“The fundamental thing is what the artist wants to do, and then, finding the technology to make it possible. For example, Bob [Robert] Whitman couldn’t care less which technology he used, but in some way he understood that through it, he could achieve what he wanted, and that he could work with an engineer to make it happen,” said Julia Martin at a 2013 conference. She was talking about one of the keys to the revolutionary movement that in the mid-1960s saw artists and engineers work together at Bell Telephone Laboratories with the simple, but terribly audacious, goal of seeing what they could come up with. It was called Experiments in Art and Technology. Probably its best-known results were the works presented in October 1967 by 10 artists (including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Lucinda Childs) after months of working with some 30 engineers. Over the course of nine presentations, more than 10,000 people came to the temporary theater erected at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory to see performance art made with appliances, dancers gliding atop robots, and even sound itself, pulsing around them.

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