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

Abstract

The book by Lindsay Caplan, suitably titled Arte Programmata, explores the understudied art movement established in the early 1960s in Italy and focuses on the crucial, diverging, relationship between freedom and control. This relationship is investigated in the framework of artworks (freedom of creation, control of audience, and vice versa) and in the wider socio-political context of the era. The author succeeds in situating the efforts and struggles of Enzo Mari and Gruppo T members—as well as to a lower extent of Bruno Munari and Gruppo N members—within the national debates and international advances of multiple disciplines, including art, cybernetics, information theory, and politics. Overall, the book is not inherently an art or design history text—it rather requires a reader that is at least a connoisseur of Programmed art movements’ tenets, artworks, and exhibitions—but a critical work that observes the phenomena from the past in light of current debates: in the acknowledgments, the author refers to the impact of the works by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The book succeeds in enucleating cultural differences among the debates in North America, eastern and western Europe. The author masters the corpus of Italian sources and interviewed some of the surviving members of the Programmed art movements. This inclusion of first-hand personal accounts is significant, given that most of the protagonists of Italian Programmed art passed away in more or less recent times. The book is largely illustrated and completed by names index; endnotes refer to a rich variety of primary and secondary sources.