Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played a key role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists introduced the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
In 1969, at the first Arte y Cibernética exhibition, the CAYC demonstrated that its experimental work was in line with ideas that had been presented previously on the international stage. With this exhibition, presented at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires (which has branches in Rio de Janeiro and New York), the center sought to illustrate the possibilities offered by new creative technologies. There was, indeed, a programmatic interest in promoting a form of interdisciplinary activity “that reflected the time in which we are living.” In March a group of Argentinean artists, assisted by a number of programmers, engineers, and systems analysts from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Escuelas Técnicas ORT, explored creative possibilities generated by technologies that were available at the time.
This exhibition, which opened in August, included works by British and North American artists, as well as works produced by the Japanese group CTG (Computer Technique Group), a pioneer in the field of so-called computer art, whose works—shown at Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), the exhibition curated by Jasia Reichardt at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London—, and whose common interests with the CAYC had inspired explorations in this direction. At this innovative edition, which was supported by international critics and institutions, works by Argentinean creators were shown alongside works by other international artists that showed the results of a creative use of the computer and/or plotter.
[For more information on this subject, see GT-24 (doc. no. 1476281)].
