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. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Going back to the CAYC’s very early years, showing films and videos was an important part of the center’s exhibition programs, in keeping with its goal of positioning itself as a space for experimental work, especially for projects that sought to combine art, technology, and communication. The center became seriously interested in videotape in 1974 when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, an event that was organized by Fred Barzyk, Douglas Davis, and Gerald O´Grady. The latter two had been involved with the CAYC since the beginning of the decade. During his presentation, Glusberg showed a selection of Latin American videos produced by Ediciones del Tercer Mundo, the cooperative he created a year earlier with Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse.
This newsletter invites readers to a program consisting of four lectures to be given by Glusberg after his participation in Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television. The article mentions the exhibition of a selection of Ampex-Toshiba equipment provided by Labadié, a family business that was founded by Roberto Este in 1967 and was a pioneer in the marketing of video cameras and closed-circuit televisions in Argentina.
That experience—which included discussions on the state of video, television, and new media in Latin America—provided the nudge the CAYC needed to organize Encuentros Abiertos Internacionales de Video in London, Paris, Ferrara, Buenos Aires, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo. Those events were used as platforms to present the productions that the center promoted to establish its connections to specialists on the international circuit.
