Arte Programmata: An important antecedent to the digital age.
And we have the ability to mobilize social systems, political systems, technological systems to better ethical ends. We need something to work.
Jacopo Galimberti:Lindsay's book finds a way to connect the sixties to the present, and this is particularly difficult.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Anybody who cares about digital art needs to read this book.
Lindsay Caplan:Hi. Welcome. I'm Lindsay Kaplan, assistant professor of art history at Brown University and the author of Arte Programmata, Freedom, Control, and the Computer in nineteen sixties Italy. And the book takes a close look at artists associated with the Arte Programmata movement in 1960s Italy. These are artists who begin working in the early 60s with kind of kinetic sculptures and assemblages and begin to work within immersive environments and light environments in the mid 60s and then go on and continually work in the field of household design.
Lindsay Caplan:And the book takes the idea of the program as a generative structure and kind of follows it through these disparate practices to unpack the dynamics of freedom and control in art but also beyond. Now I'm delighted to be joined today by two brilliant scholars and key interlocutors for this book.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Hi. My name is Doctor. Tina Rivers Ryan and I'm curator at Buffalo AKG Art Museum as well as an art historian focused on art and technology and a critic writing most frequently for art form.
Jacopo Galimberti:Hi. My name is Jacobo Gallimbert, and I'm an assistant professor at the University of Venice, at Uof, that's the name, and I'm an art historian.
Lindsay Caplan:Thank you guys for being here. I invited Jacopo and Tina because they represent the kind of two big intellectual conversations that I was hoping this book would kind of intervene and also intersect and kind of bring together, the world of kind of the history of new media art and art and technology experiments that Tina is really an expert in as a curator and both a, art historian and theories of art and politics and political organization in 1960s and kind of post war Italy. Questions then my book that really think about what broadly are the politics of form and Jacopo has written extensively on this in his first book, Individuals Against Individualism. He even writes about some of the same artists and his new book Images of Class, Aperisme, Autonomia, and the Visual Arts. You know, my book really has thrived in conversation with both of you and I wanted to bring you guys together to think transversely across the key terms that kind of come up in both worlds and also, the kind of stakes that come up.
Lindsay Caplan:I wanted to hear your thoughts and get questions from you about what you think the book is doing given these two different conversations that you're a part of, you know, nineteen sixties Italian art and theory and the history of new media art broadly conceived. So, to begin, I'd love to hear what you think that intervention is having just read it, and and then get some questions.
Tina Rivers Ryan:I can't thank you enough for writing this book. As I already conveyed to you privately, I am relieved that this book now exists in the world. I've been waiting for a book like this for a long time. As some listeners might be aware, the area of art and technology in the nineteen sixties, or even let's just broaden that and say the early history of art and technology from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, has not been as well documented, researched, and theorized as digital art from the nineties onwards. And so it's really a service to the larger field of art history that you're focusing on this earlier material.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Within the nineteen sixties, I think groups like experiments in art and technology and the art and technology program at LACMA, are better known. Arte programata, I think, is, you have completely convinced me, actually, that it is a really key part of this narrative and that it really offers a very different way of thinking about the relationship between art and technology than the movements that emerged elsewhere, especially in North America. Just on that level, in terms of what your topic is, it has really, I think, opened up the conversation about art and technology for me personally. I also really appreciate how you're not only sort of broadening the range of the historical archive, but also deepening the the theoretical and historical stakes in a way. So much of the research on this time period has sort of focused on simply establishing what happened when.
Tina Rivers Ryan:You know, there was such a huge gap in the secondary literature that it's really been invaluable for recent art historians to go back and sort of document that history and go through the archives. But the critical stakes of your research is truly breathtaking. And I know that, Jacopo has more to say about, you know, your rethinking of the relationship between individualism and community, between freedom and determination. But I think your framing of this book has made this material seem particularly relevant. And to sort of sum up, and state a little more clearly what I'm talking around, I think that in the field of art history, in the sort of subfield of art and technology, we, for a long time, have been caught in this human nuchal trap of critical or complicit.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Right? That any artist working with technology is either critical or complicit. And that has resulted, I think, in some sort of dead ends and has often, I think, put artists in a very awkward position of being classified as either techno utopianists or, you know, techno dystopianists. And, again, I just I'm not sure how helpful of a framing that actually is when you look at the things that artists have said about their practice or what the artworks are doing. And so I just personally think that allowing us to bring in cybernetic theory and to understand how one can work with technology in a way that neither gives into the sort of individualism of neoliberal rhetoric nor the kind of naive techno optimism that we see or that we saw.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Interesting. I use the present tense. That's, that's a Freudian slip that we saw so much, in the nineteen sixties, is is really, really useful.
Jacopo Galimberti:Yeah. I mean, I I I shared in this analysis, and I think Lindsay's book is extremely needed and timely. She found a way to kind of connect the sixties to the present. And this is this was particularly difficult because whenever you deal with technology, it's very easy to come across as outdated. Every form of art that, you know, to engage this with technology is exposed to these risks.
Jacopo Galimberti:And I think the way in which Lindsay managed to to connect past and present is a very subtle analysis of the cultural and intellectual debates that surrounded as a program matter, its critics, its curators, its artists, its outlets. And I think this is really the only way in which we can, develop also sometimes a source of empathy for these artists. Who are active in a very different, technological environment and media landscape. So very distant from us on that level. Yet, the kind of problems they they they engage with are somehow similar, or at least this is what the book manages to convey, in my view.
Jacopo Galimberti:This was particularly difficult because many, colleagues, good colleagues, actually provided rather, formalistic, analysis of art programmata and what's what has been also called op art, kinetic art, all these labels that are useful, but only to a certain extent. I think it was very easy to kind of provide a simplistic superficial reading of these optical effects. And this is what has been done in many exhibitions. And what Lindsay achieved was the development of a completely different perspective. And I think that just really sheds new light on a movement and its intellectual background.
Jacopo Galimberti:So I think it's it's absolutely necessary to read this book to understand the sixties, to understand, of course, you know, the very contradictory relationship between art and technology. But also, and this is also one of the strong points of this volume, the connection or relationship between art and politics. And I think Lindsay did a great job in in exploring this kind of the kind of political undertones of some seemingly playful, artworks. The idea of of freedom, the idea of community, the idea of collectivity, they sometimes embodied. This required, you know, very careful analysis of their discourses and sometimes very convoluted debates, that, you know, require Lindsay to kind of acquire very ins you know, insider knowledge of of jargons and and technical words or metaphors that are no longer in use.
Jacopo Galimberti:And so I think this is a absolutely pivotal book for the history of art and for the history of of nineteen sixties culture in Italy, but not only in Italy, in Europe, in Western Europe.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Can I just build off of what Jacopo just said to to say that not only are these works playful, they're also abstract? And another thing I really, really appreciate about Lindsay's book is that she is renewing the conversation about the politics of form and helping us understand, you know, that that this traditional narrative of Artaprokamata is being sort of apolitical up until the moment at which the movement dissolves and they all become like graphic designers, and we have this integration of art into life, that that narrative actually occludes the way in which their work that was abstract and playful was always already political. Right? And to allow us to sort of locate that politics in the work through the mobilization of new models of subjectivity, basically, and agency as well, right, that are premised not on these more traditional models, but on a more cybernetic networked way of being, I think, is, like, really, really important contribution. Perhaps I can get started, a conversation here with, with a question for Lindsay.
Tina Rivers Ryan:You know, as, you know, a curator who is really interested in this time period, one of my great frustrations is that a lot of the objects themselves are actually not extant. And you know Lindsay's heard my horror stories of going to visit museum collections and I'm not gonna name names, but going to visit museum collections and you know having made an appointment to view certain artworks and literally being brought out like a box of parts. And so I I wanted to, start with a question which I'm just personally very interested in, which is what was the process of researching this material like, and what were the sort of frustrations or the surprises of working with this particular archive? I know you said at, you know, sort of the outside of the book that a lot of this material now has been on display more recently, including in museums of modern and contemporary art in Italy. And so that you did have the chance to see it in person.
Tina Rivers Ryan:But I know you also mentioned that a lot of the works you couldn't see in person and were relying on secondary documentation. So, sort of as a service to future scholars who might also be interested in mining this territory, I wonder if you could talk about that.
Lindsay Caplan:Yeah. Thank you so much and thank you for your comments. I wanna just also say quickly that, you know, it took me a while to get my head around these works. You know, what you're describing as a kind of dense unpacking. I started with a real question that started with this kind of incommensurable duality of this abstract work and these artists who were so politically invested.
Lindsay Caplan:That was a problem for me initially that I felt like I needed to solve And it forced me to rethink the terms and by which I had come to judge what political art was. And so it really took a while. And I initially relied quite a bit on the language of the artists and the writing about the artists. Umberto Eco, who's a big figure in the book and his notion of the open work is, you know, not quite open, but not not quite closed, you know, a field of possibilities. And all of this did a lot of work for me at the start.
Lindsay Caplan:And I got very, seduced by that language, but not this, not that, both this, both that, that I think initially was a trap that was set for me in the research to some extent because it obscured the stakes and also the material. The fact that when you look at these works and you see them, and this is to get to answer Tina's question of the kind of revelation I had once I started to actually see them, which happened quite late in the research, you know, after a couple of years or so of reading, that you feel both empowered but also manipulated. You know, these are abstract kinetic works. The little ones are kind of silly, almost. They feel a little playful, but also childish.
Lindsay Caplan:You know, they look like little experiments in gestalt form or kind of something that you might they do look like children's, mobiles. Some of them are but also they look a little bit like science experiments, and so there's a kind of you go back and forth between both playful and also controlled. And that was the feeling I got, a feeling like these works were inviting you to kind of an unbounded associative subjective process, but also they kept kind of you kept coming back to their simplicity and their controlling effects. And so it was the work that spoke to me, did began to tell a different story. And I was lucky that they they started popping up.
Lindsay Caplan:When I started this project, it was very unknown. And I started reading about arts program at the when I was in graduate school. I was immersed in the rhetoric, you know, kind of debates about social practice and relational aesthetics. And I was seeing the kind of conversation about open endedness and the open work everywhere because these were social practices that were meant to establish a setup in which people could participate and be ultimately free. And then when I learned that the open work coincided with this exhibition on programmed art, that was where my question came from.
Lindsay Caplan:But it was also a moment when art and you know, everyone wanted to be a part of an digital like the prehistory of the digital avant garde. So I remember seeing at the new museum, the Ghost and the Machine show had a lot of this work. I think it might have been 2012. And the Galleria del Arte Moderna in Rome has a lot of this work, a lot of their kind of objects. The Museo del Novocento in Milan had all the environments on the Top Floor when I was doing my research.
Lindsay Caplan:So I was able to see a lot of these works. And, again, they to really unpack experientially and begin to read what it meant experientially to have, especially with the environments, these abstract light environments with mirrors and black lights and little navi labyrinthine spaces, you know, the fun but also the kind of terror of being inside these spaces. And really think about what are the political analogies and theories of subjectivity that they invite you to kind of feel but also think. So I would say there were a lot of the works I got to see in Italy and then in in shows in New York, and there was a show, in MoMA that had some of these works. But then Grupo n's environments, in particular are only diagrams and I had to really work again with literature like writing about them.
Lindsay Caplan:In some ways that itself was a gift because I'm interested in how the artists diagrammed the works and what, you know, how they imagined the subject the spectator was going to interact. And that for me was as much an important part of the story as the works themselves. And of course, the discourse and the discursive context, but also the context in which these become thinkable was important to me as well. So I felt like seeing the works was important, but, all of that other archival research and and and the lack of the objects really allowed me to see what I saw.
Jacopo Galimberti:Lindsay, I I wanted to, pick up on on some of the issues that Tina raised. And I wanted to ask you something about the political agenda of as a program matter, more specifically, about the connections between Atropogrammeister and Yugoslavia, which was a socialist country, but was not part of the socialist block. And Yugoslavia went went on to become one of the most important countries of the so called, Third World, Movement at the time and played a major role in the promotion of Ataturk Prokomasa with several exhibitions. So, I wonder whether you can elaborate a bit more about this kind of connection if it's, you know, meaningful.
Lindsay Caplan:Yes. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. The actual material connections between Arte Programatza and artists in Yugoslavia were key. They were mostly forged through the New Tendencies exhibitions that began in 1961 that brought together this kind of international network of artists working in geometric abstraction, drawing on metaphors and ideas of computers and cybernetics.
Lindsay Caplan:And these exhibitions and the conversations that happened around them were in large part about artists who were struggling to work outside the Cold War binary, which in art really manifest as a kind of debate between figuration and abstraction. Abstraction being kind of completely absorbed by, the Western democratic capitalist model with Pollock as the kind of pinnacle and figuration kind of socialist realism, aligning itself with the kind of Soviet collectivism. So not only was the cold war overdetermining, you know, political models, but it was also absorbing kind of aesthetic models at the time. And so these artists were looking for something else, for a a model of individuality that was was not socially responsible and anti collective and a model of collectivity that still maintains some dimension of individual freedom and flexibility. So, you know, a form, but also a kind of political model that could just be completely outside this again back and forth back and forth.
Lindsay Caplan:And so it's not incidental that in dialogue with artists from Yugoslavia that they're able to see cybernetics of all things in this way because cybernetics is the theory of systems that can be flexible but also functional. And it really takes on uncertainty and unknowability as I as I kind of try to outline in my book as a condition and wants to work and function nonetheless. And so we we begin to get some very interesting alignments and kind of understanding of cybernetics as an alternative to, again, the the cold war binaries. And this is something that the new tendencies group, which is artists from Latin America and both Eastern And Western Europe really take on. And one of the things I was interested in doing was parsing, like, not necessarily Arte Programat as uniqueness because they share a lot of these things with these artists, but kind of what makes them singular or kind of what is also their position in Italy maybe bring.
Lindsay Caplan:And I can say more about that in a minute, but the fact there's the fact of Yugoslavia and the conversations with artists in Yugoslavia about alternatives to the capitalist communist binary were were essential and formative. And I think structured how they're able to see what they saw when they read cybernetic theory, when they looked at information theory, when they kind of encountered computers. And this is something that the scholar, Armin Mendoce, in a great book of his On New Tendencies, he goes comes right out and calls them cybernetic socialists. And you can find this a lot, and I teach this, in fact. I kind of teach these multiple different readings of cybernetics, which in The US context is often seen as just a kind of prehistory for neoliberalism and always already neoliberal and always already tyrannical.
Lindsay Caplan:And that is both because it has roots in wartime cryptography and technologies and also because it does in fact become neoliberalism. But these artists, largely because they weren't actually engineers, can read cybernetics irresponsibly, I think, and do what they want with it. And I think it's really important to see what they see. Also to your point, Jacopo, about the political question, one of the things that interests me about what's different about RT programata is also what they see when they see politics. Because what I found was and this was not initially part of the book.
Lindsay Caplan:I really didn't deal with autonomy. I didn't really get deep into the political questions that were happening at the time. And as I did, I saw that these questions of organization and form and kind of what structures can allow for the greatest freedom, they were there in the political theory. And so I came to see that a lot of the ways in which not just this the beautiful balance of structure and agency and flexibility and functionality of cybernetics that that a lot of these artists share, but also the kind of deep investment in form as a political question. That was something that, again, I'm I'm hesitant to say unique, but it's something that has a certain kind of tenor, a certain kind of intensity with the Italian artist that I think makes them somewhat singular.
Lindsay Caplan:It really was also bringing multiple histories, not, you know, the the conversation with Yugoslavia, but also what does seeing that from the position of Italy allow us to see that I tried to really take seriously and balance in the book?
Tina Rivers Ryan:I was gonna pose this question to you, later, but actually now seems like a great time to bring it up. You know, you're talking about the singularity of Arte Pogramata, and I just wonder in terms of how we understand the relevance of this material to art today. You know, it's something that Jacopo already sort of touched upon, you know, that this is a book that definitely has a relevance, But I wanted to ask you about that. It's something that I was thinking about is how you understand the extent to which we might extrapolate from or at least learn from Artaprogramata and sort of apply it to what's going on with art and technology today. Because you do make an excellent case that there is this sort of singularity, right, that you do need to to understand, for example, their reading of cybernetics or their mobilization of cybernetics, you need to understand the political context of post war Italy, and the investment there in the idea of a programmed social order.
Tina Rivers Ryan:And so given that that context is not universal, but quite specific, yeah, I just love to hear more from you. You know, I know what happened to Archa Progamata, and I know you touched on this in the conclusion, so maybe it's just a matter of recapitulating that.
Lindsay Caplan:Sure. Thank you. Yeah. I personally feel that I was able to see what I saw in this material because of my own historical position. You know, really, learning about art and politics in the early two thousands when relational aesthetics were big and also coming to critical art practice and critical art history.
Lindsay Caplan:After poststructuralism, after neoliberalism, like deep in neoliberalism, I feel like my intellectual formation was of a moment when, you know, and I say this in in the acknowledgments, I think, and it's also why the book ends where it does, when everyone was reading Harte Negri and Empire and Multitude, and these were super important formative questions. This was also a moment when everyone in my graduate school reading groups, it seemed like communism was a was a kind of exciting word again, small c communism. There was a deep suspicion of a kind of individualist freedom that it felt like was maybe inherent in a lot of the ways in which we talk about critical art and criticality as such and the negative gesture. So there was a kind of paralysis around thinking about positive organizing because you're subject to critique. And I feel like I saw that.
Lindsay Caplan:I felt that, and I found something exciting, not necessarily with the program as it manifest in RT programata, but that the program manifests as it did in programata. So I would say I'm wary to say the lesson is to kind of reproduce or replicate as you say without contextual specificity. But the lesson is kind of how we need a materialist and historically sensitive idea of freedom because depending on where you are, it just still feels like the pendulum swing between a kind of negative assertion of, well, we need fewer constraints or the trap that the freedom and control binary can set for us. I think today too, Tina, you know this better than I do, the rhetoric of freedom is so ingrained into how we talk about technology and this is often from a kind of North American perspective. And again, either you're critical of that, you see art and technology experiments as kind of asserting an individual freedom that in, in fact, the ways in which people move from the art space to the kind of institutional design space tracks as becoming neoliberalism and becoming the internet and becoming the kind of facade of freedom that we find.
Lindsay Caplan:But I was interested again in thinking of another history and another historical model in which the technology isn't always already complicit with the present as such. I also think that, again, given that, you know, I think the ways in which things like cryptocurrency and NFTs are framed in terms of freedom, and again, Tina, this is really your area of expertise, but I see such the same ideas about freedom from constraints and kind of a total libertarianism as really getting attached to certain technological forms of deregulation and networks that and, you know, a certain collapse between a certain network form and democracy as such when, of course, these forms that can be grossly undemocratic. That I think kind of in my strange way at this case study that seems so far away, I had all of that in mind when I was writing. You know, a deep suspicion of structurelessness. Oh, concern about freedom as such as a kind of individual antisocial program.
Lindsay Caplan:These were very much in my mind as I was writing and determined again how I was able to see what I saw and and appreciate the the historical sample that I
Tina Rivers Ryan:study. Yeah. I know. I mean, let me know if this is a misreading, but, I thought one of the things that was great about your work is you've just sort of gestured towards is that in it, I find not only a lesson for those crypto anarchists techno libertarians who define freedom negatively as a freedom from constraint. I also find in it a lesson for those who don't have an understanding of freedom that is sufficiently grounded in the sort of, like, materialist and social infrastructure.
Tina Rivers Ryan:I just keep thinking of the phrase better living through circuitry. In my mind, that used to be aligned with this kind of, like, naive techno optimism, but I think what I got from your book is, you know, an understanding that, like, the circuitry is a necessary part, actually. Like, in a sense, the circuitry is actually a precondition for freedom. At any event, we we have the circuitry. Right?
Tina Rivers Ryan:So as you point out, in a way, we've been asking the wrong question all along because we've been asking an ontological question, about technology, when what we needed to be asking, right, was rather about how technology can be mobilized or weaponized to different ends, and what our relationship is to that circuitry. And understanding that the claims made about the technology are not self evident, that they're not categorical a priori, right, that rather the politics of the technology only is sort of instantiated in particular cultural context, historical moments, etcetera. So, in that sense, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I found it a helpful corrective to two very extreme positions about technology, which is why it's so sort of, like, relevant and and applicable to this contemporary moment.
Lindsay Caplan:Yeah. Absolutely. That's a lot of what I was going for because a lot of the historians of technology that I love, they trace what was and this is people like Fred Turner or Pamela Lee and others as well. We can kind of see a real kind of earnest progressive politics get kind of morphed into particular forms like networks, communication, or participation. And then those get abstracted from their context and then they can be instrumentalized and kind of mobilized to nefarious ends.
Lindsay Caplan:So I think a return to the historical specificity and kind of how participation or, you know, to what ends communication is really the kind of questions I think we need to be asking. Again, we don't necessarily just take the model and apply it, but these are the ways we unpack it. And I do think that recent writing, I think of Benjamin Bratton or even Naomi Klein's, like, a little manifesto during the pandemic about technology. I think, you know, there was a moment during the pandemic when I was reading stuff where there seemed to be this moment when people were thinking, okay. So we have these capacities.
Lindsay Caplan:We have planetary computation. We have the ability to mobilize social systems, political systems, technological systems to better ethical ends. You know, we have these resources and they don't always have to be tyrannical or surveillance. Capitalism, you know, how might we think differently because we need something to work. And the other thing is I started this book at a moment when I felt like a lot in the art world, there was a kind of equation with kind of critical art practice with kind of noise making jamming machines, which I think is a really important legacy.
Lindsay Caplan:But again, I was looking at this in a moment where I was thinking, you know, I'd like something to work once in a while and a kind of fatigue with that fetish for dysfunction. That was also something that was very much on my mind. And another was the concern with when does the focus on technology as a form and a kind of looking for its inherent politics actually obscure from these political questions of, like, like, how and to what end.
Jacopo Galimberti:Lindsay, let me ask you something about the kind of narrative you build in your book because I remember reading a an important book, Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture and having the impression that that narrative was presented as a kind of quintessential shift from countercultural milieu to a more libertarian milieu, whereas my impression was that that was very specific to a very specific area of The United States. My understanding of your book is that you kind of suggest a different narrative, one which, artists, working with computers and cybernetics, in the latter part of the sixties stopped working with computers because computers in Italy are perceived as serving a different function, has different connotations. And so I I wanted to ask you, if you could say a bit more about this kind of, let's say, alternative narrative.
Lindsay Caplan:Yes. Absolutely. Well, one of the things that kind of drives that narrative is by defining the program not as a technology like a computer, but as a particular idea, as a certain conceptual conceit, as a kind of generative structure that kind of has infinite possibilities, but nevertheless can be bounded and kind of grounded, excuse me, in something that can be understood and comprehended and and seen. So you have a a balance there for these artists between a kind of discernible structure, endless freedom, spontaneity, and kind of agency. And I do think that Humberto Eco's idea that, you know, this structure, which is parallel to the open work is that has a field of possibilities is really important because he's thinking about how meaning can happen, how you can have multiple meanings but not total chaos all the time.
Lindsay Caplan:One of the key differences was that what happened in The US was that it's kind of spun off into into kind of total individualist relativism, and there wasn't this kind of focus on the bounded, the the other side of it, the control part, the collective part. But, also, it was always an idea. The artists in Arti Programata almost never use computers as a medium, and I say that outright. They use it as a conceptual idea, as a kind of a score, you know, or like a structure for by which they make these abstract assemblages. And so what looks like an abandonment of computers, I say, is a continuation of these ideas about programming in the field of design.
Lindsay Caplan:And here they begin to think about objects as kind of catalyst for change as they enter a system and kind of can provoke change as they move through. So again, we have that balance between the structure of the system and the kind of agency of the individual node. And that idea structures the narrative of the book, And it allows me to make the arguments about the continuity among their work, which is an argument I believe in. But, but also it it kind of gets us away from thinking about computers and programming as principally a medium, which is often how, it's understood and then people can talk about kind of the experimental formal quality of this work. But looking at the program, it's this set of relationships and how it structures a relationship between artist, object, and audience, I think opens up a whole other set of questions, about how meaning happens, about, you know, again, and it it allows us at least I argue to extrapolate all sorts of ways to understand subjectivity and collectivity as such.
Lindsay Caplan:So it was a narrative structured by thinking about a kind of intellectual history of the program and that intellectual history includes art history because I treat the artworks as these kind of philosophical propositions as ways of working out these questions of communication and action. And that was there, you know, of all the things that changed in writing a book, I have to say that that narrative was actually there. That was one thing that stayed the same. And I've been working on this book for many, many years, too many to say. But that was one thing that stayed because I always saw the program as an as an idea rather than a material.
Jacopo Galimberti:As a model?
Lindsay Caplan:As a model. Yeah.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Or a metaphor.
Lindsay Caplan:As a metaphor. I know. I what I'm now obsessed with is thinking about the difference between all those words. This book kind of slips, I realized, between a lot of these, but I am obsessed with thinking about that. And I am actually very interested in thinking about the limits of the model because I think the question of jumping from the scale of the artwork to the scale of the nation state is something we still need to, I think, as art historians to kind of grapple with and thematize.
Lindsay Caplan:I won't do that here, but I will say that that remains an open question for me in the book. But I think when it comes to theorizing these questions about how meaning happens and subjectivity, the artwork is a great place to do that. I think a very compelling place to do that.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Building on what you just said, I wanna ask you a question that is both extremely straightforward and also potentially really thorny. After having written this book, how would you define digital art? Oh, wow. So I I ask because I think about the books that I read in a kind of spatial way as, like, where they sit on my bookshelf, which is both, like, a practical question, but also a historiographic one. And in my mind, like, I have already, you know, gone out on social media telling everybody I know that anybody who cares about digital art needs to read this book.
Tina Rivers Ryan:And I realized that it's it's always good to manage people's expectations and that I should perhaps warn them that this is actually a book that is not about artists using computers at all, and yet I think this is one of the most important books about digital art that has come out in recent years. So it's something that I'm also sort of struggling with is where do we draw the boundaries? And this is something that, for example, Christiana Paul, the, curator of digital art for the Whitney, has written about in her books on digital art that it gets very tricky, Like, if we want to be sort of, like, unreconstructed formalists and say, Well, you know, it's anything made with a computer, that increasingly is not tenable because name any artist right now who doesn't use a computer at some point in their creative process. You know, a painter painting from a photo that was shot with their iPhone that they're viewing on their desktop, for example. So she argues that rather we should think about digital art as work that is not only made with computer technologies, but also exhibited, displayed, experienced via computer technology.
Tina Rivers Ryan:So it's artwork that's interacted with on a screen or through digital projection, etcetera. I've been chewing over that a lot recently because as somebody who is a historian who is interested in the sort of very early moments of artists encountering computer technologies, it's not just art programmata. There's a lot of groups who were only able to interact with a computer at the level of sort of metaphor, but who were definitely inspired by it. And actually, one of the major arguments that's been put forward recently by people like Edward Schenken, for example, is that in many ways, the way that artists working with computer technology fits into the the larger narrative of post war art is on sort of on the level of ideas. Right?
Tina Rivers Ryan:That there's nothing more conceptual than algorithmic art, and that there's nothing more algorithmic than conceptual art, I guess, in some sense. Right? I'm just wondering, would you call Arte Programata, like, do you wanna claim them for nineteen sixties, you know, quote, unquote, computer art as it was known back then? Or do you think it's important to separate them out and have a little bit of distance, and what would be your motives either direction?
Lindsay Caplan:Thank you for elaborating because it was great to hear you talk about that. But, also, it helps because I think I'm definitely of the mindset that, you know, you can analyze almost anything in the twentieth century through its kind of technological conditions or it's a commentary on its technological conditions, and I'm more invested in seeing the technological as a way to do the historical and see materially the historical. And that's through the level of metaphor too. You know, how we come to understand the body, how we come to understand the brain is largely defined through the media that determine our everyday lives. I'm a % behind a really expansive idea of what it means to be a historian of art and technology.
Lindsay Caplan:There's no motivation for me to draw a line. I don't have to curate a show in which I kind of come up with constraints. I can write and teach expansively and and transversely about these things, and I do. And I agree that a lot can be gained. I think also, you know, cybernetics was just everywhere in the sixties.
Lindsay Caplan:I mean, it it was Kaprow's happenings. You know, he's reading. So I and I think that the extent to which we draw that line actually does a disservice both to the history of cybernetics, the history of those artworks, and, you know, the ways in which we understand digital art. And the extent to which I actually find the language of communication and control in cybernetics in things like performance in the sixties is mind boggling and I think really important because it was the terms by which I think a lot of questions about audience came to be understood. I do think very expansively about this idea of digital art.
Lindsay Caplan:Computer art is something else. I have a very visceral response to that word. I will actually tell you this. This is going public, but I don't think it needs to be a secret that, we had a back and forth about the title of this book because it was started as more convoluted. And one of the things they wanted me to call it was just computer art in Italy or something like that.
Lindsay Caplan:And I was like, absolutely not. That's gonna make everyone think it's about, like, fancy screensavers. And I refused. I did not want any and, obviously, it's a keyword. Obviously, that's what this is.
Lindsay Caplan:Obviously, it is. But there's something about that word that feels very opposed to that broader extensive history that I'm interested. Even though as you're right, that was the word that was used. So I might have to check myself on that, but I I got the title I wanted.
Tina Rivers Ryan:No. I I think I don't think you need to check yourself. I think you landed in the right spot. I think computer art now very clearly denotes a a very bounded field of activity that was mostly made by in house engineers at major corporations and research centers that resulted in, like, plotter diagrams. I mean, it's just, like, a very particular thing, and it's amazing how, in a way, that's not even historically accurate.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Like, if you go back and look at Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968, which you do talk about in the book, You know, that show included not only plotter diagrams, but also, like, music and and computer film and lots of other kinds of output. But I think at this point, it very specifically refers to this kind of work on paper and that's another reason why I'm actually very grateful for this book is that it reminds us to think about computer art as existing in this kind of expanded field even at the very beginning, even in the nineteen sixties.
Lindsay Caplan:Jacopo, can I ask you because you don't write about technology, if if you've noticed especially in the kind of field of Italian political theory, if you've noticed these metaphors, you know, because a lot of strands of kind of more recent writing by Franco Berardi and Hart and Negri do use these metaphors? I'm wondering if you have a take on the technological and the theoretical.
Jacopo Galimberti:Well, you know, the most interesting, Marxist trend to emerge is in the June, my view, is operasmo or also known as, world tourism. And it was extremely technophile. It was extremely technophile also because Italian culture, including leftist culture, often flirted with some sort of leftist pastoralism. You know? Think of Pasolini's central view of these, you know, dilapidated suburbs or of the so called Third Wall.
Jacopo Galimberti:Italy, because of many reasons, the church and so on, the Italian left often had this kind of very problematic vision of rural life as being closer to the human life, closer to authentic being, in a in a way, a very Rousseauian, approach to politics. So as a technophile political group or movement, Operismo was very, very keen in, these debates and and and especially, my impression but I'm really not expert of of this dimension. My impression was that what they call technological scientific intelligence, which was virtually a synonymous of the word intellectuals, was derived from a German debate about new white collars in the sixties. This is something that I might need to explore in the future. But, anyway so intellectuals as bearers of technological scientific view or culture.
Jacopo Galimberti:And, really, they didn't make a difference between artists, scientists, and, let's say, humanist intellectuals, if you if you wanna put it like that. And this is very interesting because it was more about the working conditions and the prestige of this condition rather than, you know, the usual division between manual and intellectual labor. So I think you definitely have a good interesting angle to look at also this kind of political strength? What what was the relationship to technology and and the metaphor? How often they relied on this method?
Jacopo Galimberti:I don't know really. Actually, Lindsay, I wanted to ask you something about, again, technology and its social connotations because I you know, of course, Italian society was extremely sexist, and these groups were not very different from mainstream society. And yet the Tea Group included a female artist, Gracia Varisco. So I wonder whether you had a chance to talk to her. I think she's still alive, but I might be wrong.
Jacopo Galimberti:And I wonder whether, you know, you could tell us a bit more about her condition as a woman within this very virile technical world.
Lindsay Caplan:Thank you. I didn't get to speak to her. There were a couple artists I did get to interview, but not her or Enzo Mari, which was was a real I really feel like it was a missed opportunity. But I also think that one of the things that question raises is the extent to which I extent to which I take interest in any of the artists as individuals or kind of it's not really a biographical study which I think is one of the reasons why I don't have a real sense of insight into her experience. But you're right she was included in this movement but she doesn't as far as I know go on to make environments and I don't see her represented in a lot of the kind of transcripts and catalogues and writings of the new tendencies.
Lindsay Caplan:So she is a bit of a specter for me and that's I don't know the extent to which that is because of her gender or because of her interests or her investments. I don't really know. But I think that the other thing your question reminds me is that the world in which they existed was largely art and design, not the big corporations. I mean, Olavezzi, of course, sponsors the Arti Programmatic exhibition, but the kind of work world was one of art school, design school, and then exhibitions, and that was not the kind of big technical engineering corporations at all.
Jacopo Galimberti:To be honest, I think it's even more interesting because this is clearly an artist working before the feminist movement. And I think female identity is not problematized, not by her in the first place. And I think, yeah, I mean, maybe this kind of objective, rational world, rigorous analysis that you're trying to convey may have facilitated, integration.
Lindsay Caplan:Yeah. One of the things I argue is deeply part of Arte Programata is a critique of mastery, you know, and a dispersion of authorship. Call it what you want, I don't know if I'd go as far to say it's feminist, but there is a problematizing of the author and authorship and mastery and that's there across the board. I do think it's interesting. Even the people I did speak to, I mean the artist interview is an interesting format because I did not use a lot of the stuff we talked about because again I read the works kind of against what the artists say about them.
Lindsay Caplan:Well, especially the the early Arte Programmesse works and the the Groupe OT works. They really talk about them in terms of freedom, dispersing the creative agency from the artist to the audience, and they're they're quite enthusiastic about that. And so for me to come along and say, I see all of this also about control and an anxiety about dispersion and the eradication of meaning, which does come later in the conversations they have about, I say, clarity and communication. And I find I find a lot of evidence about that anxiety as well. But the artists do talk about the those early works largely in terms of their liberatory potential for the audience and I do say something different than that by reading the work.
Lindsay Caplan:So I I take the artist's experience and their intentions and their own voice with, with some kind of historical parenthesis, I would say.
Tina Rivers Ryan:So one thing I realized we haven't done up until this point is actually given you an opportunity to walk us through a close reading of any of the work in the book. I would love to hear the sort of summation from you on, you know, what your argument is around something like Columbo's elastic space, I'm not even gonna attempt the Italian pronunciation, Or, Ceske's and Boreani's experimental environments. And not to, you know, continually bring everything back to the contemporary, which I do think is a problem with, you know, sort of mode of art historical scholarship where in order for things to be relevant, they must speak to the contemporary moment. It's like very, sort of present, distant, chauvinistic in a way. Things can be important simply because they existed or on different terms.
Tina Rivers Ryan:But thinking about some of these environments in particular, I'm just so desperate to ask you, like, what do you think about Van Gogh light shows? And were you concerned at all writing a book about, you know, ambient spatial environments that there would be this profound misreading in a way where you're, you know, oh, well, this is a genealogy of, you know, multimedia sort of like immersive digital environments and light shows. And, you know, as your book was suggested earlier, your work is really against a kind of misreading of that work as being purely about optical phenomena and phenomenology. I wonder so I guess it's sort of a two part question. One is, like, can you just maybe walk us through what you think is the significance of these kinds of room sized installations that are spatial and optical environments as well as being something else perhaps?
Tina Rivers Ryan:And then also how you see them relating to to the sort of, like, recent surge of popularity of these kinds of spatial environments that are thoroughly mediated by technology.
Lindsay Caplan:Yes. Thank you. So I'll talk about Spazio Elastico because I've seen it I've seen it, I think, at least twice, and it's the cover too.
Tina Rivers Ryan:And this is the work that's installed in Rome? Yeah. At the Galleria Nazio della dei moderni contemporary.
Lindsay Caplan:This was a reconstruction, but I also saw it. It was in the new museum, Ghost in the Machine show, and I it was also, I think, when I saw it in Milan.
Tina Rivers Ryan:I also saw it in both the new museum show and Milan. So I am soup or sorry, in Rome rather. So I am super interested to get your take on it because I will totally admit that I was just initially so overjoyed to actually be experiencing a historical installation, with technology at that scale. But I was just, like, ecstatic to be there and I I, like, completely blew my critical apparatus just because, you know, I suggested with my earlier question, like, a lot of time we only encounter these artworks through documentation. And so, yeah, I would love I wish I could have seen that with you, and so this is my opportunity to do that.
Lindsay Caplan:Yeah. Thanks. It's, it is really fun. So you enter through a small passageway into a a kind of room with this grid of elastic white elastic strings that are kind of attached to these rotating motors that make the whole grid kind of mutate and you can walk through it. It does it kind of demarcates a path but because it's moving and also because it's dark with black lights, your depth perception is totally messed with so you can't always see which of the lines is the one that's actually demarcating your path and which is kind of further behind or ahead of you.
Lindsay Caplan:And so you walk through it and, you know, I saw it in a very crowded space where you kind of follow the people, that was a little bit disorienting. And when I saw it in Italy, and I can't remember if it was Rome or Milan now, I was the only person and so it was much more disorienting. And so it it messes with your ability to kind of navigate space, which again can be fun, can be kind of fun housey, but also, spending time with it and also feeling the extent to which your eyes don't ever really adjust can be kind of disorienting. And I think Columbo's environments are particularly manipulative. He has these sculptural objects kind of stairs that I've also seen that are kind of fun to walk on but also kind of mess with your, you know, you feel like you're on a boat and you can't you can't really walk quite properly after you get off of them.
Lindsay Caplan:So he he does these very subtle movements that also really mean that you start to doubt if what you're seeing is is an effect or the reality of the material around you. So it's that tension between your kind of freedom in some ways to navigate space but also your reliance on information coming from the environment and the extent to which you can't quite trust that that really, I think, puts you as a viewer between a sense of empowerment and also manipulability. And the other thing that about a lot of these works and this work in particular does this is you don't I don't feel like a body. I feel like an eye because it's dark. And so I'm feeling that my eyes are doing a lot of work, and my eyes are kind of driving my body through this space.
Lindsay Caplan:And the other so the other thing is that these are to some degree immersive, phenomenological, but they are very optical and they play with light so that you feel attacked, but largely through the kind of porosity of your eyes. And the after and especially with ones that use spotlights, the ways in which your eye kind of the light stays as an after image for longer than it is actually shining. So it can really mess with your perception. That's my close reading of the work of how it creates this kind of sense of yourself and also again as empowered and also manipulated and I think that in terms of seeing this as a pre history to kind of interactive spectacular art, I get that question. They're like but this is just spectacle that's the word people like to use And I'm interested in that word because they're beautiful, they're abstract, and that often means spectacle.
Lindsay Caplan:But, of course, Giedebourd, when he writes the Society of the Spectacle, he says it's a social relation. So insofar as I saw the program as a set of relationships, I thank him. Thank you. And I take my training in sociology as much as art history to see it as a set of social relationships and not just an aesthetic. So that's my answer to that is that it's a misnomer.
Lindsay Caplan:It describes something. It doesn't analyze how it positions you. But I also think here is where the technological and the historical are so importantly connected because our image economy and our sensory economy and our attention economy are so different that these kind of new forms, I have not seen the Van Gogh. These new forms have to be understood in relationship to that. And and again, taken I think with deep specificity.
Lindsay Caplan:So I haven't seen the Van Gogh, but I do really like immersive environments. And I'm interested in, for example, the kind of spectacular popularity of Kusama. So a lot of Yayoi Kusama's work are very similar. They use mirrors. They use light.
Lindsay Caplan:A lot of her infinity rooms do a similar thing even on more advanced scales. And can we read, you know, what they mean now as opposed to what they mean then? I don't have, I think, the most brilliant answer to this right now. But, I think that's of interest to me, and I think her meaning now is quite different than it was then. There's a lot of parallels actually with her environments and some of the works I'm looking at.
Lindsay Caplan:I'm not initially going to shoot down works that address us through abstraction, through immersion, and through beauty as de facto spectacle. I'll say that. That's one thing I kind of pause to think more critically about. Especially, I tend to like works that are aggressive towards the viewer. I like difficult works that demand both kind of long thoughts and, you know, close looking.
Lindsay Caplan:So, I'm a geek like that.
Tina Rivers Ryan:And I I think your your scholarship and your comments are both sort of invaluable reminders that we can't evaluate these strategies in a historical vacuum. Right? Like, I remember reading David e James writing about the strategies of avant garde cinema and how those strategies, twenty years later, became the visual language of MTV. Right? So that strategies continually get co opted.
Tina Rivers Ryan:So when you refer to, like, what Kusama's work might have meant then versus what it means now, right? Part of what happens with avant garde artistic strategies is that they then actually wind up filtering into a kind of mainstream or get co opted and wind up having very different effects and meaning as time goes on. And so I think, it's just nice, like, you know, throughout this conversation and also in the book, this insistence on a kind of historical grounding, right, and understanding that the way these strategies like, the the to walk into a disorienting space mediated by technology in, like, 1968 is very different than walking into one in 2022. Right? Simply because it's a different historical moment and we become sort of like accommodated or or programmed, by different kinds of technologies and social relations in the intervening years.
Lindsay Caplan:Definitely. And I'm interested or I kind of hesitant to do the kind of art historical reading that reads things through their co optation and kind of reads the history as a steady march towards it had to be this way because I don't think that's good history and I don't think that's the way things work and one of the things that I think a kind of historical study, I mean, history as such can do is begin to say, like, this was imagined otherwise. It didn't have to become complicit with these structures or or or come to mean this thing. In many ways, the question that motivated again this whole project was this did not fit into the concepts I had to understand both art and politics at the time and, like, what was politically expedient. So it wasn't so much my job, I felt, to go back and say, did it work?
Lindsay Caplan:Was it right? Did it do what it said it did or something like that? But to rather ask, like, how was it? What were the conditions? And with this when which this was not just artistically, but politically desirable work to make?
Lindsay Caplan:And what does that tell us about the, again, the kind of motivating imaginary, political imaginary, but also, like, not just their goals, but also the concepts and their methods, which I do think have more kind of staying power. Thank you so much Tina and Yakupo for joining me. It's been so great talking to you and hearing your thoughts about the book.
Jacopo Galimberti:Thank you Lindsay.
Tina Rivers Ryan:Likewise. Congratulations. Thanks.