9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966
In 1966, a Bell Laboratories physicist brought a group of avant-garde artists together with 10 open-minded members of the science and technology fields for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of investigatory Happenings which took place at the 69th Regiment Armory and were duly noted by critics Lucy Lippard and Brian O’Doherty. The resulting seminal performances included John Cage’s Variations VII, in which 30 photocells were mounted around the performance space, activating a variety of sound sources — including a blender, 20 radio channels and two Geiger counters — as the performers moved around. An 88-page exhibition catalogue includes original essays by Clarisse Bardiot (researcher at Daniel Langlois Foundation), Michelle Kuo (Harvard PhD. candidate), and Catherine Morris (exhibition curator). It also includes reprinted reviews of the original performances 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering by Lucy Lippard and Brian O’Doherty, and an interview with Herb Schneider (engineer).