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Billy Kulver, 76, "whose collaborations with artists helped give birth to the multimedia art forms of the 1960's" died on Sunday (NYTimes obit, free reg required.)
In 1966 Mr. Kluver teamed up with Robert Rauschenberg to solve the knotty engineering problems posed by 10 artists (Mr. Rauschenberg among them) who wanted to stage their art as spectacle. Mr. Kluver invited some 30 scientists and engineers, most of them his colleagues at Bell Labs, to realize dreamy ideas like snowflakes that fell upward and tennis rackets that gave out sounds like huge temple bells.Here's an IEEE special report on Mr. Kluver for more background on this interesting man.
The outcome was "Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering," a performance series that drew 14,000 visitors when it opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan on Oct. 13, 1966, attracting worldwide attention and inaugurating a fusion of art and technology that prefigured the arrival of countless new art forms.
Experiments in Art and Technology — the organization devised in September 1966 by Mr. Rauschenberg, Mr. Kluver, the artist Bob Whitman and a Bell Labs engineer, Fred Waldhauer — quickly became an instrument of ongoing collaborations. E.A.T., as the organization is known, earned Mr. Kluver a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Royal Order of Vasa from Sweden. Mr. Kluver continued to match up artists and scientists as recently as last summer.