topics and keywords

"what also would be useful, to see where we're heading to, would be to make a list of the topics/contents each of us is the most interested in working on in the aether9 context.."

Judy (05 March 08)

We might think of a way to honor Billy Kluver. E.A.T. is still an active foundation under the direction of Julie Martin :

Billy Klüver
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Billy Klüver (1927-2004) Johan Wilhelm (Billy) Klüver was born in Monaco, November 13, 1927, and grew up in Sweden. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in Electrical Engineering. He came to the United States in 1954, and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957.

He served as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1957-58.

From 1958 to 1968 he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill. He published numerous technical and scientific papers on, among others, small signal power conservation in electron beams, backward-wave magnetron amplifiers and infra-red lasers. He holds 10 patents.

In the early 1960s, he collaborated with artists on works of art incorporating new technology, including Jean Tinguely on the machine that destroyed itself, Homage to New York, with Robert Rauschenberg on the environmental sound sculpture, Oracle; with Yvonne Rainer on her dance In the House of my Body; with John Cage and Merce Cunningham on Variations V; and with Andy Warhol on Silver Clouds.

He lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad on both art, art and technology, and social issues to be addressed by the technical community; and he has published articles on these subjects. He curated or was curatorial adviser for fourteen major museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

In 1966 Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit service organization for artists and engineers. Since 1968 he served as president of Experiments in Art and Technology.

E.A.T. established a Technical Services Program to provide artists with technical information and assistance by matching them with engineers and scientists who can collaborate with them.

In addition. E.A.T. initiates and administers interdisciplinary projects involving artists with new technology. These projects include: "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" in 1966 where ten artists worked with more than 30 engineers to produce performances incorporating new technology; artist and engineer collaborations to design and program the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70, Osaka Japan; The New York Collection for Stockholm; methods to produce instructional programming for educational television in India, 1969, pilot project at Anand Dairy Cooperative, Baroda, India; Utopia: Q&A, public spaces linked by telex in New York, Ahmedabad, India, Tokyo, and Stockholm, where people could ask people in other countries questions about the future, 1971; pilot program to develop methods for recording indigenous culture in El Salvador 1973; Children and Communication pilot project to use telephone, telex and fax equipment to have children in different parts of New York City communicate with each other, 1972; large screen outdoor television display system for Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1976-1977; collaboration with artists Fujiko Nakaya (1980) and Robert Rauschenberg (1989) to design sets for the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Currently E.A.T. has initiated a film restoration project to restore and edit the archival film material from 9 Evenings into ten films documenting the artists performances.

In 1972 Klüver, Barbara Rose and Julie Martin edited a book Pavilion, that documented the design and construction of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan.

In 1978 he began to work with Julie Martin on a research project on the evolution of the art community in Montparnasse from 1880 to 1930. In 1989 the book Kiki's Paris was published in the United States, and subsequently appeared in France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Japan.

He and Julie Martin have edited and annotated the original English translation of Kiki's Memoir's, published in 1930, but banned by U.S. Customs from the United States. It was issued by Ecco Press in Fall 1996; and in French by Editions Hazan in 1998.

His book, A Day with Picasso, has been published by MIT Press in the fall of 1997, and was previously published by Cantz Verlag in Germany in 1993 and by Editions Hazan in France in 1994 and was published by Hakusuisha in Japan in 1999, and in Korea and Italy in 2000.

In 2001 he produced an exhibition of photo and text panels entitled "The Story of E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, 1960 - 2001 by Billy Klüver." It was first shown in Rome in Summer 1901, then at Sonnabend Gallery in January 2002. The exhibition went to Lafayette College in the spring 2002, then to the Evolution Festival in Leeds, England, and University of Washington, in Seattle. In 2003 it traveled to San Diego State University in San Diego, California and then to a gallery in Santa Maria, California, run by Ardison Phillips who was the artist who managed the Pepsi Pavilion in 1970. From April to June 2003 a Japanese version was shown at a large exhibition at the NTT Intercommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo which also included a number of object/artifacts and documents and E.A.T. posters, as well as works of art that Klüver and E.A.T. were involved in. A similar showing took place in Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden in September 2004.

In 1974 he received the Order of Vasa, from the King of Sweden. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design of the New School for Social Research. In 2002 he was named Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, by the French Government.

Billy Klüver died January 11, 2004.

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Judy (29 Nov 07)

TESLA AND ASPERGER'S

Continued research revealed that I am certainly not the first to suggest that Tesla has Asperger’s. I list specific symptoms that correspond to details about the man that were repeatedly mentioned in Tesla’s lifetime. If we do at some point again use Tesla as a character in scripts, disbelief is usually suspended by the truth in details. An understanding of Asperger’s may be an excellent thing to shape the character.

People with Asperger’s syndrome may stick to inflexible routines or rituals, move in stereotyped and repetitive ways, or preoccupy themselves with parts of objects as opposed to ”˜the big picture’. Tesla would do things like measure the volume of food before he would eat it. He counted his steps when he walked, and calculated the cubical contents of soup plates, coffee cups and pieces of food. All repeated acts or operations had to be divisible by three. In later years, Tesla subsisted solely on a diet of milk and his own preparation of various fresh vegetable juices, which he called 'Factor Actus'.

Language acquisition and use is often atypical. Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance; use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker; auditory perception deficits; unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech; and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm.

Children with AS may have an unusually sophisticated vocabulary at a young age and have been colloquially called "little professors", but have difficulty understanding metaphorical language and tend to use language literally. Individuals with AS appear to have particular weaknesses in areas of non-literal language that include humor, irony, and teasing. They usually understand the cognitive basis of humor but may not enjoy it due to lack of understanding of its intent. In Tesla’s autobio the use of language is very stiff, though alone this would not be significant as English was not his native tongue. However, a repeated anecdote of Tesla tells the story of his being hired by Edison when he came to the US to take on a re-design that was presumed to be unachievable with a promise of $50,000 if he succeeded. When Tesla succeeded he was not given the money and was told that the challenge had been a joke. We have only Teslas’s account of the incident; I find myself wondering what was actually said and misunderstood. Otherwise, Edison’s cruelty is almost unimaginable.

“Some traits that are typical of Asperger's syndrome, such as attention to detail and focused interests, can increase chances of university and career success. Many people with Asperger's seem to be fascinated with technology, and a common career choice is engineering.” I cut and pasted this directly from a MD site and thought of the joke: How can you tell if an engineer is interested in what you are saying? He’ll be looking at your shoes instead of his own.

Lack of social skills and various levels of sensitivity to changes in their environment, as well as hypersensitivity to certain types of stimuli are hallmark symptoms, in addition to exceptional mental visualization functioning. Tesla may well have had a hypersensitivity to light/energy. Several of the books on him mention his dislike of jewelry, especially the pearls earrings that women often wore in those days. Having noticed that (real) pearls refract light oddly when photographed, the reflection seems out of phase, I suspect that Tesla could actually see this about pearls.

“Tesla, at the age of 59, was observed by astonished bystanders to slip on an icy sidewalk, flip over in the air and land on his hands, like a cat.” This quote attributing such ”˜eye to muscle’ control, is so theatrical that I guess it should just be noted.

In common with other AS people, Tesla often slept only two hours per night, sometimes not at all, and designed the most complex devices in his mind, without need for blueprints or experimentation.

People with Asperger's are typically uninterested in following social norms, fads, or conventional thinking. Their preference for rules and honesty may lead them to excel in the classroom and as citizens. This is another observation that somewhat explains Tesla’s feeling about rewards.

It is said that Tesla was a lifelong celibate, which is in keeping with being socially aware but unable to deal with reciprocal interaction. I saw a picture of the perfectly designed cages he had in his room at The Waldorf Hotel where he took care of injured pigeons. His love of birds is a complex topic in itself. I sat in the park opposite my apartment here in NY, looking at many pigeons, and must admit that if you take the time to look closely, they do not actually all look alike. When I first came to the city there were several people in my neighborhood who kept their birds houses on their rooftops (like in “On The Waterfront”). One of Tesla’s studios was 2 blocks north of here. It is likely that his exposure to pigeon keeping dated from exposure to this in the working class neighborhood of Little Italy. That he brought this interest uptown to The Waldorf is curious.

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Manuel (6th October 07)

some inspirational sources/models/examples in the field of cross-media performance:

Arnold Dreyblatt:
"Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933" - Hypertext Opera
"The world premiere took place in 1991 as the finale of the “Inventionen” Festival in Berlin followed by additional performances in West and East Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary."
Memory Arena - site-specific interactive performance installation
www.dreyblatt.net/

The Builders Association:
Super Vision - "A Cross-Media Performance"
SUPER VISION is a collaboration between the New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders Association, a company which exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater, and dbox, a multidisciplinary studio whose work explores the intersection of visual arts and architecture through 3D digital media.
http://www.superv.org/ - http://www.thebuildersassociation.org

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Boris (28th august 07)

some thematic ideas refering to european mythology (because, following Lucy's suggestion, i want to stick a bit more to the "aether" word - in fact we worked on it a lot with the telsa script (see the old aether9 scripts) but due to techical problems never properly performed it. would be justice to have a proper performance around this key-word:

> AETHER obviously. where the gods live.

> SIBYLS
prophetesses that prophesised at certain holly sites in the antiquity.
in late antiquity, sibyls wandered from place to place.

> DIVINATION of destiny

> characters (as sibyls, divinators or ALCHEMISTS)
- Penelope.
πήνη / pếnê (sort of "web")
ὤψ / ốps (eye or face )
The faithfull wife that refuses innumerable marriage offers while Odysseus is away and keeps the household.
- Nikola Tesla
- Tristan Tzara, or his character Mr. Antipyrine http://www.n3krozoft.com/_xxbcf67373.TMP/doc/dada/manifeste1.html
- The Girl Without Hands

> NARCOTICS - divination usually requires some
(by the way, n3krozoft produced a performance with a lot of narcotics: http://www.n3krozoft.com/projects/art/lol/index.html#

> FORUM: like in roman times where the destiny of the city was discussed in the forum, i imagine that we question the DESTINY of the in an aether9 performance.

> The html interface becoming a stage where predictions about destiny are enacted (the worst predictions if possible... the unthinkable predictions, like in tragedies in a way).


random thoughts:

>>> architectural land-scapes >>> discussed in a dada way >>> through the representation of a text (like ancient dramas?) >>> revisit older themes (have nikola tesla interact with the girl whitout hands and with the objects of consumption of hotel pleven & the desert webcams & megapolis webcams >>> forum /// megapolis cameras >>> in the middle, zen, a desert webcam >>> the invisible guest (maybe find some webcams on the mexican borders? >>> then become stalkers of the border?

>>> rehearsals: the html performance page is constantly evolving, and we could add contributions there as practical developpment and experiments to the ongoing scenario creation.
close to chris's proposal (but changing everyday the 8 cells and leavig one empty is a little extreme.)
maybe we could have a couple of html page: one for performance only and a couple for reheasals and experiments (one fucusing on webcams, the oother on text, the other on physical interactions, the other with objects, another with mythology...)

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