The '9 Evenings', one of the very first attempts ever at generating collaboration between artists and engineers resulted in the founding of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. The ten performances held from 13 to 23 October 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York were filmed by Alfons Schilling and photographed by Peter Moore and Robert McElroy. A colour film and slides were also made by Bell Laboratories. The film record disappeared for more than 30 years and then reappeared suddenly in 1995.
Added to the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre G. Pompidou, the series of ten original films of '9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering', restored and re-edited by the Swedish film director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, is an integral part of the collection called 'Des Dispositifs d’images'.
Jean-Christophe Royoux is an art critic, Advisor for plastic arts at DRAC Centre (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles).
The author of numerous essays on art, cinema and their interactions, Jean-Christophe Royoux has spent several months compiling a collection of books/DVDs dedicated to what he calls 'dispositifs d’images' (image devices), a concept describing a way of addressing an image beyond the usual forms of illustration, an archaeology of the exhibition form as a medium and a material.
