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 an 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 new exhibition at the CAYC—following the earlier event Arte y Cibernética y Argentina Inter-medios (both 1969)—was part of the series of art and cybernetics exhibitions that the center had organized up to that point. It was, however, the first time the term “artificial art” had been used in this context.
The Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires was founded in March 1969; its goal was to encourage the use of computers in artistic experimentation, thus laying the groundwork for the development of cybernetic art. A group of engineers and analysts, led by Ricardo Ferraro and Julio Guibourg, worked with a team of guest artists to express their ideas on computers. The team of artists included Luis Fernando Benedit, Antonio Berni, Eduardo Mac Entyre, Osvaldo Romberg, Miguel Ángel Vidal, Ernesto Deira, Hugo Demarco, Gregorio Dujovny, Mario Mariño, Rogelio Polesello, Isaías Nougues, Josefina Robirosa, and Norma Tamburini. The CAYC then proceeded to produce exhibitions that traveled to a variety of local and international institutions, positioning the center as a focal point for the exposure and promotion of experimental practices of this nature. The article in this newsletter is illustrated with works by Georg Nees (1926–2016) and Otto Beckman (1908-97), two forerunners in the field of digital art.
