Issue 7.1 / 2018: 17-21 The exhibition space as a laboratory Lia Carreira The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20200714141327/http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/313 (https://web.archive.org/web/20200714141327/http://continentcontinent.cc/) When Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was officially founded in the late 1960s, a movement towards more collaborative approaches between artists and computer scientists and engineers was already in motion. This movement was in part encouraged by the growing accessibility to recent technological developments by those outside of the traditional academic, military and industrial sectors. Although more accessible, those technologies (mainly in the realm of kinetics and telematics) were still quite foreign to many practitioners in the arts, and thus those emerging artistic practices were inherently collaborative in nature. The E.A.T., founded by engineer Billy Klüver, together with Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman and Fred Waldhauer, was then set from the beginning to be a catalysis for “[...] the physical, economic, and social conditions necessary for the inevitable cooperation between artists, engineers and scientists, and members of industry and labor” (E.A.T., 1969a). They, therefore, sought to pave the way to a foreseen future scenario where artistic and scientific practices collide. Nevertheless, the group’s founders considered its demise in the 1990s a natural fate. They argued that as soon as those technologies became ubiquitous there would be no need for initiatives such as the E.A.T. (Battista, 2015). Yet, the E.A.T. was more than the apparent idea of a pedagogical project to introduce new technologies to a broader public and groups of practitioners. It was a platform for experimentation in itself, acting within multiple stances of the artistic, scientific and exhibitionary processes. The organization did not only envision to support the production of artworks, exhibitions and related events worldwide, but also sought to encourage overall advances in technology and in the arts. Moreover, through its experiments, E.A.T. inevitably highlighted the lack of the necessary infrastructure and knowledge of art institutions of the time in dealing with tho emerging practices, thus indicating a pressing need to ret exhibition spaces and existing roles. It, therefore, only inserted those technologies into a disparate scenario in doing so, questioned the existing conditions of that very context. (https://web.archive.org/web/20200714141327/https://farm Article published in LIFE Magazine in 1966, on the collabo nature of the emerging practices of the time (E.A.T, 1969b Almost 30 years after its demise, the need for collaborativ experimental platforms between art and technology is still present. The theory sustained by E.A.T.'s founding fathers widespread accessibility of a given technology would cou the need for such spaces proved itself false over time. We see a plethora of “hackerlabs”, “fablabs” and “makerlabs” implemented at art institutions throughout the world. Thos platforms not only bring current practices and technologie public now born in the digital age and accustomed to netw cultures and software-based devices, but also apply and acknowledge them as part of contemporary culture itself. [1] (#ftnt1)