Rebooting the art-and-technology movement: a review of W. Patrick McCray’s Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I evaluate historian of science and technology W. Patrick McCray's 2020 publication Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture, a historical account of collaborations between artists and engineers in the ‘long 1960s.' Positioning McCray's work in a broader discourse around art's postwar entanglements with science and technology (one that has unfolded largely within art history), I work to differentiate McCray's approach to this period's ‘art-and-technology movement' and make sense of his historiographic interventions. I discuss McCray's close attention to the engineers and industrial entities involved in art-and-technology collaborations-agents rarely given equal billing with artists in existing histories—and argue that this redistribution of focus both complicates and enriches working understandings of the art-and-technology movement’s rise and fall.