The TEEM (Theater Electronic Environmental Module) or THEME (Theater Environmental Modular Electronic) was a set of components created for 9 Evenings. These components included decoders, encoders, power amplifiers, and power relays, and could be assembled in various ways according to each artist's needs for each performance, a fact that is very clear from the diagrams.
What was offered to the artists was a combination of basic components to which they could add their own elements. The TEEM was designed to fulfill the function of an on-stage electronic environmental system. A significant portion of this equipment would eventually be made available to artists by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).
For 9 Evenings, most of these electronic units were located in the central control, where they allowed the artists to use a remote-control system for lights, speakers, cameras, microphones, film and slide projectors, motors, and other objects on stage. They were connected by cables (or wirelessly) using the AMP equipment. The design for a wireless system was developed very early on: a document titled "Description of Wireless System" describes a set of FM transmitters and receivers that offered numerous possibilities. Microphones, photocells, pushbutton units, and tape recorders could be used as inputs to control outputs such as speakers and relays that, in turn, could activate various devices. Although this wireless system was not yet called TEEM, it prefigured the main outlines of that system. It was not so much a matter of elaborating a stage design as of establishing a network composed of the different elements of the show, of creating an "electronic environment" and developing interfaces between the system and the artists and/or technicians.
The idea was behind the first drafts of the TEEM SYSTEM, which was presented as a wireless system capable of using radio waves to control various stage elements remotely. But it was also an artistic matter: the artists frequently activated these systems, using their bodies to control lighting, sound, and props and, in the process, making the stage an environment that responded to their actions. Thus, in Bandoneon!, an "arranged bandoneon" allowed David Tudor to control the sound, lighting, and projected images from a distance.
The TEEM System: Exploring the Theater Electronic Environmental Module used in 9 Evenings by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to innovate stage performances AS WE KNOW IT TODAY.
If a common system was developed with the aim of making the best and most effective use of available resources, it was never about creating a machine that would impose a single aesthetic system on all the artists. One and the same system does not imply one and the same application, nor even the same idea of technology - and when it comes to aesthetics, this is even less true. Undoubtedly, this is the greatest achievement of 9 Evenings and its most important message for the artistic experimentation that followed.
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