(2026-04-30) The Laboratory And The Artist

Lucas Gelfond: The Laboratory and the Artist: Review of John Beck's and Ryan Bishop's Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde In 1966, ten thousand people attended “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” a now-forgotten collaboration between Bell Labs engineers and New York art world heavyweights. The pairings were colorful and bizarre. Robert Rauschenberg, for example, staged a tennis match with rackets wired to cut the lights in the auditorium each time a ball was hit, amplifying the sound of each volley

At their best, these collaborations found unexpected overlaps between art and technology. Researchers and artists hated corporate managerialism; both worked best without top-down direction, preferring to self-organize with talented peers. At their worst, these collaborations produced uninteresting works, poor mishmashes that neither art nor engineering would want to claim.

Artist-engineer collaborations were not always harmonious either: they spoke different languages, didn’t respect the craft of their counterparts, and were plagued by values and status differences.
We see similar challenges today. Tech companies launch creator programs that treat art as purely instrumental, or they present art as a kind of technical demo that functions as advertising.

When every startup is a “neolab” or interested in the “future of creativity,” the history of experiments like 9 Evenings becomes immediately useful.

What does “great work” look like, and how might the arts and sciences contribute to a free, democratic society? John Beck and Ryan Bishop’s Technocrats of the Imagination makes a phenomenal historical companion that offers some answers.

Beck and Bishop trace the intellectual history of both Cold War defense research and midcentury art cultures, finding the unlikely places they align. A central character in their story is John Dewey, an American pragmatist philosopher. Dewey wrote that knowledge could only come from application, experimentation, and practice, rather than being a purely mental process.

Dewey’s influence endowed both technology and art with a hands-on culture.

Dewey’s work shaped Bauhaus ideals to remove artificial distinctions between creativity, skill, and efficient production. Black Mountain College, a focal point for artists and designers like Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Ruth Asawa, and Bucky Fuller, further set these ideas into practice. Residents self-organized, cooking their own meals and working together across disciplines.

Albers held this need to grasp and rediscover knowledge as an ideal

This environment, unburdened by institutional or disciplinary restrictions, would be a perfect place for new art forms to emerge

Scientists shared this spirit, balking at attempts by policymakers or lab bosses to explicitly direct them, believing only self-direction and curiosity-motivated research would lead to true novelty.

Vannevar Bush, director of much World War II scientific research spending, increasingly supported “blue sky” research—fundamental work without a defined goal. In his famed report Science: The Endless Frontier, he wrote that “[scientific progress came from] the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”

Bell Labs, the research wing of telecommunications giant AT&T, had been welcoming artists and musicians to its New Jersey campus since the 1950s. Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Labs, and artist Robert Rauschenberg formalized these exchanges into Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), a nationwide organization that brokered 40 pairings of engineers and artists per month at its peak.

In practice, however, these collaborations often stumbled. The engineers sometimes viewed themselves as artists, sabotaging the collaborative dynamic. The artists frequently confused technical and aesthetic decisions.

Companies weren’t generally interested in art, so Klüver pitched E.A.T. as an organization that could inject creativity into corporate working methods or in functional terms

This ultimately was the largest problem; engineering as a discipline did not value art. Klüver hoped to free engineering from its regimented nature through these collaborations, moving the field out of its subordinate position to science. However, to engineers, the collaborations looked like leisure.

Engineers felt they were treated as technical support, and Klüver consistently had a shortage of interested engineers.

The same tensions flared up in a similar program at LACMA. Curator Maurice Tuchman sought to bind the museum to Southern California defense funding, pairing artists with think tanks like the Hudson Institute and RAND Corporation

This asymmetry persists today. There are many justifications for why artists are upset with AI companies. The simplest, and most descriptive, is that many artists struggle to make ends meet while watching AI researchers get billion-dollar compensation packages.

Much “creative technology” work we see today stumbles, much like the collaborations in Technocrats of the Imagination.

The authors of Technocrats basically conclude that experiments like 9 Evenings “didn’t work.” For me the truth is much more complex. I’m sympathetic to the belief that these particular events didn’t achieve their aims, but there were abundant, successful marriages of art and technology that took place beyond the book during the same time frame

In my view, the best work occurred when engineers and artists were allowed to pursue their specialties rather than work poorly in between them.

Consider hypertext, the system of links and pages now familiar to us through the internet. This work required frontier science, huge leaps in networking, browsers, graphics, and distributed systems. It paired these technical innovations with new forms of writing, like blogs, forums, and social media, and a whole new set of creators whose work was “internet native”.

The same can be said of computer graphics. Animation advanced state of the art hardware (GPUs developed alongside these workflows), software (raytracing, 3D modeling), and art, birthing a generation of technical artists

At studios like Pixar, engineers and artists worked alongside each other, each focusing on their domains of expertise, unified in artifacts that neither could produce alone, like Toy Story.

The most important legacy of the programs Technocrats describes, rather than specific works, is a sense of the value of these collaborations, and a vision for how art and technology build a great free society.

Both disciplines, regrettably, have turned inwards in recent years.

The shared vocabulary of “creativity” across the arts and sciences in these midcentury collaborations appeared distinctly American, distinguishing the country from the obedience, conformity, and unjustness of 20th century authoritarianism. The American project was always one of delicate contradictions.

As the authors of Technocrats argue, the models of exchange in these interdisciplinary programs were, at least in part, “rooted in a conception of how a free society should operate.”

György Kepes, of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, quoted Dewey about his imagination for how they might cooperate: “without [science], man will be the sport and victim of natural forces which he cannot control, [while without art] mankind might become a race of economic monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature and one another, bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation.”