Billy Klüver
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Billy Klüver (1927-2004) Johan Wilhelm (Billy) Klüver was born in Monaco, November 13, 1927, and grew up in Sweden. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in Electrical Engineering. He came to the United States in 1954, and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957.
He served as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1957-58.
From 1958 to 1968 he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill. He published numerous technical and scientific papers on, among others, small signal power conservation in electron beams, backward-wave magnetron amplifiers and infra-red lasers. He holds 10 patents.
In the early 1960s, he collaborated with artists on works of art incorporating new technology, including Jean Tinguely on the machine that destroyed itself, Homage to New York, with Robert Rauschenberg on the environmental sound sculpture, Oracle; with Yvonne Rainer on her dance In the House of my Body; with John Cage and Merce Cunningham on Variations V; and with Andy Warhol on Silver Clouds.
He lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad on both art, art and technology, and social issues to be addressed by the technical community; and he has published articles on these subjects. He curated or was curatorial adviser for fourteen major museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe.
In 1966 Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit service organization for artists and engineers. Since 1968 he served as president of Experiments in Art and Technology.
E.A.T. established a Technical Services Program to provide artists with technical information and assistance by matching them with engineers and scientists who can collaborate with them.
In addition. E.A.T. initiates and administers interdisciplinary projects involving artists with new technology. These projects include: "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" in 1966 where ten artists worked with more than 30 engineers to produce performances incorporating new technology; artist and engineer collaborations to design and program the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70, Osaka Japan; The New York Collection for Stockholm; methods to produce instructional programming for educational television in India, 1969, pilot project at Anand Dairy Cooperative, Baroda, India; Utopia: Q&A, public spaces linked by telex in New York, Ahmedabad, India, Tokyo, and Stockholm, where people could ask people in other countries questions about the future, 1971; pilot program to develop methods for recording indigenous culture in El Salvador 1973; Children and Communication pilot project to use telephone, telex and fax equipment to have children in different parts of New York City communicate with each other, 1972; large screen outdoor television display system for Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1976-1977; collaboration with artists Fujiko Nakaya (1980) and Robert Rauschenberg (1989) to design sets for the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Currently E.A.T. has initiated a film restoration project to restore and edit the archival film material from 9 Evenings into ten films documenting the artists performances.
In 1972 Klüver, Barbara Rose and Julie Martin edited a book Pavilion, that documented the design and construction of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan.
In 1978 he began to work with Julie Martin on a research project on the evolution of the art community in Montparnasse from 1880 to 1930. In 1989 the book Kiki's Paris was published in the United States, and subsequently appeared in France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Japan. Kiki was the pseudonym of Alice Prin.
He and Julie Martin have edited and annotated the original English translation of Kiki's Memoirs, published in 1930, but banned by U.S. Customs from the United States. It was issued by Ecco Press in Fall 1996; and in French by Editions Hazan in 1998.
His book, A Day with Picasso, has been published by MIT Press in the fall of 1997, and was previously published by Cantz Verlag in Germany in 1993 and by Editions Hazan in France in 1994 and was published by Hakusuisha in Japan in 1999, and in Korea and Italy in 2000.
In 2001 he produced an exhibition of photo and text panels entitled "The Story of E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, 1960 - 2001 by Billy Klüver." It was first shown in Rome in Summer 1901, then at Sonnabend Gallery in January 2002. The exhibition went to Lafayette College in the spring 2002, then to the Evolution Festival in Leeds, England, and University of Washington, in Seattle. In 2003 it traveled to San Diego State University in San Diego, California and then to a gallery in Santa Maria, California, run by Ardison Phillips who was the artist who managed the Pepsi Pavilion in 1970. From April to June 2003 a Japanese version was shown at a large exhibition at the NTT Intercommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo which also included a number of object/artifacts and documents and E.A.T. posters, as well as works of art that Klüver and E.A.T. were involved in. A similar showing took place in Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden in September 2004.
In 1974 he received the Order of Vasa, from the King of Sweden. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design of the New School for Social Research. In 2002 he was named Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, by the French Government.
Billy Klüver died January 11, 2004.
