When Robert Rauschenberg
and a buttoned-down Bell Labs engineer named Billy Kluver began
thinking, in the mid-1960s, about ways that people from the world of
technology could help artists make art, Mr. Kluver surveyed the mighty
gulf between the two groups and almost thought better of the idea. “I
was scared,” he said once in an interview. “The amazing thing was that
it’s possible for artists and scientists to talk together at all.”
Nearly half a century after that influential experiment, one in the same spirit, though crazily compressed into a single day, was taking place on Friday in a chilly loft office on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. An artist and a technical whiz sat together at a long table, their faces made silvery by the glow from their laptops — the only tools they had brought, besides their digital cameras. Anyone unfamiliar with the pair — Evan Roth, a kind of Web-centric graffiti artist, and Matt Mullenweg, a creator of the popular blogging platform WordPress — would have had to listen a long time to figure out which one came from which world. They free-associated at Web speed, their conversation sprinkled with things like hex values, detection algorithms and executable code.
(Sent to ID by Krista Bard........ thanks Krista)
To read the full, original article click on this link: New Museum Merges Artistic and Tech Brains - NYTimes.com
Author: RANDY KENNEDY
