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SUNDAY

Though onetime Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver never considered himself an artist, pieces from Jasper Johns’ battery-powered-neon Field Painting to Andy Warhol’s helium-filled Silver Clouds wouldn’t have existed without him. As founder and guiding light of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), Klüver shepherded some of the most technically ambitious multimedia schemes of the late ’60s and the ’70s, among them the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka, a futuristic environment of mirrors, light, sound, and fog that surely ranks among the grooviest architectural spaces ever to house a Shinto altar. When Klüver died in January, an era ended. Local media artist and professor Randall Packer joins Klüver’s widow and partner in E.A.T., Julie Martin, for “The Story of E.A.T.: A Tribute to Billy Klüver,” a reminiscence of one of 20th-century art’s more undersung heroes. The program begins at 2 p.m. in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium, 4th St. & Constitution Ave. NW. Free. (202) 737-4215. (Glenn Dixon)