LUMA Arles presents Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology, on view from May 1st, 2025, to January 11th, 2026—the first major exhibition in France to explore E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). This ambitious survey, co-organized with the Getty Research Institute, brings E.A.T.’s radical vision to life through a vibrant assembly of archival materials, rare works, and large-scale reconstructions.
Founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, alongside Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, E.A.T. challenged traditional boundaries between art and science. At LUMA Arles, Sensing the Future retraces the collective’s most influential moments, from the groundbreaking 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering to the immersive Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, known for its fog sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya and geodesic dome. These projects reflect the E.A.T. ethos: art as a collaborative, exploratory force deeply embedded in technology and public life.
Sensing the Future at LUMA Arles is more than a retrospective—it is a call to reconsider the artist’s role in shaping tomorrow. Organized with the Getty Research Institute, the exhibition introduces French audiences to the little-known but influential initiative Projects Outside Art, which applied artistic thinking to areas like education and environmental design. As curator Simon Castets notes, these efforts remain relevant today as artists continue to act as agents of innovation across social, cultural, and scientific domains.
Expanded from its original presentation as part of the Getty Research Institute’s PST ART initiative in Los Angeles, Sensing the Future now makes its European debut at LUMA Arles with newly added works by John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Marta Minujín, Andy Warhol, and others. The show’s structure reflects LUMA Arles’s commitment to research-led programming and its belief in experimentation as a means of imagining new futures.
In a time of accelerating technological transformation, Sensing the Future at LUMA Arles offers not just historical insight but a timely reminder: art, as envisioned by E.A.T. and preserved by the Getty Research Institute, can still sense—and shape—the world to come.
Photography by SHUNK-KENDER | archival inkjet print from negative, GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, 2014.R.20 | gift of the ROY LICHTENSTEIN FOUNDATION in memory of HARRY SHUNK and JANOS KENDER | Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris | Fog © Fujiko Nakaya, courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology | light Towers © Forrest Myers.© J. Paul Getty Trust
Courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2025
Harold Hodges, Dry Cell, 1963
Photography by VICTOR PICON, courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2025
Courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2025