Arte Programmata: An important antecedent to the digital age.

In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies to experiment with art and technology and subvert conceptions of freedom and control. ARTE PROGRAMMATA is a book that 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, and other multimedia art and design works. Here, author Lindsay Caplan is joined in conversation with Tina Rivers Ryan and Jacopo Galimberti.

Lindsay Caplan is assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University.

Tina Rivers Ryan is an art historian focused on art and technology. Ryan is curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, and a critic who writes most frequently for Artforum.

Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and assistant professor at IUAV (Venice).

REFERENCES:
-The New Museum / Ghosts in the Machine Show (2012)

-Jackson Pollock

-New Tendencies (Armin Medosch)

-Antonio Negri

-Michael Hardt

-From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Fred Turner)

-Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum of American Art)

-Edward A. Shanken

-Pier Paolo Pasolini

-Spazio elastico (Elastic Space, 1967), Gianni Colombo

-Guy Debord

-Enzo Mari

TOPICS:

gestalt art, abstraction, politics, information theory, freedom, technology, operaismo (or: “workerism”)