SciArt Magazine - All Issues December 2015 | Page 32

Renny Pritikin—Chief Curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum
Joe Ferguson: Tell us about Experiments in Art and Technology that happened in New York about 50 years ago.

Renny Pritikin: The main figure was Billy Klüver—

he got his degree from the University of California,
Berkeley. He talked Bell Labs into funding a festival
of art and technology. The idea was they would supply engineers to work with the artists to manifest their
ideas. They did a performance series in ’68 and it became
a landmark in the emergent field of science and digital
artwork. The organization
Experiments in Art and
Technology—E.A.T.—continued for about 15 years.
JF: Why was it important to
revisit Experiments in Art and
Technology?
RP: Our exhibit “NEAT”—
”New Experiments in Art
and Technology”—just
opened and the idea is to
acknowledge that seminal
moment and think about
what has changed in the 50
years since.
A key difference is the big
change from artists needing
engineers from the corporate world to manifest their
work. Artists now have been
trained in programming and
many of them are engineers
themselves—people like Jim
Campbell and Alan Rath
have electrical engineering
degrees. Artists are combinations now of programmers
and aesthetic makers.
Another difference is the
importance of the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 50
years since E.A.T., the Bay Area has been the center for
the most important artists and break–throughs in art
and technology. All these artists have been attracted here
because of the availability of peers and scientists to talk
to and places to buy surplus electronics that you can’t
get anywhere else.
The impact has been controversial—for instance, the
effect on housing and the struggle for non–profit organizations—but there are places like Autodesk, with its
artist–in–residency program which is an artist’s dream—
a stipend, studio, access to state–of–the–art equipment
that they could never get. Dolby is commissioning

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artists for its new building. That is a very generous thing
that positively impacts the Bay Area. I wanted to put on
the table the positive and negative impacts of tech on
the Bay Area.
JF: How has the curatorial process changed since the original
exhibit?
RP: Whenever you talk about tech among curators,
what comes up is the frustrating reality of changing
platforms. You buy something and five years later there
is nothing to attach it to—anything that plugs in creates
that problem. It’s a huge issue for museums.
Another change in the curatorial process is that you used
to have to be there—especially
if something was a performance—to see it. Now, you can
do a great deal of preliminary
research online and you can
pretty much trust what you see.
It’s a tremendous change in the
curatorial practice to be able to
do your research at your desk
and not have to travel all over
the world.
An important change is that
curators have to have a commitment to educating themselves. You don’t want to walk
into a museum or gallery and
have no clue what you’re looking at. You have to read and
visit museums and know artists
and talk to artists. There is a
necessary education for people
who are trained mostly to look
at paintings, prints, and sculptures, to learn how to look at
digital art. From there you have
to be able to write about it, and
help the public appreciate it.
It seems like a battle that
should have been won, but it hasn’t been. The general
public—when it comes to a museum—often has certain
expectations of seeing art that is familiar or they expect
art that’s going to be emotionally moving or emotionally
reassuring and most digital art has different ambitions.
Helping the public understand what the artists are doing—what they’re looking at—gets difficult when you’re
not trained. You don’t have the jargon.
Above: Alan Rath, Voyeur III, 2007. Fiberglass, aluminum, G-10, custom
electronics, LCDs, 79 x 44 x 51 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Hosfelt Gallery,
San Francisco. NEAT: New Experiments in Art and Technology, on view October 15, 2015 through January 17, 2016. The Contemporary Jewish Museum,
San Francisco.

SciArt in America December 2015