Reviewed by:

• Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde by John Beck and Ryan Bishop
• W. Patrick McCray (bio)

Fifty years ago, the art world experienced an invigorating wave of projects, programs, and exhibitions connecting engineers, artists, and corporate patrons. Since then, many researchers, mostly art historians and “new media” scholars, but also historians of technology, have explored this diverse array of creative collaborations. John Beck and Ryan Bishop’s Technocrats of the Imagination (they are professors of modern literature and [End Page 986] global arts, respectively) gives a new perspective on this union of art and technology and its implications for similar initiatives underway today.

Few of the artists, curators, and engineers I have encountered in archival collections or in-person interviews would categorize themselves as “technocrats” in the traditional use of the term. Instead, they adopted new artistic media partly to humanize technology that many saw as increasingly alienating, autonomous, and even malevolent.

Beck and Bishop center their account around several large-scale art-and-technology initiatives in the United States in the mid-1960s. These include the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, which artist Gyorgy Kepes launched, the Art and Technology Program curator Maurice Tuchman started at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as the influential group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which operated out of New York City.

Many charismatic individuals championed the art-and-technology movement. What is fascinating is the plurality of strategies they adopted to advance the merger of fine art and technology within the “broader cultural climate of mid-century corporate liberalism” (p. 2). Beck and Bishop focus part of their book on Billy Klüver, the co-founder of E.A.T., who was also an accomplished electrical engineer. Unfortunately, their goal of making broad appraisals about “the military-industrial state” and “neo-liberal orthodoxy” tends to flatten such fascinating historical actors. We don’t encounter Klüver until he’s already a thirty-year-old engineer at Bell Labs. This misses how he cultivated a deep interest in the arts, his fascination with experimental cinema while a student in Stockholm, or his early friendships with future curator Pontus Hultén and artists Jean Tinguely or Öyvind Fahlström. As Klüver wrote in his personal papers, his mental template for how to link artists and engineers was already well in place before he started at Bell Labs. I found it hard to accept the claim, moreover, that Klüver’s strategy “remained an individualistic one” (p. 105). For two years, E.A.T. collaborated with PepsiCo to build a pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka. This enterprise required scores of engineers, technicians, and artists (as well as $1.2 million from Pepsi), making it the art world’s analog of Big Science.

Any book that covers such a wide swath of territory might be excused for a few errors. Some are minor: John R. Pierce did not supervise the transistor’s invention and Jerome Wiesner did not create MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, for example. Others, however, trip up the authors’ argument. MIT’s Media Lab did not open its doors in 1980 (the claim appears twice on p. 74) but was dedicated five years later. This becomes an issue as the authors situate the Media Lab’s compromised academic mission with the increased commercialization of university research vis-à-vis the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.

This latter example suggests ways that historical narrative is sometimes sublimated to support authors’ social critiques of market-driven ideologies. [End Page 987] And one can ask how these apply outside the United States. The art-and-technology movement was decidedly international, with activity across Europe as well as parts of Asia and South America. Moreover, artists like Gustav Metzger, Hans Haacke, and Carolee Schneemann challenged militarism and corporatism.

For all this book’s references to markets and neoliberalism, the authors do not detail the art-and-technology movement’s finances. This seems...

审核人：

• 想象力的技术专家：约翰·贝克和瑞安·毕晓普的艺术，技术和军事工业先锋派
• W.帕特里克·麦克雷（生物）

五十年前，艺术界经历了由工程师，艺术家和企业赞助者组成的活跃项目，计划和展览。从那时起，许多研究人员，包括艺术史学家和“新媒体”学者，以及技术史学家，都探索了各种各样的创造性合作。约翰·贝克（John Beck）和瑞安·毕晓普（Ryan Bishop）的“想象力技术专家”（分别是现代文学教授和[End Page 986]全球艺术教授）对这种艺术与技术的结合及其对当今正在进行的类似倡议的影响给出了新的观点。

我在档案馆藏或面对面采访中遇到的艺术家，策展人和工程师中，很少有人会在传统用语中将自己归类为“技术官僚”。取而代之的是，他们采用了新的艺术媒体，部分是为了使技术变得人性化，许多人认为技术日趋疏远，自治甚至恶意。

贝克（Beck）和毕晓普（Bishop）围绕1960年代中期美国的几项大型艺术和技术计划发表了自己的看法。其中包括由艺术家Gyorgy Kepes发起的麻省理工学院高级视觉研究中心，艺术和技术计划策展人莫里斯·图赫曼（Maurice Tuchman）在洛杉矶县艺术博物馆成立，以及颇具影响力的艺术与技术小组（EAT），在纽约市以外运营。

许多有魅力的人拥护艺术和技术运动。令人着迷的是，他们在“本世纪中叶公司自由主义的更广泛的文化氛围”（p。2）中采用了多种策略来促进美术与技术的融合。贝克和毕晓普将书中的部分重点放在了EAT的联合创始人BillyKlüver的身上，他也是一位经验丰富的电气工程师。不幸的是，他们对“军工国家”和“新自由主义正统派”进行广泛评估的目标趋向于使这种引人入胜的历史人物趋于扁平化。直到Klüver已经是贝尔实验室的30岁工程师之后，我们才会遇到他。这错过了他如何对艺术产生浓厚的兴趣，以及他在斯德哥尔摩读书时对实验电影的迷恋，或他与未来策展人PontusHultén和艺术家Jean Tinguely或ÖyvindFahlström的早期友谊。正如Klüver在他的个人论文中所写的那样，在他进入贝尔实验室之前，他关于如何联系艺术家和工程师的思维模板已经很成熟。此外，我发现很难接受这样的说法，即克鲁维尔的策略“仍然是个人主义”（第105页）。两年来，EAT与百事可乐合作在大阪为70世博会建造了一个展馆。这家企业需要数十名工程师，技术人员和艺术家（以及百事可乐公司提供的120万美元），使其成为艺术界与大科学类似的产品。此外，克鲁维尔的策略“仍然是个人主义”（第105页）。两年来，EAT与百事可乐合作在大阪为70世博会建造了一个展馆。这家企业需要数十名工程师，技术人员和艺术家（以及百事可乐公司提供的120万美元），使其成为艺术界与大科学类似的产品。此外，克鲁维尔的策略“仍然是个人主义”（第105页）。两年来，EAT与百事可乐合作在大阪为70世博会建造了一个展馆。这家企业需要数十名工程师，技术人员和艺术家（以及百事可乐公司提供的120万美元），使其成为艺术界与大科学类似的产品。

任何涵盖如此广泛领域的书都可能因一些错误而被原谅。有一些是次要的：例如，约翰·R·皮尔斯（John R. Pierce）没有监督晶体管的发明，杰罗姆·维斯纳（Jerome Wiesner）没有创建麻省理工学院的辐射实验室。然而，其他人则不赞成作者的观点。麻省理工学院的媒体实验室在1980年没有对外开放（该索赔在第74页上出现了两次），但五年后投入了专门研究。这是一个问题，因为与1980年通过的《拜德-多尔法案》（Bayh-Dole Act）相比，随着大学研究的商业化程度提高，作者将媒体实验室的妥协的学术定位摆在了位。

后一个例子说明了有时将历史叙事升华以支持作者对市场驱动意识形态的社会批判的方式。[结束页987]有人可以问这些在美国以外的地方如何适用。艺术和技术运动无疑是国际性的，活动遍及欧洲以及亚洲和南美的部分地区。此外，像古斯塔夫·梅茨格（Gustav Metzger），汉斯·哈克（Hans Haacke）和卡洛里·施尼曼（Carolee Schneemann）这样的艺术家挑战了军国主义和社团主义。

对于本书中所有关于市场和新自由主义的参考，作者均未详细说明艺术和技术运动的财务状况。好像...