Inviting an artist into your lab sounds pretentious. Will you become
associated with his or her conceptual flakiness? In Art and Innovation
editor Craig Harris lifts the lid on Xerox’s artists-in-residence programme at
its Palo Alto Research Center. Artists using new media were paired up with the
inventors and technicians working in the field. This book is the school report
with bits of homework attached. And it worked: invention and art fed each other.
And it didn’t: researchers left, projects crashed. Bit like life, really.
Published by MIT Press, £24.50/$35, ISBN 0262082756.
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