Journal of Visual Culture
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Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America
Fred Turner
Journal of Visual Culture 2008; 7; 5
DOI: 10.1177/1470412907087201
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journal of visual culture

Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative
Labor in Cold War America
Fred Turner
Abstract

In the wake of the Second World War, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg
and other members of the New York art world helped transform
popular understandings of what it might mean for human beings
to work alongside information machines. This article shows how.
Drawing on archival research, interviews and a survey of secondary
sources, it follows Cage and Rauschenberg from Black MountainCollege into their 1960s collaboration with engineers from Bell
Laboratories in an organization called Experiments in Art andTechnology (or E.A.T.). It then shows how, in 1970, at a Manhattan
mansion packed with electronic media and christened ‘Automation
House’, E.A.T. modeled a fusion of artistic collaboration andautomated labor for the captains of American industry. In the process,the article concludes, E.A.T. helped set the stage for a re-imagining ofcomputing in the workplace as a bohemian practice and of computers
as tools for creative, peer-to-peer collaboration.
Keywords

art automation Billy Klüver Experiments in Art and Technology
John Cage Robert Rauschenberg
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1952 was a watershed year in human–machine relations, though it has rarely
been recognized as such. In the business world, 1952 was the year that
corporate consultant John Diebold published his book Automation andintroduced the title word into the public lexicon (Diebold, 1952; Ceruzzi,
1998: 32).1 Communication and control technologies, he wrote, weretransforming the world of labor. Increasingly, all could see that factories
were not simply sites of manufacturing; they were ‘systems’ – recursive, selfjournal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]
Copyright © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)Vol 7(1): 5–26 [1470-4129(200804)7:1]10.1177/1470412907087201

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journal of visual culture 7(1)monitoring ensembles of human and machine actors, working in concert
toward the production of goods. Human and machine in turn resembled one
another: both processed information, both performed work, and both were
to be watched over by a hierarchy of executive experts. For Diebold, thisresemblance promised greater efficiency in manufacturing but, for much of
the public, it provoked a quiet terror. In Congressional hearings, in thesmoking rooms of labor halls and in the pages of women’s magazines, theautomated factory soon became an emblem of a mechanistic, hierarchicalsociety (Bix, 2000: 237–75). At the heart of that society lay the possibility ofphysical replacement and psychological fragmentation: computers would do
the analytic work of all but the highest-level managers and what managers
were left would become ever-more machine-like in the way they did theirjobs. The factory itself would become a shell, hollowed of meaning, andmachine-based labor – especially information-machine-based labor – would
dehumanize all those who undertook it.
Yet, even as pundits and labor leaders were decrying the potential consequences of automation, a series of avant-garde artists were transforming thetheories of subjectivity on which visions of the automated factory depended.
1952 was also the year that John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and half a dozen
compatriots at Black Mountain College staged what has since been recognized as the first Happening. What actually happened at the event remains insome dispute, but the usually reliable Calvin Tomkins has described agathering in the Black Mountain dining room after dinner, during which
Cage delivered a lecture from a ladder, Merce Cunningham danced throughthe audience trailed by a dog, David Tudor played the piano, Charles Olson
and M.C. Richards read poetry, and movies and still photographs flickered
across the surfaces of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. When the activity
ended, the participants picked up a series of tea cups that had been set onclusters of chairs and walked away.
On the face of it, this evening would seem to have nothing to do withcomputers, automation and the factory floor. And, to date, scholars have infact analyzed Happenings and the automation debates within two very
separate fields: the history of art and the history of technology, respectively.
Yet, in this case, the history of artistic practice and the history of theintegration of computing into everyday life need to be seen as entwined. The
automation debates and the Happening at Black Mountain grew out of aremarkably similar understanding of human subjectivity. Artists such as Cage
and Rauschenberg each viewed themselves and their creations as elements insocio-technical production systems – systems that had to be automated tofunction properly. In the postwar years, these artists and others around themtransformed the erasure of self, so feared by opponents of businessautomation, into the basis of a new form of artistic agency and a new,collaborative social style specifically opposed to the hierarchies of theautomated factory – an agency and a style that I will call ‘Romantic
automatism’. Then, in a series of performances at the end of the 1960s, Cage,
Rauschenberg and others presented this transformed subjectivity to theleaders of American industry and American labor – the same leaders who had

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Turner Romantic Automatism

long debated the consequences of automation. In doing this, they offeredthose leaders a new ideological framework in which they could imagine
themselves as creative agents and their factories not simply as sites of
production, but as spaces for bohemian collaboration. In this way, Cage,
Rauschenberg and others served as key intermediaries between the technicaland artistic worlds, simultaneously embracing and rewriting the new formsof human–machine relations emerging around them.

The Automation Debates
As a material practice, postwar automation emerged as the product of
extraordinary changes in the organization of manufacturing and in
information technology. As Amy Bix (2000) has pointed out, wartimepressures on manufacturers to produce weapons and supplies led many to
try to make labor-saving technological changes in their factories (pp. 237–8).
These changes frequently involved replacing human beings with ensembles
of machinery and control devices that, together, performed work with little
or no direct human intervention. By the end of the war, business leaders had
begun to imagine factories in which, as the editors of Fortune magazine put
it, they would manage ‘Machines without Men’ (Fortune, November 1946:
165–6, 92–204). These new factories would not only cost less to run; theywould also do for America’s burgeoning consumer society what industry had
recently done for its army. As manufacturers had lately outfitted the military
with weapons for a war on fascism, so now they would equip consumers withnew weapons in a war for personal satisfaction, leisure and self-fulfillment.
In the early 1950s, executives who had celebrated the automated factory
encountered a new technology with which to control it: the computer. In theyears just after the war, digital computers were little more than massive
calculating devices (Ceruzzi, 1998: 1). The first had been developed during
the war to help calculate firing tables for the US Army and most were stillused for military purposes (p. 15; see also Yates, 1989, 2005). In 1951,
UNIVAC shipped its first mainframe to the United States Census Bureau andcomputers began to enter the civilian workplace. Over the next five years,
computers became ubiquitous features of a wide variety of industries,
including life insurance, steel manufacturing, and electricity production(Ceruzzi, 1998: 28). By 1955, businesses were buying more than $6.5 billion
worth of computer equipment (p. 57). In 1961, The Nation magazine
reported that more than 10,000 computers had been installed in businesses
that year alone (Buckingham, 1962: 10–11). By the mid-1960s, computers had
replaced legions of typists and file clerks and had become the central
processing agents for banks, airlines, and other firms whose livelihoods
depended on keeping track of information (Ceruzzi, 1998: 47).
This first, massive wave of computerization coincided with a rise in
unemployment in what was otherwise a booming economy. In the early
1950s, national rates of unemployment had hovered between 2 and 4 per
cent; between 1957 and 1961, the national average rose to 5.8 per cent (Bix,

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8journal of visual culture 7(1)2000: 254).2 In 1961, some 5.5 million people were out of work – more thanat any time since before the war (p. 257). Yet, between 1949 and 1959,
median family incomes had surged by 42.5 per cent (Levy, 1988: 47).
According to many commentators, automation was to blame for thisdiscrepancy. In a 1962 press conference, President John F. Kennedy made thepoint to the nation:
The major domestic challenge of the Sixties is to maintain full
employment at a time when automation is replacing men. It is a factthat we have to find over a ten-year period 25,000 new jobs every week
to take care of those displaced by machines and those who are coming
to the labor market. (quoted in Lee, 2004: 110)
While some analysts challenged Kennedy, arguing that in fact computerscreated jobs, much of the popular press agreed with the headline writers at
Newsweek that Americans were living at a moment at which ‘Machines
Replace Men . . .’ (Newsweek, 19 June 1961: 78–80).
Given the extraordinarily complex ways in which computers have since
become integrated into everyday life, the claims that machines would takethe place of human beings seem almost quaint. Yet, within them, we can
glimpse a configuration of the relationship between human, machine and theidea of labor that carried a great deal of symbolic weight in the postwar years
and that haunts discussions of digitized labor still. This configuration can beseen in its most garish form in Edmund C. Berkeley’s 1949 bestseller, Giant
Brains, Or Machines That Think. The book describes a series of calculating
devices, ranging from punch card machines to the massive militarycomputers of the Second World War. In each case, Berkeley aims to show thatthe machines are functionally much like human beings. To make his case,Berkeley (1949) describes an imaginary ‘mechanical brain’ that he calls‘Simon’ (pp. 22–41). The machine looks vaguely humanoid – it consists of abox with two slots on top (which Berkeley calls ‘ears’), two light bulbs infront (‘eyes’), and pieces of punched paper carrying information that will be
fed through Simon’s ear-slots into the realm of calculation, reason andmemory inside the box. When Simon has worked through the answers to
problems posed to him on the tapes, his light-bulb eyes ‘wink answers’ to hisinterrogators (p. 23).
From the point of view of human–machine labor, Simon is a threat: because
the machine fundamentally resembles a human being, Berkeley suggests, it
can replace human actors in a variety of settings. The fear of such replacement cycled through the popular press across the 1950s and well into the
1960s, and soon became attached to digital computers. In its earliest
incarnations, the notion of a human-like machine conjured up images ofmechanical, goose-stepping Nazis and fears that, in the Cold War, Americans
might adopt their former enemy’s unthinking ways. As Berkeley pointed out,
by 1949 the military was using computers to manage weapons systems andplan for nuclear conflict. Perhaps, he implied, our machines might take us
over, might make our leaders into proto-fascists, and our people into slaves.

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Turner Romantic Automatism

These fears lingered well into the 1960s. And as they did, they migrated,
finding a new home in the economic landscape. For many, the same
automated factories that promised to dispense consumer goods in untold
abundance threatened to drive men from the factory floor and into lives oflassitude at home. If the robots of the factory were to be Übermenschen, themen they replaced would find themselves defeated, emasculated, and sent
humbly home. By 1963, as unemployment rose across the country, McCall’s
magazine was asking its largely female readership, ‘When Will Your Husband
Be Obsolete?’ (Diebold and Cahn, 1963: 64, quoted in Bix, 2000: 262).
Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Berkeley’s vision of a world ruledby giant electro-mechanical brains dominated press reports andCongressional hearings alike. Historian Paul Edwards (1996) has described
this vision as a feature of ‘cyborg discourse’ – a reading of the human mind
as an information processor that pervaded the social and psychologicalsciences and popular press throughout the Cold War (p. xiii, 147–73). As
Edwards has shown, cyborg discourse grew out of MIT mathematician
Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics (1950: 179–90). Only four years before John
Diebold published Automation, Wiener had published his own Cybernetics,
Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. In thatvolume, and in a very popular 1950 follow-up entitled The Human Use of
Human Beings, Wiener suggested that at heart, individual men, machines,
animals, and even society as a whole, could be thought of as information
systems.3 Though they might appear to be singular in their ambitions andtotal in their self-control, human beings and the social and mechanicalsystems within which they lived were, in fact, probabilistic entities, whose
behavior was shaped by the chances they encountered and by the ways inwhich their bodies, biological or electro-mechanical, allowed them to learn
from those chances.
The intellectual roots of Wiener’s cybernetics run far deeper than I can dig
here, but for the purposes of making sense of the otherwise less-thanintuitive links between the automation debates and the art worlds ofRauschenberg and Cage, cybernetics’ debt to physics is particularly
important. In his preface to The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener(1950) argued that ‘at its core’, cybernetics partook of the probabilistic
worldview that overtook physics around the turn of the century (p. 12). If the
Newtonian universe had seemed to run like clockwork, the 20th-century
world hovered on the edge of chaos. For several decades now, he wrote,
human beings had known that they lived in a ‘probabilistic universe’, one inwhich ‘chance has been admitted, not merely as a mathematical tool forphysics, but as part of its warp and weft’ (p. 11). For Wiener, as for other
Americans in the postwar years, chance was more than a physical property;
it was also a symbol of the psychological and social suffering wrought by thewar. Moreover, the forces of chance could be found swirling equally within
the psyche of the individual, the natural environment, and the social
universe. As Wiener put it: ‘This recognition of an element of incomplete
determinism, almost an irrationality in the world is in a certain way parallel
to Freud’s admission of a deep irrational component in human conduct and

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10journal of visual culture 7(1)thought’ (p. 11). Like many of his readers in the late 1940s, Wiener seemed
to believe that irrationality had already broken through the social order toproduce fascism and war; harnessed to the laws of physics and the atomic
weapons programs of the Cold War, it threatened to break through yet again.
Thanks largely to Wiener, writers like Berkeley could see humans andinformation machines as functionally equivalent managers of otherwise
chaotic, probabilistic systems. Information itself, as defined by Wiener’scontemporaries Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, was simply order amid
random noise; to compute in the postwar era was in many ways to find andmaintain order in an otherwise entropic world (Shannon and Weaver, 1949).
At the same time though, in the Cold War context, the human struggle tocontain the psychological and social forces of chaos threatened to turn
humans into machines in their own right. On the battleground that was theautomated factory, human beings might fall prey to the predations ofmechanical others – machines possessed of a seeming fanaticism for orderthat conjured up the Nazi armies of propaganda. Managers in turn might
become Dr. Strangeloves, fusing the control afforded by the newtechnologies with a deeply irrational love of power. Well into the 1960s, theautomation debates left little room for compromise: when it came tomachine-based labor, humans would become machine-like managers, or theywould simply be replaced.

Romantic Automatism and Avant-Garde Art
During those same years, however, abstract expressionist painters, Black
Mountain College students and faculty, and later, the makers of Happenings
and new dances in lower Manhattan, were turning to forms of selfautomation with an eye, early on, to liberating otherwise inaccessible partsof themselves, and later, to establishing explicitly democratic ensembles ofpeople and things. In roughly the same years that the corporate world cameto associate automation with bureaucracy and the erasure of individual
agency, artists such as Jackson Pollock, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg
developed new, essentially Romantic varieties of automated experience.
Within art historical accounts, Cage and Rauschenberg are often depicted as
artists dedicated to overthrowing the solitary, emotive, and in that sense,
Romantic sensibility of artists like Pollock and to replacing it with a focus oncollectives, systems and group experience (Jones, 1993: 628–65; Roth, 1977:
46–53). While there is certainly a great deal of truth to this story, when it isset against the automation debates of the time and retold in light of theprobabilistic worldview that underlay them, continuities also emerge. If theautomation debates of the corporate world envisioned automation as an antihuman force, Pollock, Cage and Rauschenberg can be seen to havedeveloped deeply congruent theories and practices of automation throughwhich they reclaimed the probabilistic worldview developed in physics andthe cybernetic parallel of machine to human as sources of, rather than threats
to, individual and collective agency.

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Turner Romantic Automatism

They could do so in part thanks to an earlier celebration of automatism in
the arts. The history of artistic engagement with mechanism and automation
is a long one and there is no room to trace it here; for the purpose of
showing how artists later shifted public understandings of automation in theworkplace, it is enough to note that abstract expressionism emerged during
the Second World War as a number of American artists turned toward theautomatism of the Surrealists (Belgrad, 1998: 35; Leja, 1993: 237; Ratcliff,
1996: 43–8). For the Surrealists, automatism had meant turning off the ego,turning away from other ‘rational’ guides, and thereby, allowing the truths of
the Freudian unconscious to come to the fore. In his Manifesto of 1924, forinstance, Andre Breton defined Surrealism as ‘Psychic automatism in its purestate, by which one proposes to express . . . the actual functioning of thought.
Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason,
exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’ (Breton, 1993[1924]: 432).
For many painters in the 1940s and 1950s, and most publicly, for Jackson
Pollock, automatism held a similar appeal. As Rosalind Krauss (1993) has
shown, Pollock’s encounter with automatist writing practices in the early
1940s dramatically shifted his sense of what the picture plane was for (pp.
281–3). From the Surrealists, Pollock learned that the picture plane could bea graphic representation of the artist’s unconscious and that the brush, likethe Surrealist’s pen, could be a tool with which to dive into hidden regionsof the mind. Yet, as Krauss has argued, Pollock never fully accepted theSurrealist notion that art resulted from an automated retrieval of otherwise
hidden mental images. Rather, by 1951, when he was producing the drip
paintings that made him an international icon, Pollock was telling art critic
Robert Goodnough that his methods might ‘be automatic at the start but thatthey quickly step beyond that, becoming concerned with deeper and more
involved emotions’ (Goodnough, 1951: 60, quoted in Karmel, 1999: 94). As
Goodnough famously put it, Pollock’s method was a sort of ‘ritual dance’ –back and forth across the canvas splayed on the floor, and by implication atleast, back and forth between the material world of paint on canvas and theimmaterial, flickering motions of the unconscious. To many outside the art
world, Pollock’s dance-like motions seemed to reveal the artist’s strongwilled individuality and to demonstrate the power of self-automation as aform of psychic liberation. Paradoxically, by seeming to hold back his
internal, rational mind and to allow his unconscious to act of its own accord,
Pollock created himself as an anti-type of the mid-century corporate or
military drone. He became a Free Man, in both the 19th-century Romantic
sense of a man free to express the genius of his inner life, and in the 20thcentury Cold War sense of a highly masculine, heterosexual icon of freespeech (Guilbaut, 1983: 84–8; Leja, 1993: 276–83).
Pollock has of course been much criticized for his public image. But thatcriticism has made it harder to recognize the ways in which Pollock in factjoined the 19th-century Romantic ideal of the heroic artist to the understanding of the human mind as an information processor and, thus, as a force
for managing an otherwise chaotic reality. As Daniel Belgrad (1998) has
pointed out, in the work of many abstract expressionists, and particularly of

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journal of visual culture 7(1)Figure 1 Jackson Pollock, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth. Courtesy
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © 1991 Hans
Namuth Estate.
Pollock, Surrealist automatism met the field theories of 20th-century physics.
‘In classical (Newtonian) physics, an electromagnetic field was defined as anarrangement of discrete, electrically charged particles,’ writes Belgrad. ‘But
modern (Einsteinian) physics inverted this concept, defining “particles”
themselves as stable patterns of electromagnetic waves’ (p. 120). Thanks to
Einstein, objects could no longer be thought of as immobile artifacts to be
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Turner Romantic Automatism

space-time’. In 1947, as he turned away from the pursuit of recognizable
images in his work and toward the drip paintings, Pollock likewise left
behind the world of objects and entered a world of events. If the 19thcentury Romantic artist stood alone, a singular mind unique in nature (andalone in his studio), the self-consciously heroic Pollock revealed himself to beenmeshed in the probabilistic systems of the psychological and material
worlds.4 Through his drip paintings, viewers could glimpse not only theapparently masculine, Romantic chaos inside Pollock’s own being, but
the messy fields of energy, mass and interaction that characterized both thenatural world, and perhaps, in the atomic era, the human world as well. As
Pollock himself put it in 1950, his paintings aimed to offer ‘not anillustration’ of the ‘Experience of our age’, but rather, ‘the equivalent’ of thatexperience (Leja, 1993: 43, original emphasis).
In that sense, Pollock reinterpreted the probabilistic physics that underlay
Cold War cyborg discourse in light of an artistic tradition in which theautomation of work practices was thought to lead to greater selfunderstanding and more original art work. Like Berkeley’s Simon, Pollock
the artist became a boundary creature, caught between the black-box
darkness of his own psyche and the spinning, tumbling jumbles of
information and noise, order and entropy, that were the postwar social andnatural worlds. Yet he was never mechanical; on the contrary, with his
swooping, muscular gestures, he acted out the archetype of Romantic
creativity. This fusion of the Romantic artist and the cyborg in turn helped
define a form of agency-in-relation-to-system that John Cage would substantially extend. Caroline Jones (1993) has persuasively argued that theabstract expressionist painters were deeply preoccupied with their individual
subjectivities and with establishing reputations as individual geniuses(pp. 640–1). By contrast, she suggests, particularly in his early work, Cagesought to burn the ‘effigy of the Individual Ego’ by turning toward newtechnologies for the production of music and new, collaborative modes ofmaking it (p. 368). By the mid-1960s, Cage himself had decried theSurrealism and Freudianism that preoccupied so many abstract expressionists. ‘Automatic art, in fact, has never interested me,’ he told Richard
Kostelanetz, ‘because it is a way of falling back, resting on one’s memories
and feelings subconsciously, is it not? And I have done my utmost to freepeople from that’ (Kostelanetz, 1988: 173, quoted in Joseph, 2003: 273).
Despite the many ways he distanced himself from Surrealist automatism andits abstract expressionist legacy though, Cage in fact did a great deal toautomate his art and to expand the probabilistic field made visible on canvas
by painters like Pollock. When Cage built his now legendary ‘prepared piano’
at the Cornish School in 1940, he in effect automated an aspect of his
performance. By jamming screws and bits of weather stripping and felt
between the strings, he turned the control of part of his performance over toa device that would behave, in part in response to his own actions at
the keyboard, and in part in response to the laws of physics governing theinteraction of strings, screws and felt. Much like Pollock and other abstract
expressionists, Cage distributed his agency, locating it somewhere between

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journal of visual culture 7(1)the free-standing agency of the 19th-century painter in his studio and theprobabilistic systems described by 20th-century physics and cybernetics.
In one sense, Cage clearly broke with Pollock and painters like him: he did
not see the probabilistic systems on which his music depended assynecdoches for his own, individual psyche. In another sense though, like
Pollock, he did view his individual experience, that of the audience, and eventhe natural world itself, as a series of interlocking probabilistic systems,
whose workings could be revealed and appreciated when the artist cededsome of his autonomy to communication technologies such as the prepared
piano (Tomkins, 1980: 69). From this point of view, Cage stretched theboundaries of the probabilistic field opened up by Pollock and others, evenas he rejected their preoccupation with the heroic individual. For Pollock,the automation of elements of the artistic process revealed the congruenceof the inner struggles of the self and the outer struggles of the probabilistic
universe – struggles with a deep resonance in Cold War America. For Cage,
the programming of a piano transformed not a single object such as apainting, but a whole room, filled with dancers, audience members, chairs,
walls and windows into a probabilistic universe of its own, available toexperience for audience and performer alike.
Over the next 20 years, Cage turned to a variety of algorithmic strategies andtools – including charts, sound databases, and the I Ching – and to a seriesof mystical doctrines – Zen Buddhism, the writings of Meister Eckhart,
Ananda Coomeraswamy, Aldous Huxley, Huang Po, and Lao Tze among them(Pritchett, 1993: 29–56). Each of these turns would lead to performances
within which the artist (Cage) labored among algorithmic technologies forpurposes of revealing the probabilistic nature of existence and rightness ofthe human being’s place within, rather than astride, that nature. Even
though Cage criticized abstract expressionist attention to the individual
psyche, he also extended the abstract expressionist preoccupation with theself-in-relation-to-the-psychic-and-material-field. For Cage, the work ofbecoming, the work of action, was not only the work of art, but the work ofdaily life. By turning some portion of his artistic process over to depersonalized, algorithmic systems and devices, and in that sense, automating his
work, Cage expanded the arena of action and probability; his performances
no longer pointed to invisible laws, but embodied them.
In practical terms, this expansion provided a rich theoretical grounding forartistic collaboration. In the spring of 1951, Cage met Robert Rauschenberg
at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York (Tomkins, 1980: 67). Since being
discharged from the Navy in 1946, Rauschenberg had been pursuing an
education in painting. In 1948, he sought out Joseph Albers at Black
Mountain College, a painting teacher whom Time magazine had called ‘thegreatest disciplinarian in the United States’ (quoted in Tomkins, 1965: 198).
For Albers, Rauschenberg later remembered, the goal of painting was toexpress one’s own taste in the choice of materials and thereby, to ‘makeorder’ (p. 199). ‘As for me’, he explained, ‘I consider myself successful only
when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense.’

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Turner Romantic Automatism

Rauschenberg, like Cage, saw the artist not as someone who might impose
his will on a recalcitrant material reality, but rather as one whose job it was
to reveal the disorder at the heart of that reality. In 1966, Rauschenberg went
on to disavow any allegiance to the Surrealist automatism or Freudianism ofpainters like Pollock as well (Joseph, 2003: 273). ‘I don’t mess around withmy subconscious,’ he explained. ‘I try to keep wide-awake’ (Seckler, 1966:76, quoted in Joseph, 2003: 273).
That said though, Rauschenberg, like Cage, was also fascinated with thenotion of distributing agency in the production of his art to mechanical andinanimate objects. In the fall of 1951, Cage and Rauschenberg created a 22-ft
print, as Calvin Tomkins (1980) put it, ‘by automation’ (p. 67). Together they
spread ink on a slab of Manhattan pavement; with Rauschenberg pointing
the way, Cage then drove his Model A Ford through the ink and over 20
sheets of paper. The following summer saw Cage and Rauschenberg together
at Black Mountain College. Rauschenberg had completed his White Paintings
less than a year before; in these paintings, Cage recognized a version of his
own aims. Much as he had turned to algorithmic work practices in order toplace his audiences more self-consciously within the systems that he believed
constituted the natural world, so too had Rauschenberg created paintings
that did not simply stand in for the probabilistic systems around him (asmany thought, say, Pollock’s had) but that brought those systems to life. As
Cage himself would later suggest, to view the White Paintings was to becomea part of the interplay of light and shadow, to be oneself and part of thephysics of the everyday simultaneously (Cage, 1973: 102).
As Cage later told Richard Kostelanetz, the White Paintings helped inspire
him to create his now-infamous 4’33’’ (Joseph, 2000: 104). For Cage, theabsence of music ‘played’ by a musician functioned like the whiteness ofRauschenberg’s canvases: both provided framing devices within which therandom elements of the material world might be revealed. In the process,they shifted the location of artistic agency, though they did not make it any
less heroic. Cage and Rauschenberg no longer claimed sole authority overtheir works, but rather, like cyborgs, shared that authority with devices,
systems, and the probabilistic physical world. Even so, they remained
powerfully, and Romantically, attached to that world. If the artist no longer
stood above nature, transforming it into paint and sound, he was no lessheroic for asserting his place at the governing intersection of natural, social
and artistic systems.
He was, however, more playful and more democratic. In 1952, when theygathered in the dining room at Black Mountain, the makers of the first
Happening cleared the way for ever-more performative and egalitarianmodes of art (Joseph, 2003: 22). Within a decade, the Happening, and associated forms of theater and dance, would flourish around the globe. But fromthe point of view of the integration of information technology into culturallife, Cage, Rauschenberg and their compatriots had also accomplished an
important turn-around. Far from the confines of the computerized factory,
and well outside the everyday life of the corporate world, they had

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journal of visual culture 7(1)dramatically widened the probabilistic field revealed in the paintings ofJackson Pollock, and greatly increased the range of devices and situations towhich a creative individual might cede his or her agency. If the probabilistic
world was chaotic and terrifying, the examples of the Black Mountain artists
demonstrated that one need not react to either that world or its machineswith an excess of control. To embrace the world as it was, one need not
become mechanical – on the contrary, one could join one’s friends in acollaborative, even Bohemian, form of artistic labor. As the unemploymentcrisis of the early 1960s kicked in, that transformation would become an
exemplary conceptual resource for corporate executives and labor leadersalike.

Back to the Factory: Experiments in Art and Technology
To see how, we need to leap for the moment over the late 1950s and go
directly to Manhattan’s 69th Regiment Armory on the evening of 14 October
1966 for Open Score, Robert Rauschenberg’s contribution to 9 Evenings:
Theatre and Engineering. There, more than a dozen engineers from Bell
Telephone Laboratories, dressed in crisp white shirts and neatly pressed ties,
hovered around the control boards and tangled cables of a wireless radio
system. On a huge tennis court laid out on the Armory floor in front of them,painter Frank Stella and tennis pro Mimi Kanarek, each dressed in proper
whites, batted a tennis ball back and forth. Each time the ball hit a racket, asound somewhere between a ‘bong’ and a ‘thwack’ echoed through the halland an overhead light turned itself off. After a while, the room wentcompletely dark and, when it did, luminous screens came on overhead,showing infrared images of crowds milling down below, all seemingly blondeand dressed in white, while above them, disembodied voices repeatedvarious names.5 These images and sounds in turn gave way to a distantkeening, and Robert Rauschenberg walked out from the wings, picked up abundle wrapped in white, and carried it to another place on the Armory
floor. The Armory was silent and dark. When the lights came back up, some1500 spectators, among them New York’s Senator, Jacob Javits, much of theManhattan art world, and any number of gentlemen in fine suits and ladies
in glittering evening gowns, gave an extended ovation (Goodyear, 2002:
197–203; Klüver and Martin, 1966; Loewen, 1975: 75–87; Martin, 2007).
Over the years, 9 Evenings has been hailed as a turning point in thedevelopment of multimedia art and in the massive migration of technology
and industrial work processes into art that took place in the 1960s (Dyson,
2006; Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 2003: 211–12;). Yet, it also marked an
important site at which the rewriting of cyborg discourse that had gone on in
the art world for two decades began to be visible, and conceivably, legitimate,in the corporate and engineering worlds. Open Score was one of ten pieces
created by as many artists, including John Cage, pianist David Tudor, anddancers Yvonne Rainer and Alex Hay, and performed over nine nights. In
making and peforming their pieces, the artists collaborated with some 30

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Turner Romantic Automatism

Figure 2 Herb Schneider, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucinda Childs, L.J. Robinson,
Per Biorn, and Billy Klüver, during rehearsals for 9 Evenings. Photographer
unknown. Courtesy of Experiments in Art and Technology. All rights reserved.
engineers recruited by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver. Each of the performances, like Open Score, presented ensembles of humans and communication
technologies, working together in such a way that both human and machine
served as information processors. In his ‘Grass Field’, for instance,
microphones and electrodes attached to various parts of his body relayed
Alex Hay’s heartbeat and other noises to an Armory-filling sound system. As
he walked, his body movements became electronic signals and those signals
in turn became a sound environment in which he moved. In Cage’s
Variations VII, sounds poured into the Armory over telephone lines as Cage,
Tudor and a team of musicians scrambled to mix them. In one performance,
Billy Klüver encouraged audience members to get up and move freely
around the Armory floor. Slowly, the Armory became a huge, electrified
variation on the room in which Cage had once played his prepared piano:
once again, having turned his agency in part over to semi-automated devices,
he had made audible the probabilistic universe of everyday life and invited
his audience to experience it for themselves.
In this sense, when Rauschenberg, Klüver, Cage and the other artists andengineers of 9 Evenings took the Armory stage in 1966, they committed an
extraordinary act of cultural brokerage. In their performances, they fused
the Romantic automatism of the art world with the engineering practices andthe sorts of communication and control practices on which the automatedfactory depended. They did not use computers, which were still far too bulky
for theater, yet the performances had everything to do with the cyborg

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journal of visual culture 7(1)discourse still swirling around computing machines. As Klüver had told anaudience earlier that year, the computer remained ‘the great initiator of all
this technological soul searching’ (Klüver, 1966, quoted in Loewen, 1975:
45). For almost 20 years, newspapers and magazines had been filled with thesuggestion that if humans admitted their fundamental likeness to
information processors, if they turned over even a portion of their work to
those machines, they would be deprived of their independence and exiled
from the social world of the factory. But over the course of 9 Evenings, some
10,000 audience members glimpsed a world in which artists shared theircreative agency with an assortment of devices, procedures, programs andcommunities. Electronic signals penetrated and emanated from inanimate
objects, electronic systems, and the human body alike. Over it all watchedjust the sort of industrial engineers whom the popular press had suggested
might be replaced by, or might become ever more like, the machines they
managed. Together, artists and engineers made visible a world in which
giving some portion of one’s autonomy over to electronic devices forcommunication and control resulted in the creation of new experiences –experiences not of humiliation and defeat, but of playful agency in andamong probabilistic systems.
Audience members, many of whom might have expected 9 Evenings to be
more traditionally theatrical, were often confused by what they saw. Thoughaudiences roundly applauded Open Score, other pieces were followed bysmatterings of applause and silence. ‘We made a lot of people awfully happy,
but not the audience,’ said Robert Rauschenberg (quoted in Tomkins, 1980:
248). Part of this response was clearly due to the perception that performances were clumsily executed, especially at the technical level. Expectationsof technical control, however, may have been heightened by the cultural andsocial standing of the participants. By the mid-1960s, both the field of
probabilistic play that had once been confined to the surface of the abstract
expressionist painting, and the preoccupation with technology that had longconcerned the corporate world, were beginning to meet one another in awide variety of settings. In the early 1960s, inspired particularly by Cage, butalso by Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, artists and musicians had
begun to create a cornucopia of technocentric theatrical events. On the West
Coast, the beards and poetry of the Beat movement had given way to acidtests and the 1966 Trips Festival. In upstate New York, groups like the US
Company blended mystical technology with then high-technology lighting
and sound gear to pursue an egalitarian, tribal sense of togetherness (Turner,
2006: 48–51). In Manhattan, patrons of Happenings had begun to wander
through three-dimensional theatrical environments and find themselves
assaulted by flashes of light and amplified shouts of random words (Sontag,
1966: 263–74).
None of these settings, however, carried the cultural cachet of Robert
Rauschenberg or Bell Telephone Laboratories. By 1966, Rauschenberg was
no longer an unknown painter struggling to get by. In 1964, he had become
the first American ever to win the grand prize for painting at the Venice
Biennale; if not yet as famous as Pollock had been, he was well on his way

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Turner Romantic Automatism(Tomkins, 1965: 199). In 1962 he had begun working with Billy Klüver of
Bell’s Communications Research Department, to construct Oracle, a soundemitting sculpture. By 1966, Klüver had been courting downtown New Yorkartists for some time; by his own estimate, he had taken perhaps a hundred
artists on tours of Bell Labs (Goodyear, 2002: 182). In technical circles, theLabs represented the epicenter of blue-sky research into new communication
technologies. Its alumni even included Claude Shannon, the information
theorist whose work underlay the development of digital computing andmore than a little cybernetic theory. To the public, it represented the researchwing of perhaps the single most ubiquitous and widely trusted communication network of the time: the telephone system.
In September 1966, as they were developing 9 Evenings, Rauschenberg andKlüver began to turn the cultural legitimacy and social networks they were
establishing into an institution, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).
That month, some 300 responded to their call for artists looking to work withengineers. Over the next several years, Rauschenberg, Klüver and a small staff
would build a networking organization that, at its peak in 1968, would list
about 3000 engineers and 3000 artists as participants (Tomkins, 1980: 251).
In addition to helping pair more than 600 of these participants on individual
projects, E.A.T. published a series of newsletters and Klüver himself traveled
widely, promoting the notion of artist–engineer collaboration at universities,
at corporations, and at the professional meetings of engineers. By 1969,
E.A.T. had secured some 78 sponsors who had ponied up $1000 a year toreceive the organization’s publications and access to its membership (Klüver,1969). These sponsors included a number of major American corporations
that had been aggressively developing information technology, such as IBM
and Xerox, or automating their production processes, such as oil industry
giants Atlantic Richfield and Schlumberger. They also featured representatives from the unions who had most vocally opposed automation in theworkplace in preceding years. These included the American Federation ofMusicians (A.F.L.–C.I.O.), who had once established a fund for musicians put
out of work by automated music players, the Transport Workers Union ofAmerica, and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers (A.F.L.–C.I.O.).
In 1967, a mutual friend introduced Klüver and Rauschenberg to Theodore
Kheel, who had headed the National War Labor Board in the Second World
War. Kheel had been an early, ardent proponent of collective bargaining andremained one of the nation’s foremost labor mediators. For more than adecade, he had played a particularly important role in the automation
debates. In 1962, together with labor leaders and executives from a numberof industries, he created the American Foundation on Automation and
Employment (A.F.A.E.). Over the next few years, the Foundation became an
influential clearing house for ideas on how to solve the social andpsychological challenges of automation. It promoted job training initiatives,studied the impact of computerization on middle management, and hosted
a series of conferences at which managers and union officials could discuss
the impact of computing and automation on labor.

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journal of visual culture 7(1)In October 1967, Kheel helped Klüver and Rauschenberg stage a press
conference to publicize E.A.T.’s role in promoting artists’ collaborations withthe scientific and industrial communities, and with labor. The speeches there
suggest that E.A.T. offered both management and workers a way to reimagine technocentric labor in terms set by the Romantic automatism of theart world. The conference was held at Robert Rauschenberg’s loft. As
reporters arrayed themselves in rows before the podium, they foundthemselves surrounded by fragments of technocentric art: floating metallic
pillows made by Andy Warhol and Billy Klüver; a computer print-out of anude woman made by L.D. Harmon and K.C. Knowlton; and Rauschenberg
and Klüver’s Oracle (Lieberman, 1967: 49). Speakers at the conference
included New York Senator Jacob Javits, Ralph Gross (president of theCommerce and Industry Association), Herman Kenin (head of the A.F.L.–
C.I.O.’s new Scientific, Professional and Cultural Employees Council) and Dr.
Warren Brodey (a psychiatrist from MIT). Together, the speakers suggested
that the fusion of the technological and the artistic would transform theworkplace from a site of individual agency destroyed to one for the pursuitof holistic satisfaction. As the A.F.L.–C.I.O.’s Kenin explained, ‘the membersof A.F.L.– C.I.O. unions are concerned by the growing impersonalization of
their work and by the frustrations they face in attempting to employ theirknowledge and talents in making what they might consider a valid contribution to our civilization’ (Kenin, 1967). In the collaborations of engineers
and artists, Kenin and the other speakers thought they could glimpse a
personalized alternative. Pointing to the ‘computer-assisted factory’ as an
example, Warren Brodey (1967) told the assembled reporters:
There is potential for living in a personalized environment if we merely
can think our way out of the mass production mentality and into theimmense choice and fun that industry’s new talents and technology canmake available . . . It is the artist who has the capacity to create thisvariability and to use and to make relevant what is outside the ‘accepted
systems’. He can point out relationships that were not seen before.
Even from this distance in time, we can hear in Brodey’s remarks faint echoesof the upheavals of the 1960s. His calls for a ‘personalized environment’ inparticular summon up the utopian individualism of the era’s back-to-the-landand alternative technology movements. But we can also hear echoes of the
1940s and the 1950s. In the automation debates, computers threatened toreplace workers precisely because computer and worker were seen as interchangeable information systems. Within those debates, human agency, likecomputer agency, depended on the ability to control the forces of chaotic
probability that otherwise threatened to over-run the individual psyche and,as they had during the Second World War, the social world as well. As abstract
expressionists turned the picture plane into an emblem of those forces, andas artists such as Cage and Rauschenberg opened that plane out into theworld of performance, they carved out an alternative form of cyborg
subjectivity. To be Cage or Rauschenberg was to recognize the probabilistic
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Turner Romantic Automatism

technologies, to make that nature available to the senses of artist andaudience alike. The 19th-century artist’s Romantic control of his internal life(and his studio) had given way to a relationship in which the artist – notunlike the electro-mechanical information processor of cyborg discourse –stood poised between internal and external systems, natural, social andtechnological.6 But rather than attempt to control these systems, and so risk
an artistic version of the fanaticism that had lately afflicted Nazis and Cold
Warriors alike, Cage and Rauschenberg exercised their individual creative
forces in such a way as to open up the systems around and within them toindividual, playful experience.

Automation House
By aligning themselves with these systems, however, artists had not rubbed
off any of the Romantic luster that still clung to the arts, nor shed theircreative authority. Rather, they had shifted the grounds on which they andothers who followed their example might bring both to bear. Their vision inturn found its way back to corporate and labor leaders in Theodore Kheel’s
Automation House. By 1967, Kheel had come to believe that automation was
inevitable and, ultimately, beneficial, but that it needed to be reimagined in
more humanistic terms. Up until that time, he saw automation leading to ‘job
displacement and a sense of estrangement’ among workers; in E.A.T., he saw
a collaborative fusion of artistic autonomy with new technology thatpromised increased engagement and personal fulfillment (Kheel, n.d.).
Beginning in 1967, Kheel brought labor leaders, executives and artists
together to create what he hoped would be a more collaborative approach toautomation. By 1970, he had provided offices for E.A.T. in a six-story former
mansion at 49 East 68th Street in Manhattan, alongside the A.F.A.E. and theInstitute of Collective Bargaining and Group Relations. Among the key
players in these groups were such titans of American labor as Lane Kirkland(Secretary/Treasurer of the A.F.L.–C.I.O.), Joseph Bierne (President of theCommunication Workers of America), and John Lyon (President of theInternational Association of Bridge, Structure and Ornamental Iron
Workers). They were accompanied by their corporate boardroom counterparts, including Bruce Wiesley (a senior vice president at American Can
Company), Urban Monihan (a vice-president at Magnavox) and Algie Hendrix(a vice president of General Dynamics Corporation).
As the affiliations of its tenants suggest, Automation House became a center
for rethinking human–machine labor. In the coming years, it hosted collective bargaining sessions, concerts of electronic music, art exhibitions, andeven television production facilities. But it was more than a simple staging
ground for these activities. Equipped with a flexible internal architecture,sound and lighting systems, and closed-circuit television, Automation House
was meant to be a model of the automated world as everyday system.
‘Automation House has enough electric power to run a cinema in the cellar,
computers in the attic, and put on a TV show in between . . . while dinner for

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journal of visual culture 7(1)Figure 3 A Con Edison advertisement depicting Automation House,published in The New York Times, 1 February 1970. Courtesy of Con
Edison.
500 is on the stove,’ exclaimed a copywriter for a 1970 advertising supplement in The New York Times. ‘Wild, huh?’ (Con Edison, 1970). Far from
replacing the human being, the communication and control technologies ofAutomation House promised to enrich everyday life. Moreover, they did so interms set by the transformation of agency in relation to technology andsystem wrought by Cage, Rauschenberg and Pollock before them. In the
Romantic automatist tradition, it had paradoxically become possible to assert
creative agency by deploying automated technologies for the purpose of
revealing the probabilistic, indeterminate nature of everyday life. As they
wandered the floors of Automation House, moving from collective
bargaining session to multimedia art exhibition, the leaders of Americanindustry and labor could imagine themselves not as the unthinking

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Turner Romantic Automatismautomatons that had populated the automation debates, but as creative,
flexible individuals, whose agency and sense of self grew directly out of theirunderstanding of the everyday world as a probabilistic place.

Conclusion
For the moment, the question of what effects those experiences had on the
management practices of American industry in the early 1970s will have to
wait on further research. Yet, almost 40 years later, it is clear that theparticular vision of human–machine interaction that guided the developmentof Automation House has had a substantial cultural impact. As computers
have become smaller and ever-more-widely distributed, Romantic automatism has become a ubiquitous ideological resource for technical laborers,
marketers and managers alike (Streeter, 2003: 648–68). Traveling salesmen,
typing away on their laptops in airport lobbies; middle-managers gathering
around computer screens for ‘virtual meetings’; even blue-collar laborers,
monitoring digital gauges in massive production facilities – all have beensummoned by advertisers to exemplify the now ubiquitous notion that toplace oneself within the techno-social web of computerized labor is to free
oneself to pursue personal fulfillment. To many historians of information
technology, computers themselves seem to be the prime movers behind thisconfiguration of self and machine in the workplace. Yet, as the history of art
in this period suggests, that configuration came into being not because ofcomputers, but alongside them. Together, Pollock, Cage, Rauschenberg andthe members of E.A.T. opened a conceptual space in which the individual
could, like the cyborg of the 1950s, stand poised between the chaotic,
probabilistic forces of multiple systems – social, technical, psychological. And
rather than stand frozen there, he or she could act creatively, with a Romantic
degree of agency. As individual practitioners, Pollock, Cage, and Rauschenberg
have long been recognized for having transformed the conceptual scaffoldingof art. Yet, they also served as influential mediators between the technical andartistic worlds. When they did, these artists created a vision through which
workers have continued to translate their economically inevitable encounterswith machines into hopes for autonomy, community, and bohemian play.
Acknowledgement
This article grew out of my participation in ‘Refresh! The First International
Conference on the Histories of Media, Art and Technology’ at the Banff New Media
Institute in 2005.
I would like to thank Frances Dyson, Ann Collins Goodyear, Linda Henderson andDouglas Kahn for their conversations there. I also thank Daniel Kreiss, Pamela Lee,
Julie Martin, Chandra Mukerji, Robin Oppenheim and Jonathan Sterne for their close
readings of earlier drafts of the manuscript. Finally, I’m grateful to Theodore Kheel,to Patrizia Sione of the Kheel Center for Labor Management Documentation andArchives at Cornell University, and to Vincent Bonin and Julie Desautels at The Daniel
Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology. All introduced me to archival
materials without which I couldn’t have written this piece.

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journal of visual culture 7(1)Notes
1. As Ceruzzi has pointed out, the term ‘automation’ was first coined at the Ford
Motor Company in 1947, and was popularized by Diebold.
2. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt; as economist Frank Levy
(1988) points out, in the late 1950s, unemployment among African-American
males, for example, averaged 10 per cent, while unemployment among whitemales averaged just 4 per cent (p. 136).
3. This analogy has a history of its own and, as several critics have pointed out, has
had an enormous influence on American culture since the Second World War(see Bowker, 1993; Galison, 1994; Hayles, 1999: 50–112; Turner, 2006: 11–28).
4. For an analysis of the 19th-century Romantic artistic ideal as a work practice andits links to Pollock and abstract expressionism more generally, see Jones (1996:1–59).
5. Julie Martin, widow of Billy Klüver, and his partner in E.A.T., reports that
Rauschenberg had asked each person in the crowd to say ‘My name is . . .’, andthat these were the voices that the audience heard (Martin, 2007).
6. This position bears a strong resemblance to the subjectivity Michael Leja (1993)
has outlined in connection with mid-century Modern Man discourse and Jackson
Pollock (p. 278). Yet, it is quite different from the executive mode emerging
elsewhere in the New York art world in the 1960s. For an analysis of the artist as
industrial manager, see Jones (1996) and Molesworth (2003). For an importantaccount of an earlier attempt to bridge industrial production and collectivist
idealism in art practice, see Gough (2005: 151–7).

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Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication
at Stanford University. He is the author of From Counterculture to
Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Echoes of
Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor/Doubleday 1996;
2nd edn, University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Address: Department of Communication, Stanford University, McClatchy
Hall, Bldg 120, Stanford, CA 94305-2050, USA. [email: fturner@stanford.edu]

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