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The Pavilion: Into The 21st Century - A Laboratory for Social Experimentation
Randall Packer
Exploring the esthetics of interactivity, inspired by Billy Klüver's art and technology masterpiece.
Introduction
"Traditionally artists have been acknowledged, along with philosophers and scholars, as individuals, capable of such general thinking: The future of American civilization may be greatly affected by the degree to which they are once again permitted to interact with the society at large." - Barbara Rose[1]
 The Pepsi Pavilion was a seminal work that grew out of the idealism and social turbulence of the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s. A monumental architectural installation originally commissioned by Pepsi-Cola and conceived by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology), over 75 artists and engineers came together to create the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. E.A.T. founder Billy Klüver articulated the vision behind it when he said:
"The initial concern of the artists who designed the [Pepsi] Pavilion was that the quality of the experience of the visitor should involve choice, responsibility, freedom, and participation. The [Pepsi] Pavilion would not tell a story or guide the visitor through a didactic, authoritarian experience. The visitor would be encouraged as an individual to explore the environment and compose his own experience."[2]
Inspired by the Pepsi Pavilion, "The Pavilion: Into The 21st Century" project responds to Klüver's idea of freeing the spectator to make his or her own connections in the experience of the artwork. As Henry David Thoreau poetically intoned, "Obey the spur of the moment ... Let the spurs of countless moments goad us incessantly into life." [3] Here the artist builds a world, without controlling it, in order for the spectator to exist in that world as a willing and equal partner in the formation of her experience, in the shaping of her own reality. In such an environment, art and music function as socially transformative agents, deliberately not imposing pre-conceived patterns of thought which might prevent the viewer or listener from freely experiencing the artwork according to his or her own unique perspective. It is our intent to extend this liberating aspect of avant-garde practice through the use of information technology.
A Pavilion for the 21st Century
The collaborative process by which the [Pepsi] Pavilion was realized was a specifically American experiment in democratic interchange." - Barbara Rose[4]
"The Pavilion: Into The 21st Century" project challenges the potential of the original - a laboratory for social experimentation - through the incorporation of new technologies, engineering methodologies, and artistic strategies. Via the Internet, the online viewer will experience a complex multimedia environment, a virtual space of sound and image. This environment will extend and distribute the multi-user experience of the original Pavilion into virtual, networked space. For artists, who will make new works as part of the project, "Pavilion: Into The 21st Century" will provide a platform for creation, a programmable, interactive "multimedia performance instrument," a laboratory and showcase for media experimentation. This multimedia "instrument" will offer a critical forum for researching and advancing the integration of art, music and science into singular, multi-disciplinary artworks. It will also allow for the consideration of the social implications of emerging forms of interactivity in networked environments.
By bringing viewers together over the Internet into a shared, dynamic, audio/video "space," "The Pavilion: Into The 21st Century" project will generate a provocative form of collective participation. Not only will it encourage viewers to have a more creative, democratic relationship to the digital medium. It will also open opportunities for liberating forms of play between participating individuals. Promoting this kind of playfulness is an important role for art. It helps to devise models for new ways of seeing, new ways of experiencing and being in the world – not only, but including, the virtual one. We are still in the infancy of understanding: what it means to inhabit the space of the network; how we interact socially in that space; and the implications of networked space for encouraging non-hierachical creative, social and political systems. "The Pavilion: Into The 21st Century" project is a continuation and extension of the artistic research and investigation of the original Pepsi Pavilion as a vehicle for understanding the future of collective creativity and its impact on social interaction.
The current phase of the project – led by this author along with Joseph Howard, Optical Engineer at NASA-Goddard Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, Gregory Kuhn, acoustical engineer and installation designer, and Wesley Smith, artist and electrical engineer – involves the creation of a network-based technical system and a scale-model installation (currently dubbed Pavilion 21) inspired by the Pepsi Pavilion. The project has received support from the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is currently in development at American University in Washington, DC. The projected completion of the scale-model installation is early 2005, with a full-scale realization scheduled for 2007.
Historical Roots: Billy Klüver and E.A.T.
"The new interface I will define is one in which the artist makes active use of the inventiveness and skills of an engineer to achieve his purpose. The artist could not complete his intentions without the help of an engineer. The artist incorporates the work of the engineer in the painting or the sculpture or the performance." - Billy Klüver, 1966[5]
"The Pavilion: Into The 21st Century" project finds its roots in the socially transformative period of the 1960s, when artists were concerned with dissolving the barriers between the arts and contemporary life. The Pop Art movement grew out of this concern and brought about revolutionary change in the processes, materials, creation, and experience of art. The very notion of art was challenged and a new role for the viewer emerged - one that became increasingly participatory and interactive. There was a strong conviction that the artist should be brought down from the pedestal, and that art should encourage a more non-hierarchical relationship between viewer, artist, and object.
These changes had a profound influence on Billy Klüver, the Swedish-born scientist, who nearly single-handedly turned the New York art world upside down in the 1960s when he proposed a new role for the engineer in the creation of art. Klüver, drawing inspiration from the Greek root for the word Techne -which defines the practice of art and science as inseparable - suggested that the engineer serve as material for the contemporary artist. As he boldly stated, "I will argue that the use of the engineer by the artist is not only unavoidable but necessary." [6] Klüver set about to claim an active role for the engineer in the exploding New York art world when Pop Art, Happenings, and multimedia performance were emerging on the scene. He embraced the ideals of the time, convinced that the artist should draw ideas and inspiration from evolving socio-cultural issues. He was also influenced by the expanding world of engineering, new media, electronic music and information technology, which emanated from such high-tech media research centers as Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he worked as a laser scientist.
His first collaboration was in 1960 with the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, who had been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create a new work for their sculpture garden. Tinguely turned to Klüver and his assistant Harold Hodges, and together they constructed the infamous "Homage to New York," a self-destructing kinetic sculpture. It was built from found objects and other assorted artifacts of discarded junk, and was timed with electrical triggers to self-detonate over a precise 27-minute time period. At the opening on March 17, 1960, a shocked audience of high society types and local culturati witnessed not only the explosive birth of Pop Art, but the beginning of a form of multimedia experimentation that underscored the 1960s social revolution. As art critic Calvin Tomkins described, "After about twenty minutes it becomes clear that the machine will not perish unaided; firemen's axes finish the job, and 'Homage to New York' returns to the junk piles from which it was born. The nineteen sixties have begun." [7]
Klüver drew inspiration from the Greek word Techne, which defines the practice of art and science as inseparable.
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Following "Homage to New York," Klüver attracted a following of avant-garde artists, composers, and performers, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Merce Cunningham, among others, who sought to incorporate the new media and conspire with engineers such as Klüver to explore the realm of art, music and technology.
By the 1960s, performance artists Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Whitman were exploring new forms that would collectively engage audiences in environments and situations that dissolved traditional distinctions between performer, stage, set, and audience. Paramount in their concern was subverting hierarchical social structures through live performance. According to Whitman, "One of the problems of traditional theater is that you tell somebody what to see, where to sit, what to do, when to come, when to go - I don't think that's acceptable. What one wants to do is make a theatrical situation that can be available at any time."
Klüver participated in many of the experimental performance events that took place in lofts and storefronts of New York City, among them Oldenburg's 1962 "Ray Gun Theater." Oldenburg, who claimed that "theater is the most powerful art form there is because it is the most involving," kept audiences small in an open gallery space to heighten the intimacy of the experience.
From 1960 to 1965, a series of groundbreaking works emerged from Klüver's collaborations in art and technology: "Field Painting" (1964) by Jasper Johns, an oil painting with an embedded, glowing neon letter; "Silver Clouds" (1964) by Andy Warhol, floating sculptures made of helium-inflated mylar; "Oracle" (1965) by Robert Rauschenberg, sound installation of found urban objects with concealed FM radio transmitters; "Variations V' (1965) by John Cage, electronic theater for dancers, live electronic music, projections, and optical sensors (documented in a film by Stan Vanderbeek).
These works laid the foundation for the advancement of new and emerging technologies as integral to the creation of art. "Oracle" and "Variations V" in particular were seminal in the introduction of interactivity. They were among the first artworks to incorporate electronic means to bring about new participatory forms. "Oracle" invited the viewer to control the way in which radio signals were distributed in the space, while "Variations V" enabled dancers to interact in real-time with live electronic sound and slide projections.
In 1966 Klüver organized "9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering," the first major art and technology showcase, which took place at the cavernous 69th Regiment Armory building in New York City (where Duchamp's scandalous "Nude Descending a Staircase" debuted in 1913). The program paired 9 artists, composers and performers together with engineers from Bell Laboratories. This much written about, often heralded, and sometimes criticized event - infamous for its ambitious performance works that didn't always function as planned - generated a critical mass of interest in new technologies in artistic circles in New York and around the country. In the fall of 1966, shortly after the debut of "9 Evenings," Klüver, along with Rauschenberg, performance artist and sculptor Robert Whitman, and engineer Fred Waldhauer, founded E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology), the now legendary art and technology organization, which spawned chapters in major cities throughout the US and served as a catalyst for generating broad adoption of new technologies in the arts.
The Pepsi Pavilion
"An unprecedented structure with unprecedented capabilities for visual, aural, and theatrical experience, the [Pepsi] Pavilion is unlike any other performance arena, in that performers were as entirely absorbed into its shimmering mirrored surface as the audience - their reflections and activities merging with those of the spectators." - Barbara Rose[8]
 The culminating project carried out by E.A.T. was the Pepsi Pavilion. The artists and engineers who created the Pavilion synthesized the tendencies of the 1960s, bringing together the currents of social interaction, collaboration, electronic media, new music, Happenings, performance art, immersive environments, and mind-altering "realities" in this transformative "theater of the future."
The Pepsi Pavilion was first an experiment in collaboration and interaction between the artists, composers and engineers, exploring systems of feedback between aesthetic and technical choices, and the humanization of technological systems. It evoked and celebrated aspirations for heightened, non-hierarchical social dynamics. It was the product of an aesthetics of agency and transformation brought about through the collective participation of the audience, the artists, and the engineers. The Pepsi Pavilion gave visitors the liberty of shaping their own reality from the materials, processes, and structures set in motion by its creators. The central component of this experience was brought about by a huge, 210-degree mirrored dome, 90 feet in diameter, which captured the image of the viewer as a 3-dimensional reflection. The viewer could reach out and virtually touch his own image, walk around his own image, even pass through his own image. The interaction between the viewer and the mirror was the key element in the Pavilion experience: spectators not only interacted with the image, they were the image.
"The quality of the experience of the visitor should involve choice, responsibility, freedom, and participation," said Klüver.
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After receiving the invitation from Pepsi, Klüver assembled a core team of artists, along with Whitman, that included Frosty Myers, David Tudor, and Robert Breer. Together they conceived the key elements of the Pepsi Pavilion: the spherical mirrored dome; a fully programmable surround-sound system that enabled composers to direct sound in various spatial trajectories via thirty-seven speakers arranged in a rhombic grid; handsets held by the viewer emitting pre-recorded "natural" sounds as the audience traversed loop coils installed beneath the floor of the mirrored dome; 800 pound kinetic sculptures (Floats) roamed the terrace outside the Pavilion at a speed of approximately two inches per minute, with tape loops broadcasting sounds and gently deflecting off of unaware spectators; and four towers with powerful xenon lights generating a well-defined beam between each tower, dramatically framing the dome at night.
Klüver's ambition was to create a laboratory environment, encouraging "live programming" that offered opportunity for experimentation, rather than resort to fixed or "dead programming" as he called it, typical of most exposition pavilions. Each week, a new team of artists would be invited to create an entirely new work for the space, passing on knowledge and experience to the succeeding team. This was a dramatic departure from most pavilions, in which a tightly programmed experience was devised to last the duration of the exposition. Klüver felt that involving rotating teams of artists would consistently generate new ideas and produce a more open, experimental approach.
According to Klüver,
"live programming was designed to use the space in an organic way. The hardware ideas were so rich in possibilities that the concept of a continuously changing environment developed organically. A changing group of four artists (composers, dancers, painters, or scientists) were to reside at the Pavilion at all times and determine the activities and programming. The sound and light systems, as well as the floor space, the hand-set system, and the mirror were designed taking into account the demands of this continuously changing environment. The Pavilion became theatre conceived of as a total instrument, using every available technology in which the accumulated experience of all the programmers expanded and enriched the possibilities of the space. The programming and operations of the Pavilion were as important as the design of the hardware."[9]
Additional artists and composers later joined the team, including Gordon Mumma, Lowell Cross, Tony Martin and Fujiko Nakaya, among others, who were responsible for the laser deflection system that responded to audio input, bathing spectators in pulsating streamers of color as they entered the Pavilion's lower Clam Room; a programmable, retractable lighting system generated spectacular blossoming effects in the mirror; and a man-made fog sculpture generated by hundreds of tiny water nozzles enshrouded the exterior dome in a fine mist, interacting with the weather conditions. The sum total of the Pavilion was a fluid, multi-sensory experience of light, sound, touch and movement, constantly changing in response to the viewer's presence and actions, as well as to the natural environment.
[Continued on next page...]
Footnotes
[1] Barbara Rose, "Art as Experience, Environment, Process," in Pavilion, Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose (eds), E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1972.
[2] Billy Klüver, "The Pavilion," in Klüver, Martin, Rose, op. cit.
[3] Henry David Thoreau, A Writer's Journal, edited by Laurence Stapleton, Dover, New York, 1960.
[4] See footnote 1.
[5] Billy Klüver, "Great Northeastern Power Failure," [1966], in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (eds), W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2001
[6] See footnote 1.
[7] Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall, Penguin Books, New York, 1980
[8] Barbara Rose, "Art as Experience, Environment, Process," in Pavilion, Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose (eds), E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1972.
[9] See footnote 1.
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