garden Party" (on Tinguely's Homage to New York)
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) had its beginnings with a collaboration between one of its founders, engineer Billy Klüver, and artist Jean Tinguely. The project, "Homage to New York," staged the self-destruction of a machine in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. From scouring for materials in the New Jersey garbage dumps to designing machine circuitry to overheat and collapse, Klüver in his collaboration with Tinguely made an initial gesture toward pushing the boundaries of art and technology, while also raising questions about the wasting mechanisms inherent to machines.
Klüver has remarked that E.A.T.'s interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and engineers, which forged a connection between art and technology, were "from the start related to the desire for something new outside the realm of art; a desire to participate in the possibilities for radical changes in our environment which technology was to bring about." From this point of view, technology brought both a measure of enthusiasm and social purpose to the practice of art.
This essay will consider E.A.T.'s sense of the limitless possibilities offered by technology, and will position these strivings within present-day instances of technological optimism. The flipside of such a pervasive implementation of technology as social panacea requires a consideration of the breakdown of technology, and the waste and excesses that it produces. Indeed, artists and writers from Lucy Lippard to Jack Burnham have commented on the "failures" within E.A.T.'s projects. At the same time, Klüver has suggested that failure is a necessary mechanism that allows innovation to occur. I will then position E.A.T.' s projects within the larger field of the excesses of information and its technologies in order to discuss the processes of obsolescence and failure in art and technology.