How does a mid-20th-century experimental art and science group help us make sense of our social media ecosystem today?

In this extended excerpt from Stanford professor Fred Turner, you’ll hear how the origins of our media landscape date back to the 1940s and the push to counter fascist authoritarianism through democratized access to information. He also explores the unexpected role experimental art-science groups like E.A.T. played in developing our current media culture.

You can read more in his book The Democratic Surround.

Stay tuned for more bonus episodes.

Check out Getty’s first podcast for kids and their families, If Objects Could Talk!

Listen as artifacts leave the museum vault and come alive to share their side of the story. Featuring objects from Getty's antiquities collection, each episode introduces listeners to the history, creation, and everyday use of incredible items like an Egyptian cat statue, an ancient kind of dice, and a glass flask shaped like a fish. Voice actors and immersive sound design bring these historical fiction tales to life.

Hear the rest of the series and learn more at https://www.getty.edu/podcasts/if-objects-could-talk/. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear the inaugural season, beginning September 8, 2025.

Laser physicist Billy Klüver really loved his lasers. But what divided the beauty of the laser (at least in Klüver’s eyes) from art? As the co-founder of the nonprofit group Experiments in Art and Technology, drawing the line between art and engineering came up a lot. In this bonus episode, we’ll hear Klüver talk about disciplinary boundaries in artist-engineer collaborations, and about his beloved lasers.

Stay tuned for more bonus episodes.

What do engineers get out of working with artists? In a series of talks designed to attract new engineers and artists to the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), engineers Fred Waldhauer and Robby Robbinson discuss how working with artists turned them from “aesthetic primitives” to true collaborators, even if they never quite fit in with the “arty crowd.” Hear how they approached their work in this bonus episode, featuring a longer clip from the archival tape.

What makes good art good and what makes that experience stick with you? Engineer Billy Klüver, who co-founded the nonprofit group Experiments in Art and Technology, has a great answer to that question—but we couldn’t fit it in our third season. In this bonus episode, we’ll hear Klüver talk about discomfort, threats, and the power of good art.

Stay tuned for more bonus episodes.

Did you know Robert Rauschenberg was fired by John Cage? Us either—until we heard Rauschenberg telling his side of the story to Barbara Rose in one of the interviews in Getty’s archives. We’re sharing clips from the archive as bonus episodes while you’re waiting on season four. In this first episode, you’ll hear Robert Rauschenberg explain how he stopped designing stage sets for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company all while gaining a better sense of his brusque yet charming personality.

Stay tuned for more bonus episodes every other month.

Check out Getty’s newest podcast, ReCurrent, a series about what we gain by keeping the past present. In this inaugural episode, host and producer Jaime Roque shares a heartfelt journey through his family’s history and the role of food in preserving cultural heritage.

Hear the rest of the series and learn more at getty.edu/recurrent. Look for it and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out the newest season of Recording Artists, hosted by actor, artist, and futurist Ahmed Best. Explore the Getty archives and learn about the innovative art-science group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in season three, out now.

This first episode of the season features Robert Rauschenberg, weaving archival recordings of the artist with new interviews by MoMA chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler.

Learn more about the episode and subscribe to the series.

The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.

Artist Fujiko Nakaya is best known for her ethereal sculptures made with fog. But her very first fog sculpture, which kicked off decades of working with this unusual and highly technical material, came about almost by chance—and thanks to her ties to Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). At 91, Nakaya is still making fog sculptures that compel audiences to consider the environment and our impact on it in new ways.

In this third and final episode, we trace the development of Nakaya’s iconic sculpture and explore what it can teach us about environmental and social justice. We also investigate E.A.T.’s relevance and legacy, from the 1960s to Silicon Valley. Archival interviews with Nakaya and commentary from art historian Eva Díaz and contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno round out the episode.

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The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.

Laser physicist Billy Klüver had always been interested in art. So when he started working at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the late 1950s, he began going into Manhattan and meeting artists—and in short order he was collaborating with them. He co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to facilitate these partnerships and worked to find corporate sponsors, with mixed success.

In this second episode of the season, we get to know Klüver’s role as a kind of translator and middleman between artists and engineers, and learn about E.A.T.’s partnership with PepsiCo at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan. Archival lectures by Klüver and commentary from communications professor Fred Turner and composer and musician Evan Ziporyn, who runs the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT, help tell this story.

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The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast.