Artsci collaborations began in the vicinity of Fourth Avenue and East Tenth Street in the 1960s (pp. 33-54). This is where I am standing a half century later.
At the time it was “a dilapidated area full of run-down tenements. It was Picasso’s Montmartre transported to New York. [It] quickly became the new Bohemia, the locus of the avant-garde, with happenings, impromptu jazz sessions, poetry readings, performance art, and discussions on just about anything and everything, including emerging styles of art and philosophies” (p.33). The area was the haunt of Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, Jean Tinguely and John Cage, among others. Highly sophisticated electrical equipment had become available which artists were eager to use. But how? Luckily on hand was a most unusual scientist – Billy Klüver whose day job was at Bell Labs. At night he moved between the worlds of art and science sparking collaborations.
[Note: Page numbers refer to pages in the book.]