The basin of Mud Muse is filled with 8,000 pounds of mud made of bentonite, commonly used while drilling oil or natural gas wells. (Rauschenberg may have been familiar with the mud pits associated with drilling from his Texas upbringing.) Sound-activated pneumatic tubes installed in its base pump air through the mud in response to a tape recording of the sounds of the burbling clay itself. To create this complex feedback loop, Rauschenberg collaborated with a team of engineers from the aerospace and manufacturing corporation Teledyne, as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art and Technology Program. The resulting work seems simultaneously primordial—evoking ancient tar pits—and futuristic.