Bell Laboratories

It was founded as Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. in 1925 and is generally known as one of the creative centers of the USA in the 1960s.

In 1957 Max Mathews developed the first version of his MUSIC-Programm. This programm was designed to compose computermusic.

Also A. Michael Noll spent nearly fifteen years (starting in 1961) on basic research at Bell Labs in areas as: the effects of media on interpersonal communication, three-dimensional computer graphics and animation, human-machine tactile communication, speech signal processing, and aesthetics. In summer 1962 he startet his first digital computer art Gaussian-Quadratic, which making him one of the earliest digital computer artists.

Bell Labs was particularly influential in the development of early computer-generated animation. In the 1960s, the laboratories housed an early microfilm printer that was able to expose letters and shapes onto 35mm film. Artists such as Edward Zajec began to use the equipment to make moving films.

Bell Labs was heavily involved in the emerging art and technology scene, in particular it contributed to a series of performances entitled ‘9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering’ organised by EAT in 1966. The performances saw 10 contemporary artists join forces with 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Labs to host a series of performances using new technologies.

Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon created one of the most famous works to come out of Bell Labs. It was Studies in Perception in 1967.

Also Claude Shannon, Lillian F. Schwartz, Charles Csuri, Bela Julesz, Manfred R. Schroeder, Ben Deutschmann, temporarily also Aaron Marcus (from 1966) and Billy Klüver, an engineer who also collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg to form E.A.T., worked at Bell Labs.

You may be familiar with the names of people I knew there: Claude Shannon, John Pierce, William Baker, and a dozen Nobel laureates, McCarthur Fellowship “geniuses” and other notables. Like Richard Hamming who, soon after I arrived from MIT in 1962, advised me to “slow down — if everyone here made more than one contribution to the Bell System in his lifetime, the System would be in chaos.” At first startled, I did accepte this as an excuse not to obsess over telephones. – [Source: Potrait of the artist as a young scientist]”

An archival site with various documents and images can be viewed here.