---------- This is a posting from the Arts Council England "arts news" mailing list. Please send any response direct to the sender rather than replying to the list itself. ---------- OBITUARY FOR BILLY KLUVER
Billy Kluver, scientist, and writer, was the originator of the contemporary art and technology movement. He died Sunday, January 11, 2004, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, from melanoma. He was 76 years old. Billy Kluver, a Swedish citizen, was born Johan Wilhelm Kluver, in Monaco on November 13, 1927, and grew up in Sweden, where his father built the first ski hotel in Sweden. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He also served as president of the Stockholm University Film Society and was a co-founder of the Swedish Alliance of Film Societies. He spent the year 1952 working for Thomson-Houston in France where he helped install the television antenna on top of the Eiffel Tower and devise an underwater television camera for Jacques Cousteau's expeditions. He came to the United States in 1954, and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957. He served as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1957-58. >From 1958 to 1968 he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He has published numerous technical and scientific papers on, among others, small signal power conservation in electron beams, backward-wave magnetron amplifiers and infra-red lasers. He holds 10 patents. In the early 1960s, he collaborated with artists on works of art incorporating new technology, including Jean Tinguely's machine that destroyed it self in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, Homage to New York; provided Jasper Johns with neon letters for two paintings; Robert Rauschenberg's sound sculpture Oracle, John Cage's and Merce Cunningham's Variation V; and Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds. In October 1966 he and Robert Rauschenberg organized a series of performances at the 69th Regiment Armory: "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering." Ten artists -- John Cage, Lucinda Childs, �yvind Fahlstrom, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman -- worked with more than 30 engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories to produce performances incorporating new technology; and the evenings were attended by more than 15,000 people. That same year, 1966, Kluver, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit service organization for artists and engineers; and Kluver became president of E.A.T. in 1968. E.A.T. established a Technical Services Program to provide artists with technical information and assistance by matching them with engineers and scientists who could collaborate with them. In 1970 Kluver headed a team of more thant 60 artist, scientists and engineer to design and program the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70, Osaka Japan. Kluver also initated and directed communication projects for E.A.T.: - pilot projects to produce instructional programming for educational television at the Anand Dairy Cooperative, Baroda, India; - Utopia: Q&A, public spaces linked by telex in New York, Ahmedabad, India, Tokyo, and Stockholm, where people could ask people in other countries questions about the future, 1971; - pilot program to develop methods for recording indigenous culture in El Salvador 1973; - Children and Communication pilot project to use telephone, telex and fax equipment to have children in different parts of New York City communicate with each other, 1972; - large screen outdoor television display system for Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1976-1977; - collaboration with artists Fujiko Nakaya (1980) and Robert Rauschenberg (1989) to design sets for the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In 1997 Kluver initiated a series of films documenting the artists performances in the 9 Evenings from 1966. In 1972 Kluver, Barbara Rose and Julie Martin edited a book Pavilion, that documented the design and construction of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. He is co-author with Julie Martin of the book Kiki's Paris, a history of the art community in Montparnasse form 1880 to 1930. It has been published by Harry N. Abrams in 1989 and later in France, Germany, Sweden, and Spain. He and Julie Martin edited and annotated the original English translation of Kiki's Memoir's, published in 1930, but banned by U.S. Customs from the United States. It was issued by Ecco Press in Fall 1996; and in French by Editions Hazan in 1998. His book, A Day with Picasso, has been published by MIT Press in the fall of 1997, and was previously published by Cantz Verlag in Germany in 1993 and by Editions Hazan in France in 1994 and was published by Hakusuisha in Japan in 1999, and in Korea and Italy in 2000, and in Brazil in 2003. A the time of his death he was working with Julie Martin on a social history of international art communities from 1945 to 1965 in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. In 1974 he received the Royal Order of Vasa, from the King of Sweden. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design of the New School University. In 2002 he received the order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Government. Billy Kluver is survived by his wife, Julie Martin, a daughter Maja Kluver of Brooklyn, NY; a son Kristian Patrik Kluver of Boulder Colorado; Half brothers Bjorn Tarras-Wahlberg and Lorentz Lyttkens; a half-sister Ase Lyttkens all of Stockholm, Sweden. For more information please call Julie Martin 212 285 1690 or email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- You are currently subscribed to artsnews as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
