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 an important role in this process.
From its earliest days the CAYC had engaged in free-flowing communication with the international milieu, treating all participants as equals. When it opened the center in Buenos Aires it organized an auction of works donated by artists. The goal was to attract critics, curators, and art historians from overseas, including Jasia Reichardt from Poland, Charles Spencer and Willoughby Sharp from the United Kingdom (GT-07), and Charles Harrison from the United States. (GT 44). This was the beginning of a period of transnational exchanges that took place during much of the 1970s.
When Reichardt visited Buenos Aires in November 1970, she was the associate director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where, just two years earlier, she had curated Cybernetic Serendipity (1968), an exhibition that was taken to several cities in the United States. It was a pioneering project that explored the possibilities of computer-generated art and was one of the sources that inspired Arte y Cibernética, the exhibition the CAYC presented at the Bonino gallery in Buenos Aires in August 1969. For this exhibition, the Center invited a group of Argentine artists—assisted by a group of programmers, engineers, and systems analysts from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Escuelas Técnicas ORT—to explore the creative possibilities offered by new technologies that were available at the time. This initiative showed a programmatic interest in promoting an interdisciplinary approach “that reflects the period in which we live” (J. Glusberg, Catalog for Arte y Cibernética, 1969); multimedia works were among the most important parts of the center’s activities in its early years.
A second version of the exhibition with the same title, which opened in December 1969, included works by international artists. (GT-23, GT-24). It was then shown at several different venues, with a slightly different group of participants: GT-63 (doc. no. 1476298), GT-240 (doc. no. 1476436), and GT-330 (doc. no. 1476495).
