Michelle Kuo’s talk is drawn from her extensive research on the relationship between art, technology, and corporate research and development — as specifically realized in the organization Experiments in Art and Technology. Known as E.A.T., the group was founded in 1966 by Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Bell Laboratories engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer to facilitate collaborations between artists and engineers. E.A.T. posed art as a specific type of research, a model of experimentation and production parallel to engineering, invention, and nonlinear systems. Its ambitious scale and structure provided the possibility of alternate, unforeseen paths — leading beyond the increasing foreclosure of key aesthetic strategies in the postwar period, but also allowing for the exploration of systems already in place for technocratic expansion and control.  This session is part of "Systems, Process, Art and the Social" held on February 4, 2011, for the Festival of Art, Science and Technology (FAST) MIT 150 celebrations.