Bob Brown and Frank Olvey
are Seattle filmmakers who won national awards for their experimental films
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and were active members of Seattle E.A.T.
Their films were shown internationally and included in multimedia presentations
by the Seattle Opera, Seattle Symphony and Joffrey Ballet. Innovative color
processes in film such as The Tempest (1967) influenced
the work of other artists, among them Doris Chase, Karl Krogstad, and Stan VanDerBeek.
Doris Chase began her career as a painter and
sculptor in Seattle in the early 1950s. In the mid-1960s she began making sculpture
for dance performances and collaborated with dancers, musicians, and filmmakers.
An early member of Seattle E.A.T., she worked with Boeing engineers to create
a computer-animated film in 1970, Circles I, scored
with electronic music by Morton Subotnick. She created one of Seattle’s
first and best-known public sculptures, Changing Forms
(1969, Kerry Park) before moving to New York to join a pioneering community
of video artists in 1972. In New York she became known for her work in video
dance. Chase recently returned to Seattle, where she began a new body of work
in sculpture, including Moon Gates (1999), sited
near the Experience Music Project in Seattle Center.
Gary Ewing, a member of the Portland chapter of
E.A.T., is a Portland lightshow artist, graphic artist, inflatables sculptor,
and all-around artist/inventor. He developed elaborate lightshows characterized
by spontaneous and synchronized montages of colors and patterns, much like being
inside a kaleidoscope. These accompanied performances in San Francisco and Portland
by rock groups such as Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Inspired by the "9 Evenings" film shown at the first E.A.T. meeting
in Portland, he also designed and built inflatable environmental spaces for
his lightshow performances.
Jack Eyerly is a self-taught artist and engineer
who founded the Portland E.A.T. chapter in 1968. He invented an amusement park
ride that operated on the theory of indeterminacy, based on the theories of
John Cage. He invited Cage to see the ride, and was introduced to New York E.A.T.
artists while he installed the ride in New Jersey. He has made a career as a
one-man resource center for artists throughout the region. Eyerly continues
to work as a cultural networker and historian in Portland.
Patricia Failing is a Professor of Art History
at the University of Washington, specializing in modern and contemporary art.
One focus of her teaching is the development of "alternative" and
new media art forms since 1960. She is author of numerous articles, catalogue
essays and reviews for publications such as Art News, Apollo,
American Craft and Chronicle of Higher Education.
She has also published two monographs on contemporary artists,
Doris Chase: Artist in Motion and Howard Kottler:
Face to Face.
William Fetter (1928-2002) was a graphic designer
for Boeing. An early computer graphics pioneer, he was the first to draw a three-dimensional
human figure using a computer. Fetter and LaMar Harrington founded the Seattle
chapter of E.A.T. after a meeting at the Seattle Science Center on June 29,
1968 attended by 65 Oregon and Washington artists and technologists. Soon after,
Fetter left Seattle to work in Los Angeles, where he created the first in-perspective
computer graphics TV commercial. He then moved to Carbondale, Illinois to become
the Southern Illinois University Design Department Chairman, working with Buckminster
Fuller. He moved back to Seattle in the early 1980’s where he was a consultant
until his death in June, 2002.
Rich Gold is an artist, designer, writer, technologist
and cartoonist. He was a co-founder of the League of Automatic Music Composers,
the first network computer music band. He invented the award-winning Little
Computer People program (Activision), the first artificially intelligent human
available for purchase. At Mattel Toys he managed the PowerGlove project. From
1991 to 2001 Gold was a researcher at Xerox PARC, working on the Ubiquitous
Computing Project. In 1992 he set up and managed the PARC Artist in Residence
Program (PAIR) and the Research in Experimental Documents (RED) Group, which
combined art, science, design and engineering to create Evocative Knowledge
Objects. He is currently a principal at the product design company Polaris Road
and at Vision and Strategy, a company that creates visual roadmaps for large
corporations.Also see www.richgold.org.
LaMar Harrington was Associate Director of the
Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington campus in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. She heard about E.A.T. from artists who organized a show about
Happenings for the gallery. She and William Fetter founded the Seattle chapter
of E.A.T. at the Henry Gallery in 1968. Harrington subsequently presented several
individual and group exhibitions featuring artists using new technologies, among
them "Art and Machines: Motion, Light and Sound" (1969), which included
Hans Haacke’s Wind Room. Harrington was director
and chief curator of the Bellevue Art Museum from 1985-1990 and is a well-known
authority on artists working in craft media.
Billy Kluver was a member of technical staff
at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. from 1958 to 1968.
In the early 1960s, he collaborated with artists on works of art incorporating
new technology, including Jean Tinguely, Jasper Johns, Yvonne Rainer,
Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Andy Warhol. In 1966 Kluver recruited
30 Bell Laboratory engineers to work with artists who created an infamous
series of multimedia performances in New York, "9 Evenings: Theater
and Engineering." Inspired by the "9 Evenings" collaborations,
Kluver, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and engineer Fred Waldhauer
founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit service organization
for artists and engineers, in 1967. Since 1968 Kluver has been president
of Experiments in Art and Technology. He is co-editor with Julie Martin
and Barbara Rose of Pavilion (1972) [on EAT
collaborations in the design and programming of the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion
at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan], author of Bibliography
of E.A.T. 1966- 1980 (1980); A Day with Picasso
(1997) and co-author with Julie Martin of Kiki’s
Paris, 1989.
Julie Martin joined the staff of the Experiments
in Art and Technology organization in 1967. Together with Billy Kluver, she
is author of Kiki's Paris, a study of the art community
in Montparnasse from 1880 to 1930. Martin and Kluver have also published a number
of articles and museum catalogue essays on Montparnasse and on artists such
as Man Ray and Chaim Soutine, as well as contemporary artists Robert Rauschenberg,
Robert Breer, and David Tudor. Currently she is working with Billy Kluver on
Art and Artists: 1945-1965, a social history of
international art communities.
Carolyn May is a Seattle artist dedicated to exploring
the integration of leading edge technologies and new forms of media in educational
multimedia, interactive learning and interactive digital media. As executive
producer and senior manager for PBS and Intel's 1998 digital television initiative,
May produced the first enhanced interactive digital broadcast in the U.S., Frank
Lloyd Wright-Poetry of Structure, that accompanied Ken Burns' 1998 Wright
documentary. She was also a producer for the PBS childrens program, Zooboomafoo.
She is a digital media consultant and develops interactive digital projects
that blend storytelling with convergent technology.
Robin Oppenheimer is a nationally recognized media
arts consultant, curator, producer, writer, historian, and educator who has
worked in the media arts field since 1980. She recently consulted with the Seattle
Arts Commission to develop the Arts Resource Network that includes a comprehensive
website for local arts organizations (www.artsresourcenetwork.org). She was
the first Media-Arts-Historian-in-Residence at Bellevue Art Museum. As manager
of the Seattle Art Museum's Open Studio project (1997-2000), Oppenheimer taught
Seattle artists and arts organizations Web production and literacy. She is a
former executive director of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle (1989-95), and
IMAGE Film/Video Center in Atlanta (1984-88) where she also directed the Atlanta
Film & Video Festival.
Don Paulson is a Seattle lightshow artist and
historian who was a member of the Seattle E.A.T. chapter. He worked with a large
group of artists in the late ‘60s to create the "Lux Sit and Dance"
lightshow, which played at many venues in the Seattle area. He is also a painter,
with works in the collections of the Seattle and Anchorage Art Museums, and
corporate and private collections. Paulson is co-author with Roger Simpson of
An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle
(1996), a book about early Seattle gay culture.
David Ross was the first curator of video art in the U.S., and is a widely
respected authority on art and technology. He has served as the Deputy Director
of the Long Beach Museum of Art, Chief Curator at the University Art Museum,
Berkeley, and Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Whitney
Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He contributed
to the E.A.T. milieu in Seattle in the early 1970s, presenting an exhibition
of fifty video artists’ work networked simultaneously in three museums
– the Henry Art Gallery, the Everson Museum of Art and the Cranbrook Academy
of Art Museum .
Alvy Ray Smith co-founded four centers of computer graphics excellence,
Altamira, Pixar, Lucasfilm and New York Tech, before joining Microsoft as its
first Graphics Fellow. He invented, directed, originated, or was otherwise instrumental
in the following: the first full-color paint program, HSV color model; alpha
channel and image sprites; Genesis Demo in Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan; the first Academy-Award winning computer-generated
short, Tin Toy; first major computer-generated Hollywood
film,Toy Story; Academy-Award winning Disney animation
production system CAPS, and the Visible Human Project.. He received two Academy
Awards for his alpha channel concept and digital paint systems. Smith recently
retired to devote time to the emerging art of digital photography. Also see
http://alvyray.com.
Robert Whitman created some of the first and most
significant mixed-media performance works of the late 1950s and early 1960s
in the U.S. A colleague of Lucas Samaras, Allan Kaprow and George Segal, Whitman
played a major role in the development of happenings and event art in New York.
He began incorporating film in his performance work and used projected images
to create "film sculptures" in the early 1960s. He was a co-founder
of E.A.T. who served on the Board of Directors and was instrumental in defining
the organization’s direction and policy. Whitman played a pivotal role
in designing the environment and programming for the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at
Expo '70 in Osaka Japan, perhaps the largest art project of the second half
of the 20th century and E.A.T.’s most conspicuous public showcase. Whitman
has created and produced more than 40 theater pieces worldwide. Recently his
work has been shown at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York and will be
featured at Dia:Beacon, the DIA Art Foundation’s new museum in Beacon,
New York.