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.
Activities of this sort became a regular part of the CAYC’s programs in 1974, when Glusberg took part in Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the event organized by Fred Barzyk, Douglas Davis, and Gerald O’Grady. Davis and O’Grady had been involved with the CAYC since the early 1970s. During his presentation, Glusberg showed Latin American videos produced by Ediciones del Tercer Mundo, the cooperative created a year earlier with Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse (GT-349; doc. no. 1478021).
Some months later those videos and works by other Latin American artists were shown at the State University of New York’s media studies center. The event was jointly organized with O’Grady (1931–2019), the director of the Educational Communications center at the university.
Those experiences—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 (Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, Getty Research Institute, 2023).
