Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America
Journal of Visual Culture, 7 (1):
5 - 26 (2008)Abstract
In the wake of the Second World War, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg
and other members of the New York art world helped transform
popular understandings of what it might mean for human beings
to work alongside information machines. This article shows how.
Drawing on archival research, interviews and a survey of secondary
sources, it follows Cage and Rauschenberg from Black Mountain
College into their 1960s collaboration with engineers from Bell
Laboratories in an organization called Experiments in Art and
Technology (or E.A.T.). It then shows how, in 1970, at a Manhattan
mansion packed with electronic media and christened ‘Automation
House’, E.A.T. modeled a fusion of artistic collaboration and
automated labor for the captains of American industry. In the process,
the article concludes, E.A.T. helped set the stage for a re-imagining of
computing in the workplace as a bohemian practice and of computers
as tools for creative, peer-to-peer collaboration.
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