In Hybrid Practices, essays by established and emerging scholars investigate the rich ecology of practices that typified the era of the Cold War. The volume showcases three projects at the forefront of unprecedented collaboration between the arts and new sectors of industrial society in the 1960s and 70s—Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the Art and Technology Project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (A&T), and the Artist Placement Group (APG) in the UK. The subjects covered include collaborative projects between artists and scientists, commercial ventures and experiments in intermedia, multidisciplinary undertakings, effacing authorship to activate the spectator, suturing gaps between art and government, and remapping the landscape of everyday life in terms of technological mediation. Among the artists discussed in the volume and of interest to a broad public beyond the art world are Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Cage, Hans Haacke, Robert Irwin, John Latham, Fujiko Nakaya, Carolee Schneemann, James Turrell, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman. Prominent engineers and scientists appearing in the book’s pages include Elsa Garmire, Billy Klüver, Frank Malina, Stanley Milgram, and Ed Wortz. This valuable collection aims to introduce readers not only to hybrid work in and as depth, but also to work in and as breadth, across disciplinary practices where the real questions of hybridity are determined.
Hybrid Practices Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s
About the Book
Reviews
"The hybrid practices featured in this collection speak to collaboration and participation, between disciplines and between presenters and audiences. They speak to a fluidity of working in and across scientific, artistic, and performance disciplines."—Leonardo
"...[a] welcome addition to the field of hybrid practices."
—Espace
"Specialists interested in inhabiting a range of situated environments from new points of view will find many rewards in Hybrid Practices."—Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society
"This book. . . . show[s] how interdisciplinarity allowed each community to reflect and find its place in a changing world. . . .[it] is well edited and allows a relevant understanding of all the case studies."—Technology and Culture"An admirable and expansive book—a key resource for scholars and educators interested in the intertwining histories of the aesthetic and the technological during the second half of the twentieth century."—Michael Maizels, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Arkansas, and author of Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath
"A welcome contribution to the study of collaborative practices in art, science, and technology in the postwar period, this volume brings together a strikingly original collection of case studies that recast our understanding of such practices in new and exciting ways."—James Nisbet, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
Table of Contents
Foreword
Saralyn Reece Hardy and Rebecca Blocksome
Introduction: Reassessing Hybrid Practice
David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner
PART I: FALLOUT: CREATIVITY AND INVENTION IN, AS, OR BETWEEN ART, SCIENCE, AND GOVERNMENT
1. Launching “Hybrid Practices” in the 1960s: On the Perils and Promise of Art and Technology / Anne Collins Goodyear
2. Identity, Rhetoric, and Method in the Collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology, the Artist Placement Group, and the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Steven Duval
3. Fallout and Spinoff : Commercializing the Art-Technology Nexus / W. Patrick McCray
4. Beyond Method and without Object: Subject as Inquiry in the Irwin-Wortz Collaboration / Dawna Schuld
5. Monuments to the Period We Live In / Craig Richardson
PART II: AFFECTIVE FEEDBACK: TIME, PLAY, AND CONTAGION AS SYSTEMS OF PARTICIPATION
6. Sounding Snows: Bodily Static and the Politics of Visibility during the Vietnam War / Erica Levin
7. Contagious Creativity: Participatory Engagement in the Magic Theater Exhibition (1968) / Cristina Albu
8. Programming and Reprogramming the Institution: Systems Politics in Hans Haacke’s Photoelectric Viewer-Programmed Coordinate System / John A. Tyson
PART III: THRESHOLDS OF THE VISIBLE: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE EVERYDAY
9. Technologies of Indeterminacy: John Cage Invents / Sandra Skurvida
10. Dramaturgical Devices and Stanley Milgram’s Hybrid Practice / Maya Rae Oppenheimer
11. Prostheses or Technical Extensions: Rereading the Work of Bernd and Hilla Becher / Shepherd Steiner
Supplement: The Hale Experiments: Object-Oriented Ventriloquy during the Cold War
An ESTAR(SER) project by the Prosopopoeia Working Group
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Index