LUMA arles revisits E.A.T., the radical 1960s movement that fused art and technology

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)

At LUMA Arles, a pivotal chapter in the history of postwar art and innovation takes center stage in Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). This landmark exhibition, the first in France to explore the legacy of E.A.T. in depth, is presented in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute and traces the history of a movement that brought together hundreds of key avant-garde artists and the engineers who ushered in the information age. Founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman alongside Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories — then the world’s leading center for electronic innovation and telecommunications research — E.A.T. emerged as a radical platform that reimagined the possibilities of creative practice through direct collaboration between artists and technologists.

On view through January 11, 2026, the exhibition surveys a transformative period in which the barriers between disciplines—between art and science, experimentation and activism—were actively dismantled. Through a wealth of archival documents, film footage, case studies, and rarely exhibited works by figures such as John Cage, Fujiko Nakaya, Andy Warhol, and Rauschenberg himself, Sensing the Future traces the movement’s arc from the heady optimism of the late 1960s through its more decentralized but no less ambitious projects of the 1970s.‘The mid-60s to mid-70s period were by all accounts the most fervent years of E.A.T.,’ Simon Castets, Director of Strategic Initiatives at LUMA, tells designboom. ‘The stars were truly aligned, not only in terms of funding, but also of mutual fascination between the then impermeable realms of art and science.’ The 1973 oil crisis signaled a shift: public funding dried up, and technology itself became more accessible, prompting many participants to pursue independent trajectories. Even so, Billy Klüver —together with his partner Julie Martin— remained devoted to stewarding E.A.T.’s legacy, preserving an archive that would later prove indispensable to understanding the entwined histories of art and technology. By revisiting the trajectory of the movement, Sensing the Future offers more than historical reflection. It reveals how the questions posed by E.A.T.—about interdisciplinary exchange, innovation, and the future as a shared project—remain not only relevant, but urgent.

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), LUMA Arles | artwork: Facsimiles refabricated by The Andy Warhol Museum – mylar filled with helium (front) | Larry Keating, The Artist and the computer, 1976 – video (back) | all images © Victor&Simon – Victor Picon, © ADAGP, Paris, 2025, unless stated otherwise | header image: E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, Osaka, Japan, 1970, March 18 | photograph by Shunk-Kender | Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust

LUMA ARLES UNPACKS THE HISTORY OF E.A.T. IN LANDMARK EXHIBITION

Sensing the Future takes over the Living Archives Gallery of the LUMA Arles Tower, unpacking the landmark moments that defined E.A.T.’s short but influential lifespan. The exhibition begins with a deep dive into the group’s beginnings in the mid-1960s, tracing how a visionary alliance between artists and engineers gave rise to one of the most ambitious interdisciplinary initiatives of the 20th century. Artworks and documentation outline E.A.T.’s establishment in 1966 through the 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering event in New York, where ten artists, among them John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, teamed up with dozens of Bell Labs engineers to stage multimedia performances that employed infrared cameras, wireless sound transmission, and video projection—technologies then still foreign to the art world.

From that unlikely synergy grew an ethos of experimentation, grounded in collaboration, access, and action. Among E.A.T.’s most ambitious undertakings was the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Artists Robert Whitman, Robert Breer, David Tudor, and Forrest (Frosty) Myers made early contributions to the design of the pavilion, while eventually the design team grew to twenty artists and fifty engineers and scientists. Conceived as a gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, the pavilion featured a geodesic dome clad in a mirror-finished surface, an internal sound-responsive light system, and a water-vapor cloud sculpture by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. Her contribution—an enveloping cloud of artificial mist that obscured and transformed the pavilion’s form—ushered a new vocabulary of ephemeral, site-specific art that blurred perception and challenged the dominance of the visual in technological environments. More than half a century later, Nakaya’s legacy continues to reverberate across contemporary practice. Alongside Sensing the Future, another of her works, Fog Sculpture #07563, is on view as part of LUMA’s concurrent exhibition, Streaming from Our Eyes (evolving title, formerly Dance with Daemons).

view of the section dedicated to the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka with materials by Harris Shunk, Janós Kender, Fujiko Nakaya

THE RADICAL MOVEMENT’S ENDURING LEGACY

Whether through the immersive fog-drenched environments of the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka or civic initiatives addressing environmental design and urban communication, E.A.T. continually pushed the boundaries of what art could do—and whom it could serve. A pivotal section of the exhibition is dedicated to Projects Outside Art, a bold strand of E.A.T.’s activities that extended the group’s collaborative ethos beyond the traditional confines of the art world. First presented as an exhibition in New York in 1971, Projects Outside Art marked a shift toward socially engaged, systems-oriented experimentation. ‘Projects Outside Art ushered in a series of exploratory initiatives across the world in partnership with governmental agencies and universities, aimed at broadening the scope and impact of E.A.T.’s mission, as well as its international reach,’ notes Simon Castets. ‘With, for example, research into the educational potential of television in India, El Salvador and Guatemala, E.A.T.’s ambition reflected a deep belief in advanced technologies as a means to advance social aims. While more often than not the projects remained unrealized, their methodology and ethos of cross-disciplinary collaboration have had an undeniable impact on our way of thinking today’s infrastructures of innovation.’

In an age increasingly defined by technological acceleration and its discontents, the utopian idealism at the heart of E.A.T.—the belief that artists could meaningfully shape the trajectory of technological progress—feels at once remote and urgently necessary. As Simon Castets observes, ‘today, innovation is much more frequently framed as a threat, often rightfully so. Yet, the legacy of E.A.T.’s collaborative spirit could help bring out technology’s positive potential across fields.’  Much like the early 20th-century Futurists envisioned the artist as a vital force within industrial society, E.A.T. imagined new roles for artists across domains as varied as education, public policy, and environmental research. Reengaging with that vision today invites us to reconsider the artist’s capacity not only to reflect society, but to reshape it—through dialogue, through experimentation, and through the conviction that creativity and criticality belong at the core of every system we build.

performance inside the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970 | photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust

LUMA’S LONG-TERM INTEREST IN artist-led use of technologies

Sensing the Future originated as part of the 2024 edition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a region-wide initiative presented by the J. Paul Getty Trust across Southern California, comprising over 60 exhibitions and public programs exploring the intersections of artistic and scientific inquiry. Organized by the Getty Research Institute (GRI)—a global leader in visual culture research and home to one of the world’s most extensive art libraries—the exhibition brought renewed scholarly and curatorial focus to E.A.T.’s interdisciplinary legacy. In adapting the show for its European debut at LUMA Arles, the curatorial team embraced both continuity and expansion. ‘E.A.T. is much better known in the U.S. than in France,’ notes Simon Castets. ‘Therefore, in the additional time we had, it behooved us to build upon the extraordinary research done by the Getty Research Institute and include additional works and archival elements. The core structure of the exhibition remains the same, yet, together with Getty, the work continued and we were able to also feature key artworks by other essential figures of that history, including Marta Minujín, Wen-Ying Tsai, Andy Warhol, Lilian Schwartz, and Hans Haacke, alongside dozens of archival documents.’

As the first exhibition in France devoted exclusively to E.A.T., Sensing the Future reflects LUMA Arles’ long-term research interest in the artist-led use of technologies. ‘LUMA’s longstanding commitment to artist-led, innovation-driven initiatives resonates with E.A.T.’s pioneering collaborations between artists and engineers,’ Castets explains. ‘Both share a belief in the generative power of process over product, valuing experimentation as a catalyst for new ways of thinking.’ This alignment lends the exhibition not only historical significance but also a pressing contemporary urgency. At a time when the role of the artist is increasingly intertwined with disciplines ranging from environmental research to artificial intelligence, Sensing the Future underscores how fertile such crossovers can be, particularly when grounded in mutual respect, curiosity, and the open-ended nature of experimentation itself.

interior of the Mirror Dome at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970, Photograph by Fujiko Nakaya |  Gelatin-silver print Getty Research Institute, 940003 | Art © Fujiko Nakaya, courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970, photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20 | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender | Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris | Fog © Fujiko Nakaya, courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology | light Towers © Forrest Myers.© J. Paul Getty Trust

Floats, 1970, Robert Breer, photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender | Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Fog Sculpture, Pepsi Pavillion, Japan World Exposition 1970, Fujiko Nakaya, Getty Research Institute, © J. Paul Getty Trust

performance inside the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970 | photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust

Fujiko Nakaya at the construction of the Pepsi-Cola Pavillon, photographed by Billy Klüver, © Julie Martin

Marta Minujín, Minuphone, 1967 | Marta Minujín, Greetings from Marta Minujín, 1967 – Postcard from 1969 with the Minuphone | Marta Minujín, Marta Minujín’s Art Works, 1966-1969 – Video | © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon

Greetings from Marta Minujín, Postcard from 1969 with the Minuphone (1967), © Marta Minujín

Marta Minujín, Minuphone, 1967 © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon

Variations VII, 1966, John Cage | photograph by Peter Moore |. Gelatin-silver print. Getty Research Institute, 940003 © Northwestern University. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Fakir in 3⁄4 Time, 1968, Lucy Jackson Young and Niels O. Young | photograph by Shunk-Kender | Gelatin-silver print, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender | Art courtesy Thomas Young © J. Paul Getty Trust

section dedicated to the movement’s beginning’s | Harris Shunk, Janós Kender, Tom Gormley,Anders Österlin, Robert Whitman, E.A.T.

Harris Shunk, Janós Kender, E.A.T, Robert Rauschenberg, Harold Hodges

Robert Rauschenberg, Harold Hodges, Dry Cell, 1963 | Silkscreen ink and oil on Plexiglas, metal coat hanger, wire, string, sound transmitter, circuit board, and battery-powered motor on metal folding camp stool

project info:

exhibition name: Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
participating artists: Robert Breer, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Ivan Dryer, Jean Dupuy, Öyvind Fahlström, Hans Haacke, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Marta Minujín, Peter Moore, Forrest Myers, Fujiko Nakaya, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Lillian Schwartz, Harry Shunk & János Kender, Wen-Ying Tsai, David Tudor, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and others
location: LUMA Arles, France | The Tower, Living Archives Gallery, Level -2 | @luma_arles
dates: May 1st, 2025 to January 11th, 2026

organizer: LUMA Arles in partnership with the Getty Research Institute | @gettymuseum
LUMA Arles team: Simon Castets, Director of Strategic Initiatives; Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Artistic Director; Fabian Gröning, Project Manager for Strategic Initiatives; Martin Guinard, Curator

Getty Research Institute team: Nancy Perloff, Curator, Megan Mastroianni and Andrew Park, Research Assistants, Alex Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Daniela Ruano Orantes, Curatorial Project Assistance

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