Billy Klüver

Born 1927 in Monaco, grew up in Sweden. Graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in Electrical Engineering. 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. He 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 on the machine that destroyed itself, Homage to New York, with Robert Rauschenberg on the environmental sound sculpture, Oracle; with Yvonne Rainer on her dance In the House of my Body; with John Cage and Merce Cunningham on Variations V; and with Andy Warhol on Silver Clouds.

He lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad on both art, art and technology, and social issues to be addressed by the technical community; and he has published articles on these subjects. He curated or was curatorial adviser for fourteen major museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

In 1966 Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit service organization for artists and engineers. Since 1968 he served as its president.

In 2001 he produced an exhibition of photo and text panels entitled The Story of E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, 1960 - 2001 by Billy Klüver.

He died in 2004.

Literature

• Billy Klüver, "Artists, Engineers, and Collaboration", in Culture on the Brink, eds. Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey, 1994.
• Garnet Hertz, Interview with Billy Kluver, 19 Apr 1995.
• Anne Collins Goodyear, "György Kepes, Billy Kluver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology", Science in Context 17:4 (2004), pp 611-635.

Links

• http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archives/Kluver/Kluver.html