“God Help American Science”: Engineering Theatre and Spectacle (2016)

In 2016 Seattle hosted a recreation (or maybe it was a memorial?) of 9 Evenings called 9e2. Organized by John Boylan, whose "Conversations" series is worth checking out, 9e2 was fun and intermittently thought-provoking but from what I understand not much more than an echo of the original NYC event which, as outlined in the McCray piece here, was itself an experimental shout into the dark that received many negative critical reverberations, but also some resonance that lasted.

There's a fine line where technical art - "new media" and beyond - and artworks made purposefully to reflect upon or expose specific topics, issues, or tools in science and engineering stop holding their own artistically and becomes either "gadget show-and-tell" (symptom: when it takes more time to put on the VR headset and wait for the creator to reboot the computer and scene than to view and interpret the 5-minutes-of-Unity-tutorials art within), the kitschy sculptural, musical, or whatever media equivalent of Popular Mechanics cover art, or interactive science museum displays.

That line is fine, and I wonder where each of the works and performances in the 9 Evenings program sat on the spectrum, but there are many artists currently and in the past who have adapted or interpreted science and engineering material successfully and to great effect (Refik Anadol comes to mind at the moment).