Argument

This essay aims to broaden our understanding of relationships between art, science, and technology during the 1960s by juxtaposing two of the most important, and under-examined, figures of this period, the artist Gyorgy Kepes and the engineer Billy Klüver. While these two are generally linked due to their similarities, a closer examination demonstrates significant differences in their outlook. Comparing the organizations they nurtured, Kepes, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Klüver, Experiments in Art and Technology, provides unique insight into the distinct origins of such organized collaborations between art, science, and technology. It reveals both how the cultural conditions of the 1960s contributed to the perceived need for such agencies and how interactions between art, science, and technology reflected, at once, the culmination of aspirations reaching back to the opening decades of the twentieth century, and a perceived break with the past.

Through a detailed study of the group surrounding Andronov and Grekhova, this article highlights how the configuration of the interaction between techno-science, the State, and production appears to be very specific to the Soviet Union, as compared to the United States or France. We are often used to thinking of the relationship between science and its (social and cultural) context by postulating that the core of scientific content is universal while context is variable. This study suggests rather the opposite. For indeed, the local and specific nature of the scientific culture and tradition of nonlinearity in Gor'kiy must be emphasized. It is the political context of World War II and of the Cold War that forced the unification with Western science, in that they set theoretical targets and technical objectives, and stimulated the manufacture of identical products, such as radar and nuclear devices, automated systems, etc. In short, in the relationship of politics and science that is examined here, it is the politics which created unity and universality.