Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy by Lindsay Caplan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy by Lindsay Caplan W. Patrick McCray (bio) Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy By Lindsay Caplan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Pp. 312. In the 1960s, an array of art-and-technology projects, exhibitions, and collaborations burst forth from artists' workshops, corporate laboratories, and museum galleries in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. Lasers, miniaturized electronics, and new multimedia environments all became materials for artistic experimentation. One of the new technologies that most intrigued artists was the digital computer. Engineers and artists alike experimented with using computers to [End Page 609] generate images and music. At the same time, artists and curators displayed an increasing interest in abstract concepts like cybernetics, systems, and information. Given the often-rudimentary nature of the visual artworks produced, critics often attacked them on aesthetic and ontological grounds. Were they computer art or merely computer-generated forms? And if a computer made it, was it still art? The idea that machines might substitute for artistic originality paralleled contemporary concerns about the dehumanizing and deskilling effects of computers. To date, much scholarly attention on the art-and-technology movement (including work by this reviewer) has focused on large-scale efforts in the United States by groups such as Experiments in Art and Technology. Arte Programmata—written by Lindsay Caplan, an art historian at Brown University—expands that geographic coverage in provocative new directions. As her subtitle suggests, ideas of freedom and control along with computer science concepts such as "programming" and "information" were central topics for her historical actors. Unlike many of their counterparts in the United States, for example, the artists who joined collectives such as Gruppo N engaged with politics in more explicit and combative ways. Caplan does a wonderful job of situating their artistic activities in the context of the enormous political and economic shifts that Italy experienced in the 1960s. Throughout her narrative, we see artists' activities framed in various oppositional modes: the individual vs. the collective; capitalist vs. socialist economies; and, perhaps most notably, free or programmed spectators who experienced various interactive sensory "environments" (ambienti) created by artists in the mid-1960s. Despite having "computer" in the title, Caplan's book is less about using machines to make art and instead is more concerned with varying definitions of "programming." Although concepts like "cybernetics" and "information theory" were originally developed during World War II in response to specific engineering problems, Caplan describes how artists and curators embraced them in ways that someone like cybernetician Norbert Wiener might have found disquieting. While Max Bense and Abraham Moles suggested how one might quantify an artwork's "aesthetic information," the idea would likely have puzzled Claude Shannon (who placed information theory on a mathematical footing only to later write a brief but acerbic essay called "The Information Bandwagon"). Nonetheless, the spread of cybernetics and systems thinking into such diverse fields affords us an opportunity to look more deeply at how and where histories of technology and art overlap. Caplan's book takes up this opportunity most notably in her chapter on "The Politics of Information." She asks, for example, why the artists of the Arte Programmata movement "abandoned computers" around 1968, even as their creative colleagues elsewhere were just starting to embrace the technological possibilities. She locates the answer in the specific political circumstances and ideologies of Italian artists. Caplan focuses on "computer art's most contested, mutable, and socially relevant" issue, which was the [End Page 610] "meaning of information" (p. 131). In doing so, we get a glimpse of the ways in which cybernetics and information theory were understood, deployed, and exploited in varying national contexts. Well-written and relatively jargon-free, Arte Programmata is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of art and technology (and artists and engineers). Historians of technology may take issue with some of the factual infelicities that crop up occasionally: Wiener's first book on cybernetics came out in 1948, not 1946, and Olivetti's Programma 101 was not a personal computer, for example. I personally would have welcomed more discussion about how the...