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Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy
Tracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control
In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Working contrary to assumptions that the rigid, structural nature of programming limits subjectivity, this book traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life. Situating their developments within the context of the Cold War and the ensuing crisis among the Italian left, Arte Programmata describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory. Creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, domestic home goods, and other multimedia art and design works, artists such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and others looked to the conceptual frameworks provided by this new technology to envision a way out of the ideological impasses of the age. Showcasing the ingenuity of Italy’s earliest computer-based art, this study highlights its distinguishing characteristics while also exploring concurrent developments across the globe. Centered on the relationships between art, technology, and politics, Arte Programmata considers an important antecedent to the digital age.
In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Working contrary to assumptions that the rigid, structural nature of programming limits subjectivity, this book traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life. Situating their developments within the context of the Cold War and the ensuing crisis among the Italian left, Arte Programmata describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory. Creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, domestic home goods, and other multimedia art and design works, artists such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and others looked to the conceptual frameworks provided by this new technology to envision a way out of the ideological impasses of the age. Showcasing the ingenuity of Italy’s earliest computer-based art, this study highlights its distinguishing characteristics while also exploring concurrent developments across the globe. Centered on the relationships between art, technology, and politics, Arte Programmata considers an important antecedent to the digital age.
312 pages, Paperback
Published October 25, 2022
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April 11, 2024
I'm incredibly biased because Lindsay is my advisor/I've seen some of this before but still managed to wildly exceed my expectations, one of my favorite books this year and one I'd really, really enthusiastically recommend to others. So much relevant stuff here about early (and persistent) metaphors of computing as liberation, strained efforts to engage computing in political contexts, asymmetries in art/technology collaborations and their lack of reception in both contexts, and ways artists struggled with an overfocus on gestures of political negation/efforts to truly "collectivize" art movements or the reception of works.
Art history is a pretty fascinating angle here too—to see notions of participation and interactivity (plus technocratic control/domination) in specific works. I would really strongly recommend this, quite readable and a pretty fascinating history. Longer review for capstone below!
Lindsay Caplan’s Arte Programmata follows the artists of a 1962 Italian exhibition through the next decade of their careers, examining art’s interaction with politics and new information technologies. It broadly focuses on aspects of ‘freedom and control’ in these works—how certain environments or works present constrained choice to viewers, hope to involve them in co-creation of a work’s meaning, or posit a sort of liberation through this co-determined meaning and choice. She’s precise about some of the challenges of these efforts; “creativity does not exist in a vacuum; structures can foster spontaneity; and even the sort of unbridled freedom that art appears to offer (freedom from necessity, determination, the limits of medium, tradition, artistic convention) is still bound by material, social, and historical constraints.”
Much of her focus, too, centers on the political context the works lay within; the 1960s were a time of incredible economic boom for Italy, and Arte Programmata’s exhiibit showed near the peak of optimism about state-led economic reform. This context—compared with increasing American individualism and enthusiasm about the free market—helped to determine the meaning of such works as much as their viewers.
Much of this idea about interpretation comes from Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work, a recurrent theme throughout the book; it was written as part of the original Arte Programmata exhibition and suggests some of its motivation. As Caplan writes, “artworks comprising changeable, indeterminate structures [...] grant viewers a larger degree of freedom when interpreting them than ever before.” At the same time, many artists hoped to (at least somewhat) constrain the ways such works could be interpreted. In doing so, artists exerted a sort of control over the audience paralleling (and often using!) technocratic methods of domination faciliated by new information technology. This complicates some of the presentation of such works as liberatory or collective, a theme which Caplan devotes considerable attention to.
Caplan also gives ample attention to the emergence of new information technologies, and the multidisciplinary popularity of information theory. In particular, Arte Programmata served as an early examination of computers, particularly engaging them as a conceptual platform to reconcieve individual freedom in relation to systemic constraints. She notes that the seeds of neoliberalism are visible in this period but that Arte Programmata—unlike many other works driven by such technologies—was not simplistically complicit with these attempts, but rather was motivated by political concerns around collectivity.
Much of this tension is in line with early rhetoric and popular conception of the role of the computer. As she writes, “computer enthusiasts imagined utopian digital futures,
in which people would be more individually empowered and free because of the increasing rationality made possible by computing.” These descriptions recur; in the early 1980s, computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte chose four words to describe the digital age: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering. Caplan critiques some of this early optimism, which saw technology as a sort of politics, “which obscured its real social effects and interfered with movements for structural change.” Many of its freedoms, too, were ‘negative freedoms’—freedom from certain constraints or restrictions, rather than freedom towards any distinct goal or end.
Olivetti, a large Italian computing company sponsored the Arte Programmata exhibition, but had a sort of socially minded enterprise to it too; compared with IBM’s large mainframes, Olivetti released the Programma 101, a small, user friendly, affordable computer. “The Programma 101 materialized the Olivetti company’s conception of the society they hoped their products would produce: one that was efficiently integrated and egalitarian, comprising empowered and creative individual.” In essence, while technology replaced politics in America, it made politics more legible in Italy, including less equitable social development in the latter half of the 60s and the dissolution of such optimism.
Chapter 1 examines the Arte Programmata exhibition itself, and its opening at the Olivetti Showroom in Milan. Artists filled the exhibition with kinetic sculptures and optically stimulating objects; while these had no direct relation to computers, they suggested structural and conceptual foundations of them. As Caplan writes: “The idea of ‘programming’ underlying Arte programmata therefore condensed complex and seemingly competing notions such as algorithmic functions, stochastic processes, and mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem into a single operating principle: a simple, logical structure can generate an unforeseeable number of possible forms.”
These potential forms and interpretations would be determined by the viewer, paralleling Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work; as Caplan writes, “the most radical ambition of an arte programmata was to generate a multiply authored, horizontally organized, and endlessly mutating composition— a leveling, even democratizing, of the creative process that included and activated the audience.”
There were flaws with this approach, however; “the same unstructured, abstract styles that
had invoked an antifascist freedom of the individual in the late 1940s and 1950s now appealed to those seeking an apolitical, immediate, personal, and antirepresentational art.” In a unique political gesture (why don’t politicians do this anymore, LOL) the leader of Italy’s leftist party condemned abstract art. Enzo Mari, one of the Arte Programmata artists, was “drawn to scientific, rational modes of artistic production as ‘the only true existing democracy,’ due to their basis in verifiable facts and reproducible methods…the artist’s goal to be formally innovative conflicted with the aim to be unambiguous and universally legible.”
Caplan proceeds into an analysis of Gruppo T and Gruppo N, two notable collectives involved in Arte Programmata. Gruppo N is of interest in particular because they “denied the ideal of artist as meaning-maker and replaced it with a vacuous parody”—while they did not eliminate authorship in their works, parodic exhibits like the ‘closed door exhibition,’ where the group presented a locked gallery door with a message that said “No one is allowed to participate,” served to demystify art and separate it from idealistic or transcendental values.
Caplan then examines the actual Arte Programmata exhibition in 1962, with particular attention to Eco’s open work; the Arte Programmata artists faced an audience with no basic common language or shared political project. As Caplan writes, “for Eco, open works are like information theory: both are meta-linguistic commentaries on the conditions of possibility for meaning, not an interpretation of a work in and of itself.” This general view was echoed by Abraham Moles, who suggested that complexity was contingent on the aesthetic conventions of the audience, and the best works would occupy edges of what is expected without being illegible or ugly. Neither of these notions ‘collectivize’ authorship, but rather delegate some of it; similarly, each spectator stands alone in their interpretation, rather than some shared notion. As caplan writes: “This attempt to have it both ways— to generate a collective aesthetic experience that also affirmed the spectator’s individual creative capacity or agency, as defined by the work of art— also led them to posit the inevitable element of control for any collectivity, however provisional, temporary, or inoperative, to exist.”
In Chapter 2, Caplan takes up immersive environments in the following years, particularly efforts to control spectator experience. She briefly takes up a MoMA exhibit called “The Responsive Eye” focused on optical or “op art.” She highlights reception of the show, particularly a CBS documentary about it; the dominance of talking heads in the show versus actual art highlights the instability of meaning in the show. Critique of the show similarly took on how “The Responsive Eye’s appeal to sensory experience aligned it with the individualistic sensibility of capitalist consumer culture,” much like many early critiques of Arte Programmata. Beyond simple alignment, critics challenged exhibits for suggesting that they fully cooperated with the world and were wholly complicit/co-optable, rather than, as Caplan writes, “empowering…inciting new collective experiences in their audience.”
Many of these debates took place as television adoption skyrocketed in Italy; thoughtful artists saw media’ s constructive power to socialize, that could be extracted from capitalist culture and show how individuals were embedded in a system. This sort of manipulation, even by artists, however, could similarly be seen as a technocratic form of domination. In Caplan’s words, “opinions differed depending on which side of the equation was seen to be at greatest risk: individual autonomy or social cohesion. Many at the time recognized the complex and contradictory way that mass media operated in postwar Italy/”
Caplan gives brief attention to the New Tendencies, an international group of artists, including several from Arte Programmata, that emerged in the mid 1960s. They explicitly aligned themselves with production rather than consumption, and research, imagining they could counter the logic of capitalism. At the same time, Gruppo N dissolved due to its fears of being incorporated into the art market, and struggles to work truly collectively.
Gruppo T reasserted themselves as programmers, imagining ways to ‘program their audience’ — exhibits that were highly choreographed for spectators, but using the language of liberation in their interpretation. This takes on interesting valence compared with similar immersive environments in the United States; for example, Beatriz Colomina argues that “ the Eameses were the architects, first and foremost, of a new form of technocratic power, in which the façade of individual freedom is maintained by providing a discrete, carefully chosen
array of choices within a rigidly controlled environment.” Some of the meaning of these works, however, can be seen as shaped by their respective political contexts, i.e. a more individualistic and capitalist American culture versus a more collectivist, social-democratic ethos in Italy.
Chapter 3 takes up more experiments in computer art internationally. By the mid 1960s, most Arte Programmata artists had abandoned the computer. Many believed formal experiments were il-equipped for new waves of social unrest in Italy; simultaneously, many overseas, particularly in the US and England, took up increasing interest in computer art. Arte Programma distanced themselves from “explicit language of technological programs, algorithms, cybernetics, and information theory because of how these platforms were understood by artists elsewhere. That is, the dominant ways that artists in other parts of the world articulated the political stakes of computer art rendered the technology unviable as a medium for Arte Programmata by the 1970s.” In essence, while artists of Arte Programmata made works were always attuned to social context, the changing international perception of the computer made the meaning of such works unstable.
Caplan examines several exhibits, like Billy Klüver’s Experiments in Art and Technology, MoMA’s “Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” the ICA’s “Cybernetic Serendipity, MoMA’s “Information,” and the Jewish Museum’s “Software” exhibition. She also takes up emergent theories of generative aesthetics, particularly those described by Max Bense and George Birkoff. Notably, these ideas still retained fairly traditional ideals of authorship, and tended to purge political context; “ It is a rationalized avant-gardism, stripped of any explicit social or political aim: artists aim to create pleasurable perceptual experience of forms, where pleasure is stimulation that comes from experiencing something just beyond the bounds of convention.”
Regardless, few of these works were received in such definite terms; the Howard Wise gallery refused to call any of these works “art” when exhibiting them, and research labs that produced them didn’t want to categorize them as art because it would be seen as trivializing the worthiness of scientific research. Computer artists could attempt to claim some non-aesthetic utility of their work, creating a sort of ‘dead zone’ where works were not received well by industry or an art public. In Caplan’s words, “Art and science could coexist in this way only because essentially nothing was at stake; the language of experimentation meant that everything made by these practitioners was potentially valuable, but nothing carried the burden
to be actually so. All the results— successes as well as failures— were seen as positive steps toward a future where computers could execute innumerable and as yet unforeseeable tasks.”
Similarly, because of such corporate sponsorship, many dismissed these works because of their political context. For example, at the ICA’s “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition, many suggested these works reflected the ICA’s connection with the Labour Party’s project of technocratic modernization. In the words of a critic of the time: “When we ignore the total social context in
which they work, and begin to accept the after- hours fun and games of IBM technicians as art, we are not all that far from admiring the aesthetic surface of thermonuclear mushroom clouds and ballistic missiles.”
New Tendencies similarly took this up; Alberto Biasi argued that engagement with computers required a revolution with capitalism, “given that computerization, mechanization, and most of all innovation were inseparable from the dominant values of capitalism, the exploitation of workers, and the perpetuation of war.”
Caplan devotes considerable attention in this chapter to comparing American and Italian views of information. For example, compared with Italian artists, Hans Haacke’s works at MoMA seemed to elaborate visible reality and bring a social system to light, based on well-formed assumptions about how society and subjectivity operate. Italian surveys, on the other hand, tended to position themselves as an inquiry into a world they didn’t presume to understand.
Chapter 4 takes up the “ends of programmed art” in the 1970s. By this time, Arte Programmata “was seen as nothing less than an ossified relic of bourgeois culture to be vandalized and dispensed with.” Gestures of negation seemed to be far more relevant to artists politically, and many felt that the economic structures, spaces, and discourses around art would overdetermine its meaning and make it complicit with existing systems of exploitation.
Caplan focuses on questions of participating (or avoidance of) institutional forms; groups found contradiction between their theoretical and political positions, prizing spontaniety politically while suggesting organization theoretically, knowing that capitalism thrives on discontinuity. In essence, as she writes, “Everyone might have agreed what they were against, but they were having a difficult time finding consensus on what they were for.” In many ways, these efforts were a failure—they tended to foreground individual agency which was dwarfed by the systems they hoped to confront.
Caplan concludes where she begins, examining notions of “freedom” feeding into neoliberalism. In her words, “articipation becomes submission and self- management another form of servitude; freedom is just another kind of control, leisure is labor, and creativity— far from a line of flight from systematicity— is demanded of all of us, all the time.” In essence, following Byung-Hul Chan, neoliberalism can transform free choice into free selection among items on offer, producing freedoms of liberation while foreclosing conditions.
Artists of Arte Programmata hoped at the time to pursue a collective sensibility that was being programmatically eliminated by other fields, embracing absurdity and opposing traditional organization. In her words: “No longer the party, no longer large, politicized structures, but an organization born from below, from everyday life, from relations of love and friendship, from the refusal of waged labor and the pleasure of being together.”
I’m obviously biased (she’s my advisor!) but Caplan’s book is remarkably engaging and particularly relevant; I’m left thinking lots about ‘pleasure activism’ and other individualistic modes of activism that recur. Similarly, these early metaphors of the computer are, most certainly, still with us, and to see similar themes emerge—freedom within constraint versus true freedom, notions of the computer as liberatory while void of political context—ring particularly true. Arte Programmata, which I’d only studied really briefly (in class!) before, is a pretty fascinating lens from which to view asymmetries in art/technology collaborations, questions of sponsorship and political content in art, and some of the ways artists reckoned with the political context of their works. It’s also particularly interesting to see how theories of information also informed methods of interpretation for artists, or how they thought about audience participation in a work’s interpretation in information-theoretical terms. I’d really strongly recommend!
Art history is a pretty fascinating angle here too—to see notions of participation and interactivity (plus technocratic control/domination) in specific works. I would really strongly recommend this, quite readable and a pretty fascinating history. Longer review for capstone below!
Lindsay Caplan’s Arte Programmata follows the artists of a 1962 Italian exhibition through the next decade of their careers, examining art’s interaction with politics and new information technologies. It broadly focuses on aspects of ‘freedom and control’ in these works—how certain environments or works present constrained choice to viewers, hope to involve them in co-creation of a work’s meaning, or posit a sort of liberation through this co-determined meaning and choice. She’s precise about some of the challenges of these efforts; “creativity does not exist in a vacuum; structures can foster spontaneity; and even the sort of unbridled freedom that art appears to offer (freedom from necessity, determination, the limits of medium, tradition, artistic convention) is still bound by material, social, and historical constraints.”
Much of her focus, too, centers on the political context the works lay within; the 1960s were a time of incredible economic boom for Italy, and Arte Programmata’s exhiibit showed near the peak of optimism about state-led economic reform. This context—compared with increasing American individualism and enthusiasm about the free market—helped to determine the meaning of such works as much as their viewers.
Much of this idea about interpretation comes from Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work, a recurrent theme throughout the book; it was written as part of the original Arte Programmata exhibition and suggests some of its motivation. As Caplan writes, “artworks comprising changeable, indeterminate structures [...] grant viewers a larger degree of freedom when interpreting them than ever before.” At the same time, many artists hoped to (at least somewhat) constrain the ways such works could be interpreted. In doing so, artists exerted a sort of control over the audience paralleling (and often using!) technocratic methods of domination faciliated by new information technology. This complicates some of the presentation of such works as liberatory or collective, a theme which Caplan devotes considerable attention to.
Caplan also gives ample attention to the emergence of new information technologies, and the multidisciplinary popularity of information theory. In particular, Arte Programmata served as an early examination of computers, particularly engaging them as a conceptual platform to reconcieve individual freedom in relation to systemic constraints. She notes that the seeds of neoliberalism are visible in this period but that Arte Programmata—unlike many other works driven by such technologies—was not simplistically complicit with these attempts, but rather was motivated by political concerns around collectivity.
Much of this tension is in line with early rhetoric and popular conception of the role of the computer. As she writes, “computer enthusiasts imagined utopian digital futures,
in which people would be more individually empowered and free because of the increasing rationality made possible by computing.” These descriptions recur; in the early 1980s, computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte chose four words to describe the digital age: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering. Caplan critiques some of this early optimism, which saw technology as a sort of politics, “which obscured its real social effects and interfered with movements for structural change.” Many of its freedoms, too, were ‘negative freedoms’—freedom from certain constraints or restrictions, rather than freedom towards any distinct goal or end.
Olivetti, a large Italian computing company sponsored the Arte Programmata exhibition, but had a sort of socially minded enterprise to it too; compared with IBM’s large mainframes, Olivetti released the Programma 101, a small, user friendly, affordable computer. “The Programma 101 materialized the Olivetti company’s conception of the society they hoped their products would produce: one that was efficiently integrated and egalitarian, comprising empowered and creative individual.” In essence, while technology replaced politics in America, it made politics more legible in Italy, including less equitable social development in the latter half of the 60s and the dissolution of such optimism.
Chapter 1 examines the Arte Programmata exhibition itself, and its opening at the Olivetti Showroom in Milan. Artists filled the exhibition with kinetic sculptures and optically stimulating objects; while these had no direct relation to computers, they suggested structural and conceptual foundations of them. As Caplan writes: “The idea of ‘programming’ underlying Arte programmata therefore condensed complex and seemingly competing notions such as algorithmic functions, stochastic processes, and mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem into a single operating principle: a simple, logical structure can generate an unforeseeable number of possible forms.”
These potential forms and interpretations would be determined by the viewer, paralleling Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work; as Caplan writes, “the most radical ambition of an arte programmata was to generate a multiply authored, horizontally organized, and endlessly mutating composition— a leveling, even democratizing, of the creative process that included and activated the audience.”
There were flaws with this approach, however; “the same unstructured, abstract styles that
had invoked an antifascist freedom of the individual in the late 1940s and 1950s now appealed to those seeking an apolitical, immediate, personal, and antirepresentational art.” In a unique political gesture (why don’t politicians do this anymore, LOL) the leader of Italy’s leftist party condemned abstract art. Enzo Mari, one of the Arte Programmata artists, was “drawn to scientific, rational modes of artistic production as ‘the only true existing democracy,’ due to their basis in verifiable facts and reproducible methods…the artist’s goal to be formally innovative conflicted with the aim to be unambiguous and universally legible.”
Caplan proceeds into an analysis of Gruppo T and Gruppo N, two notable collectives involved in Arte Programmata. Gruppo N is of interest in particular because they “denied the ideal of artist as meaning-maker and replaced it with a vacuous parody”—while they did not eliminate authorship in their works, parodic exhibits like the ‘closed door exhibition,’ where the group presented a locked gallery door with a message that said “No one is allowed to participate,” served to demystify art and separate it from idealistic or transcendental values.
Caplan then examines the actual Arte Programmata exhibition in 1962, with particular attention to Eco’s open work; the Arte Programmata artists faced an audience with no basic common language or shared political project. As Caplan writes, “for Eco, open works are like information theory: both are meta-linguistic commentaries on the conditions of possibility for meaning, not an interpretation of a work in and of itself.” This general view was echoed by Abraham Moles, who suggested that complexity was contingent on the aesthetic conventions of the audience, and the best works would occupy edges of what is expected without being illegible or ugly. Neither of these notions ‘collectivize’ authorship, but rather delegate some of it; similarly, each spectator stands alone in their interpretation, rather than some shared notion. As caplan writes: “This attempt to have it both ways— to generate a collective aesthetic experience that also affirmed the spectator’s individual creative capacity or agency, as defined by the work of art— also led them to posit the inevitable element of control for any collectivity, however provisional, temporary, or inoperative, to exist.”
In Chapter 2, Caplan takes up immersive environments in the following years, particularly efforts to control spectator experience. She briefly takes up a MoMA exhibit called “The Responsive Eye” focused on optical or “op art.” She highlights reception of the show, particularly a CBS documentary about it; the dominance of talking heads in the show versus actual art highlights the instability of meaning in the show. Critique of the show similarly took on how “The Responsive Eye’s appeal to sensory experience aligned it with the individualistic sensibility of capitalist consumer culture,” much like many early critiques of Arte Programmata. Beyond simple alignment, critics challenged exhibits for suggesting that they fully cooperated with the world and were wholly complicit/co-optable, rather than, as Caplan writes, “empowering…inciting new collective experiences in their audience.”
Many of these debates took place as television adoption skyrocketed in Italy; thoughtful artists saw media’ s constructive power to socialize, that could be extracted from capitalist culture and show how individuals were embedded in a system. This sort of manipulation, even by artists, however, could similarly be seen as a technocratic form of domination. In Caplan’s words, “opinions differed depending on which side of the equation was seen to be at greatest risk: individual autonomy or social cohesion. Many at the time recognized the complex and contradictory way that mass media operated in postwar Italy/”
Caplan gives brief attention to the New Tendencies, an international group of artists, including several from Arte Programmata, that emerged in the mid 1960s. They explicitly aligned themselves with production rather than consumption, and research, imagining they could counter the logic of capitalism. At the same time, Gruppo N dissolved due to its fears of being incorporated into the art market, and struggles to work truly collectively.
Gruppo T reasserted themselves as programmers, imagining ways to ‘program their audience’ — exhibits that were highly choreographed for spectators, but using the language of liberation in their interpretation. This takes on interesting valence compared with similar immersive environments in the United States; for example, Beatriz Colomina argues that “ the Eameses were the architects, first and foremost, of a new form of technocratic power, in which the façade of individual freedom is maintained by providing a discrete, carefully chosen
array of choices within a rigidly controlled environment.” Some of the meaning of these works, however, can be seen as shaped by their respective political contexts, i.e. a more individualistic and capitalist American culture versus a more collectivist, social-democratic ethos in Italy.
Chapter 3 takes up more experiments in computer art internationally. By the mid 1960s, most Arte Programmata artists had abandoned the computer. Many believed formal experiments were il-equipped for new waves of social unrest in Italy; simultaneously, many overseas, particularly in the US and England, took up increasing interest in computer art. Arte Programma distanced themselves from “explicit language of technological programs, algorithms, cybernetics, and information theory because of how these platforms were understood by artists elsewhere. That is, the dominant ways that artists in other parts of the world articulated the political stakes of computer art rendered the technology unviable as a medium for Arte Programmata by the 1970s.” In essence, while artists of Arte Programmata made works were always attuned to social context, the changing international perception of the computer made the meaning of such works unstable.
Caplan examines several exhibits, like Billy Klüver’s Experiments in Art and Technology, MoMA’s “Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” the ICA’s “Cybernetic Serendipity, MoMA’s “Information,” and the Jewish Museum’s “Software” exhibition. She also takes up emergent theories of generative aesthetics, particularly those described by Max Bense and George Birkoff. Notably, these ideas still retained fairly traditional ideals of authorship, and tended to purge political context; “ It is a rationalized avant-gardism, stripped of any explicit social or political aim: artists aim to create pleasurable perceptual experience of forms, where pleasure is stimulation that comes from experiencing something just beyond the bounds of convention.”
Regardless, few of these works were received in such definite terms; the Howard Wise gallery refused to call any of these works “art” when exhibiting them, and research labs that produced them didn’t want to categorize them as art because it would be seen as trivializing the worthiness of scientific research. Computer artists could attempt to claim some non-aesthetic utility of their work, creating a sort of ‘dead zone’ where works were not received well by industry or an art public. In Caplan’s words, “Art and science could coexist in this way only because essentially nothing was at stake; the language of experimentation meant that everything made by these practitioners was potentially valuable, but nothing carried the burden
to be actually so. All the results— successes as well as failures— were seen as positive steps toward a future where computers could execute innumerable and as yet unforeseeable tasks.”
Similarly, because of such corporate sponsorship, many dismissed these works because of their political context. For example, at the ICA’s “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition, many suggested these works reflected the ICA’s connection with the Labour Party’s project of technocratic modernization. In the words of a critic of the time: “When we ignore the total social context in
which they work, and begin to accept the after- hours fun and games of IBM technicians as art, we are not all that far from admiring the aesthetic surface of thermonuclear mushroom clouds and ballistic missiles.”
New Tendencies similarly took this up; Alberto Biasi argued that engagement with computers required a revolution with capitalism, “given that computerization, mechanization, and most of all innovation were inseparable from the dominant values of capitalism, the exploitation of workers, and the perpetuation of war.”
Caplan devotes considerable attention in this chapter to comparing American and Italian views of information. For example, compared with Italian artists, Hans Haacke’s works at MoMA seemed to elaborate visible reality and bring a social system to light, based on well-formed assumptions about how society and subjectivity operate. Italian surveys, on the other hand, tended to position themselves as an inquiry into a world they didn’t presume to understand.
Chapter 4 takes up the “ends of programmed art” in the 1970s. By this time, Arte Programmata “was seen as nothing less than an ossified relic of bourgeois culture to be vandalized and dispensed with.” Gestures of negation seemed to be far more relevant to artists politically, and many felt that the economic structures, spaces, and discourses around art would overdetermine its meaning and make it complicit with existing systems of exploitation.
Caplan focuses on questions of participating (or avoidance of) institutional forms; groups found contradiction between their theoretical and political positions, prizing spontaniety politically while suggesting organization theoretically, knowing that capitalism thrives on discontinuity. In essence, as she writes, “Everyone might have agreed what they were against, but they were having a difficult time finding consensus on what they were for.” In many ways, these efforts were a failure—they tended to foreground individual agency which was dwarfed by the systems they hoped to confront.
Caplan concludes where she begins, examining notions of “freedom” feeding into neoliberalism. In her words, “articipation becomes submission and self- management another form of servitude; freedom is just another kind of control, leisure is labor, and creativity— far from a line of flight from systematicity— is demanded of all of us, all the time.” In essence, following Byung-Hul Chan, neoliberalism can transform free choice into free selection among items on offer, producing freedoms of liberation while foreclosing conditions.
Artists of Arte Programmata hoped at the time to pursue a collective sensibility that was being programmatically eliminated by other fields, embracing absurdity and opposing traditional organization. In her words: “No longer the party, no longer large, politicized structures, but an organization born from below, from everyday life, from relations of love and friendship, from the refusal of waged labor and the pleasure of being together.”
I’m obviously biased (she’s my advisor!) but Caplan’s book is remarkably engaging and particularly relevant; I’m left thinking lots about ‘pleasure activism’ and other individualistic modes of activism that recur. Similarly, these early metaphors of the computer are, most certainly, still with us, and to see similar themes emerge—freedom within constraint versus true freedom, notions of the computer as liberatory while void of political context—ring particularly true. Arte Programmata, which I’d only studied really briefly (in class!) before, is a pretty fascinating lens from which to view asymmetries in art/technology collaborations, questions of sponsorship and political content in art, and some of the ways artists reckoned with the political context of their works. It’s also particularly interesting to see how theories of information also informed methods of interpretation for artists, or how they thought about audience participation in a work’s interpretation in information-theoretical terms. I’d really strongly recommend!
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