…To fear and love,
To love as prime and chief, for there fear ends,
Be this ascribed; 
  –William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” Book 14, 162-165.

First, you get up in the morning, and although they tell you not to drink coffee, you do it anyway, because you know it will be the best moment of the day. Try to do few things around the house before they come to pick you up and bring you to the doctor’s office. Later on you will just want to nap and watch TV until morning, probably horse racing, because it’s the only thing on late that you don’t already know the outcome of.

Don’t forget some fruit, the poetry book, and the headphones, because you’ll want to tune out the other people in the room, the cancer clutch. The center is nothing fancy, not a suite of private treatment rooms like at some centers, just a large room with some office dividers acting as a lame attempt to screen you off from each other. The reclining medical chairs are dated, vinyl and not particularly ergonomic. Considering what it costs for this stuff, $7500 each visit, you’ll wonder why they can’t splurge on nicer lounges and maybe some privacy curtains.

For the next five hours you will be hooked up to an IV drip containing the medicines that are supposed to save your life, if they don’t kill you first. Don’t worry, you’ll fall asleep through part of it, and by judiciously using your headphones and your book, you will be able to ignore the cancer clutch. There are two kinds of patients in the room, those who talk and those who don’t.  You make it very clear early-on that you are a non-talker, aside from the occasional pleasantries, of course. It’s not that you’re antisocial; it’s just that most of the clutch, seeing their own life fade before them, feel compelled to talk about their disease at great length. They are old and ready to die; you are young and not ready. Don’t fall victim to that complacency. Fight the disease quietly, alone.

The nurses are compassionate and will ask many questions: How are you feeling? Have you eaten today? First, they do a finger-stick blood test to make sure your cell counts are OK before they start poisoning you, unleashing cell killers that don’t differentiate good cells from the cancer cells; the drugs attack with equanimity. Next, they’ll put a long flexible needle into a vein on the top of your hand. It’s best not to watch this; if the nurse is good, you won’t even feel it. Take the blanket the nurses offer you because the liquids are at room temperature and they will chill you off from the inside, something you’ll think must feel like the onset of death. Your cocktail drip-they call it that-consists of four ingredients, starting with Compazine, to prevent stomach upset, and Benadryl, to ward off allergic reactions to the chemo drugs. If you’re lucky, the Benadryl will put you right to sleep for an hour. Then they’ll follow with the big guns: Taxol, a lung cancer drug made from the Yew Tree of all things, and Carboplatin, a basic do-all cancer drug that will burn slightly on the way in.  If it gets too hot, call the nurse, and they’ll rinse the vein with some saline.

When you wake up, eat some fruit and read Wordsworth for a little while, then close your eyes and try to nap again. Follow your breaths, like in meditation, until you begin to visualize Wordsworth’s landscape–the fells, slate-capped and oddly treeless, dotted with sheep, quilted by stone walls that stretch for miles. When the discomfort starts, promise yourself that if you get better, you will go back there as originally scheduled, visit your mates, get your families together and go walking. Convince yourself that planning this trip while healing will cure your melancholy, much the same way that living there cured Wordsworth’s. At the church in Grasmere, above his grave, Wordsworth planted Yew trees. You find this ironic.

***************

In the churchyard at Grasmere, among the Yew Trees and just off the path that bears thousands of summer tourists through the streets of the small village, lies the tomb of English poet William Wordsworth. Standing there under the trees, trying to make out the writings on the stones faded from 150 years of English precipitation, it occurs to me that it would be OK to die here. There are few, if any, similarities between William and me. I am neither a scholar of romantic poetry nor a poet, but this small piece of the world has held special significance for me for over twenty years. What began as a random stop on a semester abroad has become a place of almost tantric focus, a mental image to tranquilize the fear of my impending death. Now in remission, I have come here to pay homage, as the bard himself once did:

At sight of this seclusion, he forgot
His haste, for hasty had his footsteps been
As boyish his pursuits; and sighing said,
“What happy fortune were it here to live!
And, if a thought of dying, if a thought
Of mortal separation, could intrude
With paradise before him, here to die!” 
  –William Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere,” 8-14.

Young William first saw the beauty of this place as a child. Much of the region’s popularity derives from the treatment of this landscape in Wordsworth’s poetry. Twenty years ago, two dear friends, my roommates at England’s University of Worcester, borrowed a car and took me here for a long weekend of camping and walking, which is what most people come here to do. My roommates had heard that all Americans want to visit the Lake District, like Buckingham Palace, but the truth is, I had never heard of it. Wordsworth was a walking poet, and he composed most of his work while walking the fells and vales of this most beautiful of landscapes. As a student, I was just barely acquainted with his poetry, but my amazement at the place made me explore his verse and come to enjoy it even more. In this landscape, and in the language William uses to evoke it, there exists an indescribable power to sooth and reassure, as if to say, within nature lies the capacity to survive.

Throughout the months of cancer treatment, I used Wordsworth and Grasmere as my crutch. At my times of deepest anxiety, when most would focus on their families for comfort, I could not bear to conjure them, the possibility of losing them as real as the possibility of survival. But I could recall the incredible sense of peace I felt in these hills, the completeness. Trying to avert long nights of anxious dreaming, I often pictured myself walking here, healed, restored. That college trip to Europe changed my life, and the brief time I spent walking these hills and pastures were more transformative for me than I ever could have known. For twenty years I dreamt of coming back here, bringing my family and gathering my roommates and their families for a week together in these hills. We had begun to make plans before the tumor was discovered. The reunion was postponed so I could receive treatment. Fate intervened, and on the other side of the battle for my life, this trip shined like a trophy. All I could do was follow.

Such pleasure now is mine, albeit forced,
Herein less happy than the Traveller,
To cast from time to time a painful look
Upon unwelcome things which unawares
Reveal themselves, not therefore is my heart
Depressed, nor does it fear what is to come;
But confident, enriched at every glance,
The more I see the more delight my mind
Receives, or by reflection can create:
Truth justifies herself, and as she dwells
With Hope, who would not follow where she leads?
  –William Wordsworth, “Home at Grasmere,” 491-501.

Now in the churchyard the sky threatens showers and we start the day late, delayed by trying to get six adults and nine children under fourteen dressed and fed, so that the day’s excursions could begin. My roommates and their families headed off in another direction, leaving us to take this one journey alone. Though we planned the walk for months, arriving at the parking lot and preparing to begin stirs my anxiety. What if it rains? What if we get halfway and I can’t make it any more? Surely the kids are not as interested in this as me. They are enjoying the trip, but I think they look upon this walk with their parents as a bit of an annoyance, like having to go to church. Still, they know this walk is important to me and are supportive even though they cannot understand the deeper significance of it all. I’m not sure I understand it myself. They were so strong and grown-up through my illness that I feel almost ungrateful for making them take this trek.

In another bit of irony, this walk is called the Coffin Path. The brochure tells us to begin at Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth moved at the age of 30 to live in relative obscurity with his sister Dorothy and to compose his life’s work, “The Prelude,” a long poem discussing the growth of a poet’s mind. The walking path is circular, beginning at Dove Cottage where it climbs to a level of 1800 feet at a moderate incline, running parallel to Grasmere Lake and Rydal Water until it reaches Wordsworth’s later home at Rydal Mount, some three miles away. We are then to descend to the water’s edge and begin a slow climb along the other side of the lakes, returning to Grasmere. Total distance: 5.4 miles. The tourist information center lists the difficulty as easy; suitable for children and the elderly, it says. Allow three hours.

When William moved into Dove Cottage in December 1799, his first book of poems had just been released to a mix of controversy and acclaim. For the next 50 years, he walked these hills and immortalized this landscape and its inhabitants. The Cottage was once a small inn for passing traders, and William and Dorothy lived here simply, if not comfortably. The home has all the charm of an old cottage: whitewashed walls, plated glass windows, small sparsely furnished rooms, and an unpretentious English garden planted with common domestic plants like London Pride, Orchisis, Celadine, Laurels, and Thyme. While living here, the Wordsworths entertained other poets of the period, most notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom Wordsworth would have a deep personal friendship spanning many years. The cottage, and the small group of buildings that surround it, have all been purchased by the Wordsworth Trust and are well maintained. There is a new museum as well, which holds many artifacts from the Wordsworths, as well as illustrations of Lakeland life in the early 19^th century. The food in the nearby café is remarkably good; we eat heartily and watch the skies threaten more showers. My wife and kids seem to be waiting for me to decide when to leave. I’m having second thoughts again. My wife takes my hand. “You came this far,” she says. She’s right, of course, and strong.

The road begins its ascent from the valley just beyond Dove Cottage, and at first, though it is paved and slightly steep, I feel encouraged. Part way up I feel the strain in my legs and chest. I hoped the incline was more gradual, but then again, perhaps it is better to put my lungs to the test now. I lost half my left lung to the cancer, removed surgically in a four- hour operation in New York City just over a year before this trip. I was not in the greatest shape before the surgery, and certainly had not prepared in any way for this walk, so I’m not sure how my breathing will be and if I will be able to complete the walk before the dark of night or chill of rain. As I climb, stepping smaller and smaller, I sometimes turn around and walk backward to shift the pain to other muscles in my legs. I later learned that Wordsworth sometimes did this as well. I breathe steady and rhythmically, like a determined marathon runner, thinking at each step that if my kids can do this, then so can I. At first the paved road is easy on the ankles, but as we reach a leveling out point, the pavement veers left and the trail, pointed right by a wooden signpost that says “Path to Rydal,” becomes damp soil littered with stones. The first ascent complete, I am out of breath but still breathing.

***************

You’ll observe in the hospital that no one wants to be the one to deliver the diagnosis. The attending doctors actually flip coins to decide. They’ll kind of skirt the issue and avert their eyes when speaking to you, because they can’t hide their sympathy for what you are about to go through, for the degree to which your life is about to change. What they will eventually say is “There is a large mass, seven centimeters, at the top of your lung. We have to do more tests. It could just be pneumonia.” You’re smart, though-you know it’s lung cancer-but you’ll stay strong for the wife who is sobbing next to you. You’ll say something pathetically brave, like “It’s OK. We can beat this.” Bravo.

From this point on, under no circumstances are you to read information on the five-year survival rates, which hover around ten percent. Lung cancer victims are mostly old people; you are young and can handle everything the medical community can throw at you. You will get sick, lose your hair, grow more exhausted and disheartened than you ever thought possible. Radiation treatments will burn your esophagus, and chemotherapy will make you vomit. You won’t shit for days. After that, if you’re lucky, you will only lose half your lung, rather than the whole one. You have two, but every piece counts. You will survive this though. Even when you don’t believe this, you must believe this.

***************

Walking now, I am starting to heat up. My teenage son has taken to glancing at me, looking to catch me if I faint. He coaches me the way I coached him in Little League. “Move your arms more,” he says. “Lift your knees.” I remove my coat and stuff it in my backpack. It’s a black Swiss Army bag, not one of the shiny high-tech looking ones, but a more basic daypack that actually zips on to the outside of the larger, more high-tech bag that carried my belongings here. I haven’t overpacked: there’s my lined windbreaker and a compact Totes umbrella; some sunglasses, a small LED penlight and a set of binoculars; basic first aid items, of course, Barbie band-aids, Advil, and cortisone cream. Hidden deep-down, a few Vicodin. Water.

On the straps, I’ve attached pins that promote my alma mater, favorite sports teams, and other quirks about me–an American flag, a drum. The one that says “Cancer Sucks” I left at home. I’ve also brought Wordsworth’s selected poems (the Dove Cottage edition), a topographic map of the Lakes, and the brochure containing the directions for the hike.

On my back, I carry the joy of having survived, of being in a place with such enormous spiritual power, of connecting the past to the present with the ones I love most in the world. Before me lie the hills and valleys on which I relied for support when my soul was at its most afraid. From such fear, such joy! For all cancer survivors, my continued existence, like my ability to complete this trek, is tenuous, and so I also carry the heaviest item of all…the fear of failure. But I keep walking anyway.

In my head I can still hear the lines of poetry, the iambic pentameter that now seems so quaint to our ears. Wordsworth’s language became my lexicon of hope, and even though I often read it halfheartedly, only skimming the text without taking from it any real meaning, it gave me great comfort just to have it there, like a Bible, as if reading it could bring my mind and spirit back to this place in which I am now walking, as if I could calm myself enough to do some good.

The trail winds gently up and through a forest between stone walls that must have taken years to build. In some areas sheep graze in between the trees and ferns. In other areas, small rivulets of clear mountain water flow down to the lakes, which have now disappeared from view. I stop at some of these rivulets to baptize myself in its coolness. My daughter laughs when I shake my head at her, like a wet dog. Eventually we come to a small clearing where the lakes can be seen once again. According to my watch I assume we must be almost there, but according to the view, we are not yet one-fourth of the way to our stopping point at Rydal. I have to stop more often to catch my breath, pretending that I need water when what I really need is air.

The Coffin Path gets its name from its important role in connecting the once-churchless village of Rydal to the church at Grasmere. When a Rydal resident died, mourners and pallbearers would have to carry the deceased in his leaden box over this three-mile route. Scattered along it are stone seats, where they could place the coffin and rest their shoulders. The one before me is a simple slab of limestone, nothing noted on or near it, but well worn from years of service. Wordsworth walked this path often, composing poetry aloud as he wandered. Nab Scar, a foreboding piece of rock where falcons and buzzards nest, looms high above us. Darker clouds roll in, the same way they did when Wordsworth wrote his poem about this eerie spot in 1808:

A humble walk
Here is my body doomed to tread, this path,
A little hoary line and faintly traced,
Work, shall we call it, of the shepherd’s foot
Or of his flock?–joint vestige of them both.
  –William Wordsworth, “To a Cloud,” 54-58.

The rain begins to fall at last, but we are protected by the overhanging forests through which we climb. The sounds of running water grow as the rains increase and then subside, and moments later the sun breaks out, raising the humidity and making it even harder to breathe. We pass a small ruined cabin, gated off, in which Wordsworth composed poetry in his later years, and from which passers-by often heard him talking to himself. Just beyond we can see the main house, Rydal Mount, where William moved in 1813 having outgrown the more meager spaces of Dove Cottage. He had a wife now, and children. This home and the lush landscaped gardens that surround it are quite different and reflect Wordsworth’s new status in his career. I am eager to see inside, but I am more thrilled because I know there is another tea shop where we can revive ourselves and take in the surroundings. After two grueling hours, we are halfway home.

Rydal vastly differs from Dove Cottage, featuring acres of formally landscaped gardens designed by Wordsworth himself. In contrast to the other gardens simplicity, these include plants quite exotic for the time, large plantings like Japanese Maple, Rhododendron, and Italian Cypress. Though partially still in use by his descendants, most of the home is open as a museum, featuring copies of letters and artworks that belonged to William. We are the only visitors, and the woman who walks us through the house is excited to see us. “Sit a spell,” she tells me. “You look half dead.”

Though William composed most of his best poetry in Grasmere, this new home bespeaks of reinvention and revision. At Rydal, while continuing to write new poems, he also spent vast amounts of time revising “The Prelude,” the final revision of which would not appear until after his death in 1850, 45 years after he completed his earlier draft. His life’s work was truly that-life-long.

While browsing the gift shop, the clerk asks if we’ve taken the trail here. I joke about being exhausted and yet only half finished. He says, “If you’re really knackered, there is a bus that runs from the bottom of this hill right back to Grasmere every 30 minutes.” My wife looks at me, relieved that, with both houses now visited, we can enjoy a more sedentary afternoon. But I’m not so sure.

Over tea we discuss the options. The day has warmed but I feel restored, invincible, and I want to keep going. None of the brochures mentioned a bus return, so I always assumed the only way to get back would be to complete the walk. Taking the bus back now would be anticlimactic, though my legs, lungs and children would thank me. I pretend that I am debating the issue as we descended from Rydal Mount, past the waterfalls on which Wordsworth based one poem, and past the Rydal Church, where in his late 70s, he and his wife bent on hands and knees and planted thousands of daffodils to honor the memory of their daughter Catherine, who died at the age of 42, nearly my age now. It being August, the daffodils are not in bloom, but we decide to walk through the cemetery gate and see the inside of the church.

Alone in the cool sanctuary I listen to the slow scrape of a branch against a stained glass window. My daughter signs the visitors’ book as I sit in the first pew, right where Wordsworth himself sat (and allegedly slept) through many services in his later years. Here I feel the connection to William more strongly than ever. On this very bench, might he have prayed for strength? For health? Frail and 70, his planting daffodils seems more effort than my finishing the last three miles of this pilgrimage. This church was not completed until eleven years after Wordsworth moved to Rydal, so until then, he continued to attend regular services in Grasmere by walking the exact path we had just completed, back and forth on a Sunday morning. One of the things you learn when facing cancer is to do nothing half-way. The kids, bless them, say nothing, as we walk right past the bus stop at the bottom of the hill and begin the second half of our journey.

***************

You’ll feel surprisingly good when you come out of surgery. You won’t remember anything, just saying to yourself, “Done.” Gradually you will begin to assess your situation, location, sensations. Before you get too far along, the nurse sees you are awake and comes to your side. “Are you comfortable?” she’ll say. Yes. “Do you know your birthday?” Yes, April 22. She’ll tell you everything went fine and will leave to get your wife. Your wife will look more beautiful than ever before.

Try to enjoy this moment of self-congratulation. You survived major surgery, feel pretty good, and with any luck, are now completely free from the tumor and any cancer cells waiting in the minefields of your chest. The way you feel at that moment will be the best you feel for days, anesthesia still in force, relieved, grateful. The months ahead will hold rehabilitation, discomfort, drug addiction, depression, anxiety, hate, pain, guilt. This will be tempered by the support of friends you have never met, the prayers and offerings of dear ones, and the joy of seeing your children waiting on the porch as you pull up the drive, their tears finally flowing. You realize that when you last left them, they were not sure they would see you alive again. It amazes you that, somehow, you never saw them cry.

***************

The walk on the west side of the valley is every bit as beautiful as the east, but instead of being shaded and cooled by the canopy, it is wide open, the forest having long ago been cleared to make room for pasture land. With no shade and the clouds fleeing, beautiful sunshine warms the earth but continues to increase the humidity. This path’s long, slow climb goes on for ages, and the sign posts and the directions in the brochure do not always agree. Time grows late. We stop for a drink and realize that we have left our last full bottle of water in the tea shop at Rydal. We have just a few ounces left in the bottle in my backpack. Growing weary, there remains much more walking to be done. Tempers, while still good, are fragile. Five hours have passed, and we expected to be finished by now.

After the surgery, days of laying about in the hospital, the return home, and subsequent follow up visits, we had time to celebrate the surgeon’s declaration that all the cancer had been removed. Happy to be finished, and comfortably numb from the Vicodin, the news that I would have another four doses of full-strength chemotherapy, just to kill any rogue cells that might be circulating in my body, did not sit well. Like this walk, I just wanted my illness to be completely over. In hindsight, it seems as if this entire episode of my life-this battle temporarily won, this disease tenuously in remission-is a sign of some kind, sent by something greater than life, with a message equal to the severity of the continuing challenge before me. It is never completely over. We keep walking.

Thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ;
Whether her fearless visitings, or those
That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light
Opening the peaceful clouds; or she would use
Severer interventions, ministry
More palpable, as best might suit her aim.
  –William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” Book 1, 351-356.

I suddenly realize we took a wrong turn at the last signpost, and have started to ascend the mountain again. Clearly it will end at the same road, but rather than hugging the shorelines of the lake, our path meanders across slightly wooded pasture. We learned later that the trail had been altered to improve drainage and that new brochures had not yet been printed. I start to get tense. My whole body aches. I long ago stopped hearing William’s encouraging words in my ear. I just want to get to the pub at the end, and from there, return to our rented cottage where there is, of all things, a large Jacuzzi tub.

The brochure said the walk would take about three hours, and now, approaching the seven-hour mark we finally see the village in the distance, almost touchable. I am not thinking about William or about poetry anymore, as up ahead of me I watch my 10-year old daughter set the pace. She has complained a little, but is now excited about the nearing of the village and getting to rejoin her new friends at the cottage. It occurs to me that for each of my steps, she takes two. That’s 30,000 steps over the course of this walk to my 15,000. She has not reached for the Barbie band-aids, nor I for the Vicodin. Discomfort is temporary, and relative. It occurs to me that this is yet another transformational moment in Grasmere, a reminder that there is more to life even than death, if you simply slow down and take the time to see it.

***************

For awhile you will dislike being called a survivor. It seems so trite and almost gloats in the faces of those who were not as fortunate as you. Though it may sound strange, you are not grateful for your second chance at life, delighting only superficially in your past, and dwelling not on your fragile future. You are grateful solely for this very moment, to just exist, right now, because like discomfort, pleasure, too, is temporary and relative.

You will no longer waste a single minute. You will do only what you care most deeply about. You’ll focus your interests and take on less responsibility, not as a sign of surrender, but as a commitment to live life to its fullest, which entails giving it everything you have. You will never do anything halfway.

***************

Leaving the path at last we follow the paved roadway into the village of Grasmere. The narrow road, bordered on both sides by ragged stone walk barely fits two cars passing side by side, so we walk single file, as close to one wall as possible. I lead, my senses on heightened alert for speeding vehicles, the kids follow close behind me, and my wife brings up the rear, keeping us in line. We have come full circle in more ways than one– completing the circuitous path, returning after 20 years to this land of special significance, and coming once again to this plot of Yew Trees, which saved my life literally and figuratively. But at the end of every circle lies its beginning, and I remember that the battle is never really over, but a new one begins. But my soldiers and I, with our poet lieutenant, are ready.

You call this art?

In art, as in engineering, the past 30 years have seen tremendous diversification. These pages are inadequate to list all the technology that art has adopted–in part because art is difficult to define. Despite the lack of hard and fast rules, certain requirements guided the choice of the nine examples presented here from the many fine works at the “Alternating Currents” exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art, in California. Though not always obvious from the photographs, each work meets the following criteria when confronted by the viewer in person.

• The art had to be visual or have a visual component. It could give off auditory and other sensory stimuli, but sight had to be the primary means of communicating with the viewer.
• The art had to do something–move, talk, explode–just as long as it was something more than a static representation. Since technology is often evoked to produce physical or virtual motion, most of the items portrayed here are kinetic. Although many works that fall under the banner of Art & Technology do so because they comment on technology as a subject, works that use technology as a medium looked more likely to interest IEEE Spectrum readers.
• The art had to communicate. In the age of electronics, communication often means audio or video, but even in silent or static works, a message should be conveyed, be it obvious, covert, reportorial, revelatory, or fanatical. Regardless of the meaning, the image should stimulate thought and stir debate.
• One person’s trash is another person’s treasure–not a small issue! Having said art is hard to define, if not indefinable, right at this moment we are attempting to define it, categorize it, and judge it. Does art need to be beautiful? If it displeases or disturbs me, do I still have to regard it as art? These complicated issues bring to light the most important and self-evident statement that can be made about art: art is subjective.

In the following pages are works in many styles that will elicit an infinity of opinions from viewers. Yet they do have two things in common: they have been dubbed “art” by experts in that field, and they use technology as a medium, and quite often, as a message.

Spectrum is indebted to Beth Venn and Cathy Kimball, co-curators of “Alternating Currents,” for the interpretive captions. Unless otherwise indicated, each photograph shows an item from the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dimensions are in inches; height precedes width precedes depth. Photographs appear here through the generosity of the artists and through special arrangement with the owner of each work. 

Art’s Sake

As with other areas of society, fine art was not immune from the sweeping technological advances that began in the early 1960s. The avant-garde artists of the ’60s counter-culture, in direct collaboration with engineers, welcomed the introduction of emerging technologies and employed them in ways that changed how art is created, defined, and appreciated [see "The engineer as catalyst,"]. In the decades since, this merger of art and engineering has blossomed into what museum curators and art historians now like to term the Art & Technology Movement.

Technology itself has had a multi-faceted effect on the world of art. These days, art may approach technology as a subject, an artistic medium, a message, or any combination of the three. As a subject, technology’s effect on society is well documented by today’s artists. Sometimes, oil paints or bronze or other traditional materials are harnessed to the portrayal of the positive or negative effects of technology, while at other times, artists employ technology as an attention-grabber, to comment on itself.

As a medium, technology may be considered an extension of, say, watercolors or clay. Today’s artists use motors, transmitters, and computers both behind the scenes and in the finished work. Technology has also transcended the bounds of the visual by incorporating sound, light, and motion. The moving shapes draw the viewers of a work deeper within its toils, even as the technological addition exacts from them a wholly new way of experiencing art.

In most works of art, subject and medium together affect the response to a painting, statue, or what have you, but the outcome is not always predetermined. The message put forth from a work, as interpreted by a viewer, is highly individual.

In fact, no interpretation of a work of art is ever universally accepted, and none will be proposed here. Rather, this report sketches in a perspective from which readers may draw their own conclusions. The objective is to provoke thought and retrospection, not to take sides on what is or is not “art.” But it seems fitting, as the turn of century, indeed the millennium, approaches, to step back and form our own opinions on what art is saying about this Age of Technology.

Pixels at an exhibition

Assembling an interpretive report of the Art & Technology Movement would have been a monumental task, in light of the relative youth of these works and the myriad opinions on what constitutes a successful work of art. The movement is 30 years old and shows no sign of ending. Happily, the selection of works for inclusion in this article was aided by two leading U.S. art museums, which mounted a major exhibition on the theme in October 1997.

“Alternating Currents: American Art in the Age of Technology” is a joint effort of California’s San Jose Museum of Art and New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The show, which runs in San Jose through mid-October 1998, features over 60 works representative of the Art & Technology movement from 1959 to the present. In this cross-section of late 20th century technological art, each work is poised to become a mine of fascination for art historians of the next millennium.

Most of the items were selected from the Permanent Collection at the Whitney Museum, long a promoter of Art & Technology. And while traditional art forms such as painting or bronze sculpture are of course still practiced, the arrival of new technologies has lured even these contemporary artists beyond the purely visual to incorporate other sensory stimuli in some of their works.

At first, the sheer variety of the exhibits on display in San Jose is overwhelming–a veritable onslaught of light, video, sound, size, and movement lays siege to one’s senses. The gamut runs from traditional pencil sketches to huge inflatable ice bags [Figure 1]. So what threads are common to the exhibition as a whole?

The primary component is, of course, technology, according to Cathy Kimball, associate curator at the San Jose Museum of Art, although not solely in its use as a creative device. “The works are not all tech-based,” she told IEEE Spectrum. “Many of the more traditional works were included since they speak to the paradox of technology in our lives, how everything has simultaneously become simpler yet more complex.” For some artists, it seems, the best way to comment on the effects of technology is to revert to the simplest and most traditional of artistic media.

Variations on a theme

The curators grouped the works by gallery, with a view to suggesting how technology has meshed with works of visual art, and what the results may say about the effects of technology on society.

One gallery, entitled Challenging Perceptions, houses items that tend to illustrate the artists’ shift from traditional materials to experimentation with “the powerful visual imagery of both complex technological devices, and explorations of light and space,” to quote Beth Venn, associate curator at the Whitney Museum. They illustrate the possibilities of electric light and kinetic sculpture, introducing a radical change from the art of prior centuries. This sharp contrast in style, fueled in part by the technological magic used to create these works, defy the viewer to answer the question, “Is real, real?”

Consider Robert Irwin’s No Title. Here, artificial light is deployed to obliterate the physical boundaries of the work, asking the viewer to determine where the wall ends and the art begins [Figure 2]. Engineer Harold Edgerton [see "An EE for all seasons," Trudy E. Bell, Spectrum, September 1989, pp. 52-57] manipulates the stroboscope to help him photograph what the human eye cannot capture [Figure 3]. The peculiar beauty of a bullet racing through an apple flowers from his inventive merger of light and motion with photography, and though the event is too fast for the human eye to see, the photograph proves how it all happened.

Or does it? Photography, once considered so honest that it could serve documentary purposes, can now be digitally altered without betraying the fact and has therefore lost a degree of trustworthiness. Some of the San Jose exhibits accordingly demonstrate the early capabilities of digitally enhanced photography. The axiom, “The camera doesn’t lie” may no longer be true. With the aid of a computer, the camera may lie just as seamlessly as it tells the truth, further blurring the line between illusion and reality.

Another gallery, Message & Narrative, examines how technology can transform the very nature of looking at a piece of art, in particular its contribution to the viewer’s interpretation of a work’s meaning. In this gallery, artist Jenny Holzer uses a light-emitting-diode sign to directly communicate alternating messages that in another age might have been a series of static, woodblock prints [Figure 4]. Pepón Osorio and Nam June Paik combine found objects with video and audio to erect virtual monuments to deceased acquaintances [Figure 5 and Figure 6]. In their thought-provoking works, Tony Oursler and Alan Rath use technology as tool, interpreter, and messenger [Figure 7 and Figure 8].

“It is important to recognize that not all art that concerns itself with issues of technology is necessarily ‘high-tech,’” the Whitney’s Venn said. Indeed, many of the exhibition’s works are drawn or painted, differing only stylistically from the portraits and landscapes of centuries past. The issues they expose can be foreboding or optimistic, offering as many types of opinion as there are types of artist. Despite all the technology displayed in the exhibit, however, the foremost byproduct of the Information Age–the computer–is all but absent.

Where’s the computer?

The art establishment by and large spurns the computer when it is used by artists to replicate traditional methods and materials. The feeling seems to be that artists who utilize computer software solely to produce and output a digital painting or other conventional work are neither battling the traditional mainstream nor advancing the field of visual art in any other way. For today’s artist, using the computer as a tool requires far less skill than mastering the techniques of oil painting or charcoal sketching, for example, since with the click of a mouse users can now automate what were once virtuoso artistic techniques.

Venn, for one, said that using the computer to generate images is not enough to elevate the work to a higher level in today’s art world. “The result has to be different from anything else to really make an impact, but all this technology will not eliminate the use of traditional materials and media,” she said. “Traditional media will continue to coexist with technological ones, much in the same way that radio managed to coexist with television. People have different tastes, so there’s lots of room.”

Art & Technology guru Billy Klüver is of the same opinion [again, see "The engineer as catalyst,"]. “Certainly you can consider works generated on a computer as ‘art,’ but it doesn’t interest me,” Klüver said. “Too many artists feel if they work on the computer, they don’t have to do anything dangerous. Art just can’t sit there. It has to do something.”

On the other hand, artist and educator Paul Brown theorized that computer technology will eventually spawn a revolutionary artistic medium, one in which the computer is not just a tool for the artist, but a medium for the art itself. Many young artists are working in new forms that again challenge the viewer’s understanding of what art can be. As with all avant-garde work, the viewer must re-examine their definition and appreciation for art.

“It will require a shift in the way art is perceived,” said Brown, a member of the International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology, San Francisco and editor of Fine Art Forum. “It is slow in developing for a number of reasons, but if historical models–like the emergence of photography or motion pictures–are any indication, I would expect a new medium to emerge in the early years of the new millennium.”

Venn, Klüver, and Brown make the same excellent point. The use of a computer to produce static images, no matter how high-tech those images may look, turns it into simply another tool for the artist–a new-age electronic paintbox–and leaves the onlooker literally on the outside. The computer’s strength is its ability to interact directly with the viewer, seen or unseen, not unlike the early kinetic art of Klüver’s colleagues [see photos in "The engineer as catalyst,"]. When a viewer moves a mouse and so alters the artist’s image within a given set of parameters–or else triggers other sensations like touch, sound, and smell–the motion or event serves to involve that person or audience with the work.

Many works use a computer behind the scenes, as in the design of a mechanical work or in the software component of multimedia installations. In the finished piece, however, the computer may not be seen at all. While the computer may serve to display art or create art, its real potential emerges when used in both capacities, as evidenced by the only computer-interactive work in the San Jose exhibition.

In Joel Slayton’s To Not See a Thing [Figure 9], the viewer manipulates a transparent Plexiglas cube containing a motion sensor. The movement is displayed as a wire-frame drawing on a 15-inch color monitor, giving the viewer a visual representation of the cube’s movements. Meanwhile, the attached Sun workstation records all the coordinates transmitted by the moving box and will eventually compile them into one gigantic collaborative video file.

Interestingly, even though there are likely to be many thousands of user sessions, most visitors respond to the work in the same manner. First, they handle the box gently, watching the monitor to see how the wireframe cube reacts to their actions. Then, a little at a time, they handle it more roughly, starting slowly and building in speed and force. Some jump around with it, some dance with it. Eventually, they try to outdo it, moving it faster and more vigorously until the graphics cannot keep up.

This treatment of the art work suggests a parallel with society’s handling of technology. If the Plexiglas box is seen as a metaphor for new technology, then viewers handle it with the same actions as society does, in the same order–trepidation, familiarity, competition. Again, art has communicated. Only this time, it’s not just an artist’s suggestion of how society may respond to new technology. Like a good scientist, somewhere on the Sun workstation’s hard disk, there exists the evidence and data to prove his theory.

Billy Klüver has a lot in common with the more accomplished electrical engineers of his generation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, is a veteran of Bell Laboratories, has been an IEEE member since 1943, and holds several patents. Unique to Klüver, however, is the almost surreal story of a quiet scientist, thrust from the serenity of the lab into the burgeoning art scene of New York City in the 1960s.

His knowledge of technology, coupled with a deep-rooted interest in art, launched him on a whirlwind tour of the tumultuous ’60s. The list of those with whom he has collaborated embraces some of the 20th century’s most notable visual and performing artists–Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and others. Were it not for his well-chronicled presence in the annals of art history, Klüver’s story would be difficult to believe.

Life magazine, though, fell short of the mark in a 1966 article that tagged him “The Mr. Fix-It of kinetic art.” He was and is far more than just a repair man. Most memorably, he was the lead engineer and co-organizer of “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” a defining event in late 20th century art.

“9 Evenings” resulted from a collaboration between 10 artists and more than 30 engineers and scientists who integrated fascinating new technologies into works of art. Held in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, the performances drew an audience of over 10 000.

Because of the enthusiasm generated by “9 Evenings,” Klüver, fellow Bell engineer Fred Waldhauer, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman went on to form Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.), the first organization dedicated to uniting artists eager to use technology with engineers equipped to provide it.

E.A.T.’s first task was to attract engineers who would collaborate with artists. Within two years, E.A.T. membership rolls grew to over 4000 and the organization subsequently became the catalyst for much striking technological art.

The ’60s were a productive period in the history of art and technology, and Klüver’s work was chronicled in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Life, Newsweek, Art Forum and elsewhere. Not to be outdone, IEEE Spectrum’s May 1969 issue examined E.A.T. and the young Art & Technology Movement.

In that report, staff writer Nilo Lindgren sought to persuade engineers to get involved with the organization. “You need not be a Renaissance Man to apply for a match with an artist. It won’t be all fun and games, although part of it will be, and you might even end up doing something so useless from an engineering point of view, and so right from another point of view, that you could begin wondering why engineering is practiced the way it is–i.e., you might get turned on.”

The “artist’s scientist,” as The New York Times called him in 1965, has himself become an object of renewed interest to artists and historians. In the past 12 months, Klüver has co-authored a well-received book of historic photographs (A Day with Picasso, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.), attended a festive homecoming at Berkeley’s engineering department, received an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from New York City’s renowned Parson’s School of Design (now part of the New School for Social Research), has been interviewed for the BBC, and has been asked to appear on countless panels and give numerous lectures. Right now in his suburban home in Berkeley Heights, N.J., where he and two assistants maintain the mountain of archives that chronicle the 30-year history of the Art & Technology movement, Klüver wonders what all the fuss is about.

“I mean, can you imagine, a degree in fine arts,” he said in a recent interview with Spectrum. “I’m an engineer, not an artist.” Klüver, the technological guru of late 20th century art, made the statement with a great deal of pride in his profession. Though rejecting any claims of being an artist himself, this engineer is as responsible for shaping the face of technological art as any painter or sculptor of this era.

Hallowed ground to underground

For Klüver, science has always been paramount, whereas his interest in art was “just another form of intellectual activity,” he said. He was born in Monaco in 1927 and his family moved to Sweden immediately after. While an undergraduate at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stock-holm, he joined the Film Society across town at the humanities faculty of Stockholm University, an unprecedented act for an engineering student. His deep love of film eventually led to his election as president of the Film Society.

He desired to merge his two loves, film and science, by producing high-level educational films, something that had not yet been done. For his senior thesis, he received permission from his professor, Nobel prize winner in physics Hannes Alfvén, to produce a short animated film about the motion of electrons in electric and magnetic fields. Later he presented the concept of high-level, educational films to Encyclopedia Britannica, which did not know what to make of it, since no film geared to an audience with such knowledge had ever been made before.

After graduating, he first took a job with Compagnie Générale Thomson-Houston in Paris, where he worked on a cavity-type electron-beam device slated to join the radio transmitters atop the Eiffel Tower. He continued to pursue the merger of film and science by spending some time in Marseilles, working for famed oceanic scientist Jacques Cousteau. “I got to go on board Calypso [Cousteau's ocean-going research vessel],” he said, his eyes brightening at the memory. “My group at Thomson had developed one of the first underwater television cameras. It was quite amazing back then. Cousteau used it to explore a cargo ship that had sunk 2000 years ago just outside Marseilles.”

At age 26, after one year in Paris, he emigrated to the United States. “I always knew I wanted to come here,” he said. “I saw the movies and wanted to see for myself.” He was certain he would get a job with the Radio Corporation of America or Bell Laboratories; but his arrival in 1954 coincided with the McCarthy hearings and the questioning of research centers about possibly Communist, “un-American” activities. Being a foreigner, he decided to avoid the risks and instead to stall for time by working for his Ph.D.

Under the supervision of professor of electrical engineering John Whinnery, Klüver finished up at Berkeley in just two years and seven months–a speed record for a Ph.D. back then. In 1958, he found employment in the Communication Sciences Division at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J. His days were spent researching backward-wave magnetron amplifiers, linear tubes, and small-signal power conservation theorems. At night, he hung out at artistic events. When Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely was inspired to build a large mechanical sculpture that would ultimately destroy itself (an embodiment of what he thought New York City was doing), he asked Klüver for assistance in finding discarded bicycle wheels. This strange request would forever change Klüver’s life.

‘I want to destroy it,’ said the artist.

Artist Tinguely actually met engineer Klüver in Paris in 1953, and came to New York City in 1960 for his first U.S. gallery show. Impressed by the success of that opening, the Museum of Modern Art invited him to build a sculpture in its outdoor garden, on West 54th Street. Klüver recalled, “They had no idea what they were getting into.”

Nor did he. Technological assistance was not at all what he expected to supply. Involvement by way of navigating the streets of New York City and helping with transportation seemed more likely. “I was the only one of Jean’s friends who had a regular job, so I was the only one with a car,” he said.

It started simply enough. Klüver recalled driving his huge Chevrolet convertible heaped with rusty bicycle wheels collected from the basement of a New Jersey bicycle shop. He and Tinguely pulled over near the museum’s garden, and threw the junk over the fence–which was lower then, he observed.

Little by little, things grew more complicated. Outside the train window, on the way to visit Klüver in New Jersey, Tinguely had seen vast suburban garbage dumps and asked to be driven there. “We went and walked around for hours, loading up all these things he wanted–baby carriages, etc.–all that stench sticking to your clothes. I can still smell it,” Klüver remembered.

“We took all that stuff to the museum, walked right through the front door, continued to the garden, and started building. Tinguely was an amazing structural engineer, no training at all. For him, building it was the easy part. The problem came in how to destroy it.”

The resulting work was entitled Homage to New York [Figure 1]. On 17 March 1960, after a 27-minute performance, it collapsed and burst into flames, just as it was designed to do.

Looking back, Klüver told Spectrum, “Some of the sculpture’s components didn’t work, of course. I wanted to run up and fix some things, but Jean said, ‘Don’t touch.’ He was happy with the result. He liked spectacle; it was his character. He liked to see how people reacted and what happened.”

From that collaboration he learned to listen to the artist and provide him with as many choices as possible. He also learned another important lesson, that is, when to let go. “I knew that I could solve the problems, if I took a day, but the curtain had to go up. Artists still complain that engineers never learn that the curtain must go up.”

As the firemen were dowsing the flames, reporters raced to get their stories to press. The next day’s New York Journal-American headline was “Art Goes Boom.” The media attention sparked by the event was enough to stir the interest of the other artists who had attended. For one, Robert Rauschenberg immediately asked the young engineer to collaborate with him on what would become what art historians now consider one of his most inventive works, Oracle [Figure 2].

The newspaper article also attracted the attention of John Pierce, Klüver’s supervisor in the Bell Labs Communication Sciences Division and now Visiting Professor of Music, Emeritus, at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Said Klüver: “After Homage, Pierce came running in my office. He had no idea what I was doing–we were doing work on Bell Labs time, with Bell Labs equipment, even Bell Labs staff! I thought I was fired. So Pierce comes running in and says, ‘There’s only one thing wrong. Why wasn’t I invited?’ ”

This positive attitude led Klüver to extend his assistance to all the artists who came to him with requests after Homage. Jasper Johns, for one, wanted a neon letter in the middle of a painting with no wires [Figure 3], and Andy Warhol wanted light bulbs to float [Figure 4]. After six years of collaboration between the artists and Klüver, not to mention the growth of public interest, the time seemed ripe for a major exhibition. With the support of Bell Labs, Klüver and a team of over 40 engineers set the stage for “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” and the later launch of E.A.T.

8000 hours for ’9 Evenings’

A music society in Stockholm wanted to present a Festival of Art and Technology in 1966 and asked Klüver to organize a U.S. contribution. Rauschenberg agreed to help, and the two invited their friends to participate. Many of these artists, choreographers, and composers had been developing and presenting avant-garde works, under the title, “Happenings,” in New York City’s Judson Memorial Church, in Washington Square. Klüver had begun to recruit fellow engineers from Bell Laboratories to assist the artists when the Swedish project folded in the summer of 1966. Undaunted, the group continued to develop their large-scale performance art pieces, and decided to present them in Manhattan instead. Incidentally, the facility chosen to host the performances was the 69th Regiment Armory, the same building that had housed the famous 1913 show that introduced modern European art to Americans.

The events were scheduled for October 1966, and during the summer, over 40 engineers were at work on the technology that would bring the artists’ visions to life. As the artists’ desires were hampered by neither practicality nor reality, the engineers rose to their seemingly impossible requests by resorting to developmental technologies. The list of devices used reads like a chronology of engineering achievement.

In the 1969 Spectrum article, editor Lindgren summarized the artists’ unusual demands: “The engineers provided…infrared television for Rauschenberg, direct access to sounds [from] all over New York for Cage (he wanted sounds, too, from outer space), a sound [environment] for [choreographer Steve] Paxton, snowflakes that went upward for [Oyvind] Fahlström, and a proportional control system for [David] Tudor, with which it was possible to modify lights and sounds by the movement of a flashlight over a photocell control panel.”

Some engineers designed systems for use by more than one artist. Klüver and his colleagues contrived “a local-area FM transmitting system used to control lights, sound, and movement of objects at a distance.” Engineer Fred Waldhauer devised a proportional control system for “moving sound around the speakers mounted in the armory and for varying the level of sound in each speaker.” [Figure 5, Figure 6, and Figure 7 show three of these works.]

By the time the events were over, upward of 10 000 people had attended. Most had mixed reactions. Said Klüver, “We had a high-powered public relations team and they got imaginative stories into the press. People came down there expecting to see miracles. But, of course, we had no miracles to perform. They thought they would see people floating in the air and everything. When they got there and saw it, they were bored to death. They had no idea that this was what contemporary art was. But these days, people come up to me on the street and say ‘I was there,’ and tell me how important ’9 Evenings’ was for them.”

While attendance far exceeded what Klüver had anticipated, so, too, did the time bestowed on the project by Bell engineers–over 8000 man-hours, in Klüver’s estimate. Nonetheless, Bell Labs management was still bent on encouraging him. “The number of midnight equipment requisitions was quite large,” he said with a grin. “Years later I asked John Pierce, ‘Why did you let me do all this, get away with it?’ Pierce replied, ‘There was too much energy there. To stop it would have been too destructive.’ ”

For those involved, “9 Evenings” was a launching pad to notoriety in the art world. So much enthusiasm was generated among the artists and engineers working on the project, that Rauschenberg and Klüver immediately scheduled a meeting for artists in December 1966 to announce the formation of E.A.T., and find out how much interest there was in the New York art community in an organization that would foster collaborative efforts between artists and engineers. More than 300 artists attended, and more than 80 of them had immediate requests for technical assistance. The main task facing Klüver and the fledgling organization was to find engineers willing to work with artists. Klüver’s strategy involved talks, lectures, visits to corporate laboratories, and in March 1967, a booth at the annual IEEE convention where artists made a pitch to involve engineers.

“I was scared,” Klüver said. “The amazing thing was that it’s possible for artists and scientists to talk together at all.” Yet talking together and working together dissipated the fear on both sides. Three years later, E.A.T. boasted 4000 members all over the country, including 2000 artists and 2000 engineers, and its Technical Services Matching System put artists with technical requests directly in touch with engineers who could work with them. The responsibilities placed on Klüver were so large that he left Bell Labs in 1968 to run E.A.T. full time.

Now, almost 30 years later, Klüver is delighted by the renewed interest in E.A.T. and “9 Evenings.” Efforts are under way on a $250 000 project to preserve the original 16-mm films of the event and to convert them into videotape (Billy’s love of film is still paying off). Through the use of a more recent medium, the San Jose Museum of Art, in California, is preparing an interactive CD ROM on the history of Art & Technology in the ’60s and ’70s. Projects of this nature have not only loaded Klüver with more responsibilities and commitments, they have compelled him to reexamine, through 71-year-old eyes, what he has learned.

The value is in the collaboration

Though responsible for the merging of such unlike fields, Klüver accepts the fact that this form of art does not appeal to everybody. In a 1966 Life magazine article, he was quoted as saying, “All of the art projects that I have worked on have at least one thing in common; from an engineer’s point of view they are ridiculous.”

But Klüver feels that while the technology needed by the artists might often be “trivial” from the engineers’ point of view, applying their technical knowledge in a new environment and in a new way provided the difficulty and challenge. He loved the excitement of working with the artists, some of whom have come to be known as Pop artists, although this was not the term that Klüver preferred. “I would’ve called them the factualists,” he said, “because that is what they did. They dealt in reality and fact. But factualist is a hard word to say.” Perhaps that is why engineering, the science of turning imagination into fact, played a more than transitory role.

Originally, Klüver believed the engineer should simply work for the artist. “Once I gave a talk,” Klüver remembered, “and made the point that an engineer should just be another tool for the artist. But Bob [Rauschenberg] very specifically said, ‘No! It has to be a collaboration.’ I immediately understood what Bob was saying. The one-to-one collaboration between two people from different fields always holds the possibility of producing something new and different that neither of them could have done alone.”

The sculpture Oracle, the first collaboration between Klüver and Rauschenberg, is considered by many art historians to be one of the late 20th century’s greatest works [again, Fig. 2]. Its permanent home is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and its recent showing as part of a Rauschenberg retrospective in Houston made Klüver think about its history: “It took about three years to finish the first system. It seems like I spent most of my time in endless lines in electronics shops. Two complete systems were built and rejected as technically inadequate, before we finished it in 1965.”

He laughed, “When I would install it in museums over the years, I had to lie on the floor to get it going. You’re trying to solve borderline difficult problems alone, on the floor. You’re not in a lab, you don’t have the tools. And even today, when the value of a piece that started out a couple of hundred dollars is now worth millions, I still face the same situation.”

But Klüver has never hesitated to upgrade Oracle‘s technology so as to preserve the artist’s intentions. This year, he asked an engineer who has worked with E.A.T. since “9 Evenings,” Per Biorn, to design and build a new system for Oracle. “We’ve updated the technology several times. It will be updated to last forever…I hope.”

All things considered, it is probably the art world’s current interest in Oracle–and the historical interest in the early days of Art & Technology by up-and-coming artists–that has Billy Klüver thinking about his legacy, particularly as it relates to maintaining the technology inherent in this type of work. Of great concern to Klüver is what will happen years from now, when the art has outlived the life of the tubes and switches. Will the collaboration between artists and engineers evolve into a collaboration between curators and engineers?

Klüver hopes so. “The museums need to have special curators, engineers who work for the museum to take care of things 10 or 15 years from now. Curators will have to try and understand the technology, and engineers will have to learn how to handle fragile artworks.” The task will not be an easy one on either side.

‘If it works, we’re invisible,’ said the engineer.

The 1969 Spectrum article presented an optimistic view of the future of E.A.T., beginning with the “orchestrating of a large-scale international collaboration for Expo ’70,” the World Exposition in Osaka, Japan [Figure 8]. In the 1970s Klüver, working closely with artist Robert Whitman, oversaw E.A.T. branching out into projects in education and developing countries. More recently, and even with the “9 Evenings” film restoration project, the importance of the E.A.T. organization has waned somewhat.

Today, much of what was once cutting-edge technology is now within easy reach of the artists themselves. In effect, technology itself has lessened the need for collaboration, though not eliminated it entirely. This pleases Klüver immensely. “In the first E.A.T. newsletter,” he remembered, “we said that if we were successful, we would disappear. We would disappear because if we were successful, there would be no need for the functions of E.A.T. in society. It would be perfectly natural for an artist to be able to contact an engineer him or herself.”

E.A.T. (still a nonprofit organization, though with a much less formal structure than in its heyday) still receives some 300 calls per year, but Klüver connects only 25-30 of the artists to the engineers he knows will work with artists. When asked why, Klüver replied that many artists called before they had thought the project through. “If they have made some effort to solve the problem themselves,” he said, “and it gets down to a purely technical issue, where the answer is not available by other means, then I contact an engineer. Otherwise, I figure they’re a kook and I hang up the phone.”

Needless to say, he always answers calls from Rauschenberg, who recently asked if it were possible to paint with colored liquid crystals. It seems he had been commissioned to paint his interpretation of the Apocalypse on a window behind the main altar in a new pilgrimage church near Foggia, Italy, and he wanted the image to be invisible until it was turned on during services.

“I traced the liquid-crystal material to Samsung Korea,” Klüver said. “They kept sending me to the sales department. It was very difficult, even as an engineer, to get through to the engineering department. I did finally get to speak to members of their research group, who considered the idea and reported that the answer was no, liquid crystals are gray and not available in color. A high-ranking Samsung official in the United States called me back several days later, suspicious, saying, ‘What did you really want?’ As I explained the reason for my question, I realized that E.A.T. can still act as a useful intermediary for the artist.”

His role in the art world notwithstanding, Klüver rejects the title of artist, though he is viewed as one by many artists. To this day he expounds the theory first put forward by Rauschenberg: that the true nature of Art & Technology lies in collaboration, not consultation.

“Engineers are not artists, and artists can’t do their own engineering. Artists and engineers are separate individuals, and if they work together, something will come out of it that neither can expect. That’s the quote I want to die with.”

Grumblings from the trade show floor

Internet World ’97, held in December at New York City’s cavernous Jacob Javits Center, proved to be more style than substance, as 50 000 attendees discovered few new developments buried beneath mountains of hype. Many of the 600 exhibitors were start-ups offering their own versions of existing products, but industry giants like Microsoft, IBM, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems were equally lacking in cutting-edge developments. For them it was more like damage control, affirming that this year their existing products would really perform as advertised. The big surprise was Apple Computer’s withdrawal from the event, its second major trade show absence in less than a month. (Apple missed Comdex in November.)

But despite the absence of notable developments and developers, curiosity seekers were out in force. The percentage of nontechnical attendees was so great that it prompted one Javits Center employee to inquire whether this was a trade show or a consumer show. One recurring theme among first-time visitors was the anxiety over corporate America’s dictum to “Get us on the Web.”

The people responsible for doing just that were among those who attended the show’s Webmaster’s Symposium. Some informal polling revealed frustration with the standards bearers for making an already complex, ever-changing medium even harder to produce and maintain.

Overheard at the coffee cart

Almost all the Webmasters queried at the meeting believed a lack of universally adopted standards was the issue of greatest concern. With standards in different phases of acceptance or refusal by different developers, many Webmasters expressed frustration at having to design entire domains to the lowest common denominator–that is, reducing the level of eye-catching content and services to allow access to the greatest number of users and their plain vanilla gear.

The alternatives are either exclusive (barring access to many users) or expensive (replicating the entire site content to provide optimized services based on the user’s equipment).

Surprisingly, only a small minority of those surveyed were concerned with connection speeds, predominantly those involved in commercial ventures (e-commerce was all the rage).

A Webmaster for one retailer said, “Sites with flashy, interesting, and functional content are fine for users with a T-1 connection at work, provided they have the time and permission to use it. Most home users prefer simple, graphically challenged pages that load quickly on their 386 with a 14.4K modem. If our pages take too long to download, we risk losing a sale. On the other hand, if we look primitive, users may interpret that as inexperience and shop elsewhere.”

Most feel the problem will taper off when cable modems–and their speeds of upwards of 200 kb/s–become more prevalent, but others argue that in computer and communications technology, there is no such thing as “fast enough.”

For many, these difficult decisions are compounded by a lack of technical experience. Over three-quarters considered themselves “accidental” Webmasters–mid-level administrators and small business employees with limited technical knowledge who have been told to sort this whole Internet thing out, report back, and be ready to set it up.

A corporate communications manager for a mid-sized engineering firm summed it up best: “We know it’s big, and we know we have to be on it. But we’re not sure why, and we’re not sure how.”

One feeling shared by Webmasters throughout the show was directed vociferously to software developers: please work together. For those in the trenches, the daily struggle to appeal to the greatest number of users, while still serving up the latest services, is stunting the growth of the Web’s capability. All the Webmaster can do is run in place, while industry suppliers try to eliminate each other, the standards consortiums try to buy time, the Government tries to control what it can, and the marketers try to capitalize on the hype.

The year 1997 was when the Internet came to the common man. The growth was staggering, but many Webmasters are beginning to stagger, too.

Removing bugs from the Web

Now that computers’ proximity to each other is growing, so, too, are the risks to system health. Whereas computer viruses often took years to spread worldwide, now, thanks to the Internet, they can migrate between hosts in a matter of hours. Fortunately, the cause of this increased rate of infection is also the means to its cure.

Using human biological parallels, a unit at IBM Corp.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Facility, in Hawthorne, N.Y., has developed and successfully tested what it calls an Immune System for Cyberspace. Invisible to the user, the system automatically detects, removes, and vaccinates against new computer viruses by using the Internet. It works like a mirror of human immunology, only better, since it doesn’t rely on humans having the good sense to protect themselves. (When was the last time you had a tetanus booster?)

Rather than expecting users to retrieve downloadable updates from an anti-virus supplier’s Website, Jeffrey Kephart, a manager in IBM Corp.’s Massively Distributed Systems Group, believes that the most effective way is to remove the human element from the delivery system altogether. “A computer’s immune system should get the updates itself, because people aren’t going to want to do it,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to. Even if it’s just pressing a button, that’s too much.”

When a protected PC’s virus-checking software detects an unknown virus, the system samples it by removing the infected data, attaching it to an innocuous host, and sending it either to the network’s administrator or directly to IBM over the Internet.

If the sample is not already known to IBM, the virus is automatically replicated and analyzed to determine its workings. The cure is then sent back to the administrator, where it is disseminated to the original host and other computers on the same network. In addition, the virus’s signature and vaccine are both added to the master database at IBM, which will ultimately begin updating the immune systems of all its users via the Internet.

At a San Francisco demonstration last October, IBM researchers infected a laptop computer with viruses unknown to its anti-virus software and watched the computer automatically cure itself. Roundtrip time from point of infection to point of cure was an impressive 3-5 minutes, including the file transfer time between San Francisco and Hawthorne, N.Y., the location of IBM’s virus detection unit.

Even with full implementation of an immune system, there will always be new computer viruses, just as there are always new human ones. At the current rate of Internet growth, Kephart believes there exists “a recipe for widespread infiltration of the Internet if you don’t have an immune system. It’s not a panacea, but just a necessary step to keep pace with the virus problem, to just keep it at the nuisance level.”

While no specific product information has been announced, expect the Immune System for Cyberspace to be incorporated into IBM AntiVirus sometime this year.