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. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities provided viewers with a greater chance of seeing the latest innovations in scientific thought. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was a key factor in the achievement of social change.
During the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, the CAYC became a cultural home for the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), a space that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires after the military takeover of the university in what came to be known as “The Night of the Long Sticks” in June 1966.
In its early years the center organized a variety of activities with intellectuals whose support contributed to the circulation of ideas from different disciplines (analytical philosophy; mathematical logic; psychology; epistemological, semiotic, and linguistic problems), which had been excluded from official circles by the violence unleashed by the military government that took power in 1966.
This newsletter invites readers to attend “Introducción a la investigación semiológica,” the seminar to be presented by Professor Armando Sercovich (b. 1911), a renowned specialist in the theories of signs and semiotic systems. After the seminar that was presented in March 1971 (GT-32; doc. no. 1478590), this newsletter announced a new educational opportunity: a research team charged with studying social communication. The CAYC saw this initiative as a way to explore what communication theories might have to offer the practice of art, and especially, to underpin the center’s program of activities and the creation of its own institutional poetics.
