One reads the Report only to see them behave as would-be magi, con-men, fledgling technocrats, acting out mad science fiction fantasies, such as Jackson MacLow’s abominable idea that I.B.M should construct a vast computer environment “for accepting and feeding out massive amounts of information based on the ecology of the Los Angles metropolis.” It is possible to sympathize with technicians who doubtless were beginning to wonder into whose hands they had fallen, and who had to confront a barrage of ignorant directives and willful misapplication of resources. Here the Report, otherwise extremely matter-of-fact in style, can best be seen as a comedy detailing the clash of ego and suppressed ego, quickly or eventually bringing out the worst in both — that is, accentuating the capricious, the esoteric and the juvenile in the one, and the philistine and the flunky in the other. The permissive atmosphere in the art world, that which licenses and sanctions the artist’s most extravagant conceits, evaporates as soon as his context is changed to one where men are supposed to be doing things seriously and for purpose. Bob Morris, for example, did not gain favor by wanting to construct “an environmental situation involving temperature control systems” with a division of Lear Siegler, which would “bury this technology right in the ground and have nothing there but a little more weather than was there in the first place — what miniature gold did for the game this piece might do for the National Parks.” If Gemini Director Ken Tyler’s idea is just — the idea that the whole project was a species of living theater (“For me the technicians are the stage designers, the choreographers and our guys like Claes are the actors.”), then it was theatre in which technology is typically entombed or sent off into the heavens, a theatre in which the disproportion between inordinate means and foolish or aborted results cancels out the drama. Thus, finally, the two parties, the artist and technicians of society, were brought together in a long hoped-for union, only to produce a folie à deux.

There were those, of course, who found harmony in realizing mutually comprehensible aims. But the presence of such techno-artists as Rockne Krebs, Boyd Mefferd, and Newton Harrison only highlighted a prime esthetic dilemma of the program. To the entrenched style of the Pop artists and minimal sculptors, industry offered either a more durable and gussied packaging of there efforts, not very interesting in itself, or a surrender to the prerequisites of machines which might entail the sacrifice of intelligible syntax and hard-won control. These artists placed themselves in the position where “conservative” and “progressive” stances held little meaning and much danger for them. For they had allowed an entirely false premise to be imposed upon them, namely that what had been invoked by a will to form was to be furthered by resort to electro-mechanical means which could only activate or atomize form. Sensation and effect would be sorry to recompense for the loss of shape and structure.

On the other hand, the type of artist infatuated with technical process would be all the more encouraged, through force of bias, to the sensational, to art as short term entertainment or mystification. Between the option of getting technology out of sight and making it extremely manifest, his choice was clear. He had no vocabulary or style to compromise, but also no point of view to propose or express. The climate of expectancy generated by the show was to penalize both the “straight” and “novelty” solutions to any problem. Pity the artist doomed either to disappoint or titillate. It was Jim Turrell, withdrawing from a project where he had been led by Robert Irwin to perform some cruel experiments in sensory deprivation, who gave the most thoughtful critique of the program. Speaking of a “Pavlovian approach into spirituality,” he continues: “We’re very physical. When we want to go into the universe, we can’t look at rock, like the Japanese. We have to actually go to the moon, we’re so literal . . . . There are actually meditative sciences, or sciences of the soul. We have devices, sensors, alpha conditioning machines. . . .we cant meditate without having this thing strapped on us.” His is not a complaint about gadgetry as such, but about the illusion that a kind of soul hunger and quest for faith might be literally satisfied by chemical assistance or electronic innervations. Turrell’s is the only voice in the Report to speak against the whole affair as a perversion of artistic values. For there was something metaphorically sublime in modern art’s longing for synesthesia which the A&T program makes literally ridiculous, and something consciously liberating in the contest between the artist’s mind and hands which the program would now automate.