In 1968, Robert Irwin entered the Art and Technology Program, established by Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator Maurice Tuchman. The project, which ran from 1967 to 1971, put him in contact with Caltech’s Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he toured IBM’s San Jose facilities and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The same year, Irwin also met Dr. Ed Wortz, head of the laboratory at Garrett Aerospace Corporation, who was working on the physiology for NASA’s moonwalks. They started a fruitfully open interdisciplinary research project on perception (which also involved a young James Turrell before he left the project in 1969), that resulted in a lifelong friendship and changed Irwin’s perception of reality at large and of art in particular. Their repeated tests on sensory deprivation in anechoic chambers convinced Irwin that it is crucial to remove everything from the visual frame of an art work and to instead position the viewer at its core, so that he / she could experience ‘all the marvel inherent in our perceiving ourselves perceiving.’
