Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations, 1966

Narrator: In the late sixties, Warhol began using new technologies to make art. This video shows one result of his experiments, the Silver Clouds. He made them with the engineer Billy Klüver. 

Julie Martin:  Andy said, I’d like to have a floating light bulb, in other words taking a quotidian object and doing something else with it.

Narrator: Julie Martin, one of Warhol’s technological collaborators, was married to Klüver. 

Julie Martin: So Billy went back to the labs and he and his colleagues calculated that you’d have to have a bulb almost as big as a house to lift the batteries that were available in those days. But in the meantime, a neighbor of his gave him this material, this heat-sealable Mylar from 3M and said, maybe you’re interested in this. Billy took it to Andy and Andy said, oh this is great, let’s make clouds. So Billy went back to the lab and they began to see if you [could] heat seal curves, which wasn’t done in those days. In the meantime, Andy just took the material, folded it over, sealed the edges, and made what he called Silver Clouds. I think this is a very much an artist response to the material, to working in the most simple way, the most physical way. But then of course you get this incredible thing, sculpture, with no weight, and sculpture that moves and responds to the environment.