*Unsurprisingly, there wasn't one.
*I'm a bit surprised that it took me this long to look that up. I always figured it was AT&T footing the bill through sheer corporate largesse. Nope, it was Billy Kluver himself.
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...already in the first newsletter we said that if we were successful we would disappear. We would disappear because there is really no function like E.A.T. that needs to exist in society if we were successful. It would be perfectly natural for an artist to be able to contact an engineer him or herself. If it was natural, why should we be involved? And that's what we have stated from the beginning - and of course that is what has happened. The universities, the computer graphic societies, artist societies, and organizations like your own - it was inevitable.
People in New York wanted us to move in, to set up labs with all of the equipment, but we constantly refused. It was not a matter of institutionalizing. I'm very pleased that the initial attitude was like that because it meant that we could still exist.
To institutionalize anything in this area is dangerous and self-destructive. It's just a matter of solving problems, and you can do that forever.
It makes sense that people critical of E.A.T. have misinterpreted it as being very institutionalized - when in reality it is quite the opposite.
The main thing is that we never anticipated in the growth in the late sixties - and you had to take care of it - so you needed a staff. Everybody then immediately thought "Oh my God, they're making a lot of money". Actually, you can't believe all of the debts that we had. I saved E.A.T. by selling every artwork I had, not by making money. I sold things that would have made me a billionaire if I would have held on to them….
