Robert Rauschenberg's nine night electronic tennis match in the dark

Think Silicon Valley has a monopoly on tech disruption? In 1966, New York hosted an art-tech mashup on an unrivalled scale, as John Cage, Yvonne Rainer and friends got plugged in for a spectacular set of public performances

It was one of the strangest games of tennis New York City had ever seen. There, in the cavernous space of the 69th Regiment Armory, the US painter Frank Stella and tennis pro Mimi Kanarek rallied with rackets wired to an electronic network, so that each time they hit the ball, they switched off lights – until complete darkness reigned. A crowd of volunteers assembled in the gloom, and their ghostlike images were projected via infrafred TV cameras – equipment that was classified by the US military at the time – to an audience forced into a surveillance role. The year was 1966.

The history of art and technology is a history of envy. The rival fields – famously characterised as Two Cultures by CP Snow – have long challenged, borrowed or stolen from each other. Each wants what the other has. Art desires technology's seeming omnipotence, its cold power, its cutting-edge materials and processes; technology wants art's creativity, its free thinking, its radical innovation. And yet in spite – or because – of this fraught relationship, art and technology have converged in many ways, whether in competition or collusion.

Sometimes their convergence reflects the postwar dream of universal connectivity; sometimes, the dystopian nightmare of machines run amok. Electronic Superhighway, a new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, traces these dynamics back to an origin point: the New York performance series 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, where Stella and Kanarek's tennis match took place.

9 Evenings was a colossal enterprise, its ambition matched only by its scale. More than 10,000 people attended the nine-night event, where nearly 40 engineers from Bell Laboratories – ground zero for the modern telecommunications revolution – worked with 10 artists to bring the working methods of the postwar laboratory and the artistic studio into an unprecedentedly intimate relationship. Neither art nor technology would ever be the same.

Artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver launched the collaboration. Having produced a transistor radio-powered, sound-emitting sculpture together (Oracle, 1965), they wondered: what if more artists and engineers could meet and exchange information, techniques, ideas?

An invitation to produce a performance for a festival in Stockholm gave Klüver and Rauschenberg their prompt. They enlisted members of the experimental dance and theatre group Bastard Theater, which Rauschenberg had been working with since 1962, and several other composers and artists, along with some of Klüver's colleagues. At raucous brainstorming meetings, this group (which included John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer and Robert Whitman) contemplated proposals including using Telstar – the first telecommunications satellite to transmit telephone and television signals through space (developed at Bell) – and physically "materialising" smells.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these otherworldly ambitions, the relationship with the Stockholm festival fell through. But an alternate venue – the 69th Regiment Armory – was found. Its proportions were gigantic: it was approximately 150ft long by 120ft wide, with a ceiling 160ft high. Echo and reverberation times were as long as 5.5 seconds. Working on this large scale, the artists and engineers became fascinated by using remote controls for props and special effects.

They embarked on what would become the most demanding and innovative part of 9 Evenings: the development of a "theatre electronic environmental modular" system, which used a novel configuration of transmitters and FM receptors for the wireless control of lights, sound, video and other elements. 9 Evenings became less a matter of stage design than of creating an informatic network unlike anything yet invented.

Even with this extraordinary interface, the artists and engineers had a very hard time talking to each other. Roles were muddled; artists were forced to relinquish control and found themselves doing mundane tasks like cutting wires. They described feeling completely lost, powerless. Engineers had to cobble together new technologies, or make existing ones do things they were never meant to do.

Making 9 Evenings was unlike any traditional individual artistic process. It didn't look like a streamlined scientific inquiry, either. And it resulted in deeply epiphanic and traumatic experiences for its participants. On opening night, Klüver said, "there are three elements fighting: the artists, the engineers, and the audience".

When the lights did go up, many of the complex systems didn't work, or caused long delays. The massive audiences were listless, bored, angry. But then things started to happen. There were 10 performances, each presented twice, in different combinations, over the nine evenings. Rauschenberg and the engineer Bill Kaminski spearheaded the tennis match, appropriately titled Open Score. Cage and Coker led a group of performers who twisted knobs and manipulated machines to amplify live transmissions from phone lines, transistor radios – still a relatively new technology – and such unlikely sources as a coffee grinder and Terry Riley's turtle tank.

The sonic experience was open-ended and subject to the whims of signal strength and feedback. One night, audience members spontaneously got up and left their seats to stroll, sit and lie down amid the performers. Tudor and the engineer Fred Waldhauer further tested concert decorum, wiring a bandoneon (a cousin of the accordion) into an intricate system to generate sheer cataracts of sound. Noise cascaded out and ricocheted off the walls; feedback triggeredspeakers custom video graphics and lights.

In Carriage Discreteness, Rainer relayed stage directions via walkie-talkie to a group of performers who each had wireless earphone receivers and were meant to act on her instructions. The choreographer's mundane, affectless gestures mingled with a series of seemingly random occurrences on stage – a grid of screens toppled on cue; styrofoam, metal and plywood objects made by Carl Andre were strewn across the floor – with unexpected mishaps in the wireless system.

The performances defied all expectations of a traditional performance or technological showcase. And they defied any conventional hierarchy between art and engineering: the artists did not simply follow engineers’ instructions; nor did the engineers take a back seat to the artists. Far from it – they created and changed the very form of the work. People, things, tools and networks all became part of the collaboration.

9 Evenings led to the idea that such partnerships could proliferate – and that the best way to generate them was an organisation dedicated to matchmaking artists and engineers. Klüver, Rauschenberg, Waldhauer and Whitman led this effort, claiming to model their group on entities as diverse as the US's Rand Corporation and the League of Women Voters. The collective they assembled was dubbed Experiments in Art and Technology, or EAT, and amassed thousands of members of all stripes.

EAT would irrevocably change art and its cherished notions of a singular creator labouring alone. It changed technology, too, with echoes of the organisation's breakthrough inventiveness, its rejection of orthodoxy, in today's Silicon-Valley-speak "disruption". And EAT also changed what art and technology could be together, auguring possibilities still to come.