Remote Control: Art, Technology, and the Politics of Distance (1966-1972)

Abstract

Platforms carrying dancers across a stage, doors sliding open as if by magic, and simultaneous Happenings in Berlin and Buenos Aires: remote control promised thrills as postwar artists experimented with technologies of distance. Focused on the half-decade between 1966 and 1972, this thesis intervenes in the history of art and technology to argue that a desire to activate the supposedly empty space between artist, art object, and audience effected a new fixation on the nature of that distanced interval, leading artists to incorporate actual remote control technologies into their work. This impulse grew from an unorthodox reading of the work of modernist painters, particularly Jackson Pollock. Where a generation of critics had canonized “presentness” and medium specificity, a younger cohort read the work differently, finding in it permission to embrace remoteness, intermedia experimentation, and political messaging.

Artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, Marta Minujín, Wolf Vostell, and Carolee Schneemann, among others, undertook radical experiments with remote systems, often in collaboration with engineers. Theirs was not a technocratically neutral position; this thesis demonstrates that these artists consciously cast the “remoteness” enabled by new technologies as a charged concept, just as controlled distance emerged to define military and industrial relations on domestic, urban, and geopolitical scales. Remote control enabled artists to incorporate, not reject, the expanding frames of reference taking place outside of the sanctioned spaces of the art studio or gallery, from automation to satellite communications to warfare. Artists’ uses of remote technologies intentionally surfaced questions about critical power relations, tying the stakes of their work to debates about the future of U.S. social and economic control and development. In doing so, it also crystallized a newly diffuse, participatory artistic subject: the controller.

The introduction theorizes “remote control” in historical and historiographic context. A second chapter follows Automation House (1970-1972), a Manhattan art space that combined labor mediation and media art to experiment with the American postindustrial labor economy to come. A third chapter centers on Three Country Happening (1966), which took place in New York, Buenos Aires, and Berlin, supposedly mediated by satellite—foiled by the uneven development of the Cold War-era satellite system itself. A fourth chapter delves into Snows (1967), a multimedia performance in protest of the war in Vietnam, which incorporated audience-controlled feedback sensors. A concluding discussion traces the ongoing nature of remote control as it implicates artists and audiences alike in a network of shared responsibility.