BRUNO MUNARI REJECTED EXCLUSIVITY IN FAVOR OF ART AND DESIGN THAT CONNECTED AND SERVED. HIS PROJECTS ACTIVATED VIEWERS, ASKING THEM TO PARTICIPATE IN THE WORK BEFORE THEM. He engaged with the public as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, industrial designer, and author. In the early part of the twentieth century Munari was a member of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurist group, but he distanced himself from the movement after World War II when its fascist sympathies began to emerge. In 1948 he helped found the Italian concrete art movement. His interest in projects that were open to viewer interaction led to his involvement with the New Tendencies movement. Inspired by 1960s mainframe computers, this group of designers, artists, engineers, mathematicians, and scientists strived to develop a technological aesthetics that bridged art and science. Disgusted by the faddish consumer nature of the gallery scene, they saw computers as the key medium for a more useful twentieth-century visual culture.1 In 1962 Munari organized an influential exhibition that showcased the early figures of the New Tendencies movement. Sponsored by the Olivetti Company, Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opera moltiplicate. Opera aperta. (Programmed Art. Kinetic Art. Multiplied Works. Open Works.), was held first in Olivetti’s Italian and German showrooms and later shown in the United States. The projects challenged the viewers’ sense of perception. Some pieces shifted visually as viewers moved, for example, suggesting a kinetic quality. The “programmed” aspect was not algorithmic in a contemporary sense, as Umberto Eco explained in the accompanying catalog, but rather “a formative practice…according to a dialectic of planning and randomness.” In his introduction Eco praised the “dynamic of perception” expressed in Arte programmata: “Aesthetic pleasure was no longer—or at least not always—derived from looking at complete and fully achieved organisms, but rather from seeing organisms in an indefinite process of completion.”2 The concept of “programmed” work, brought to the forefront by Munari’s exhibition, permeated the New Tendencies movement in the years to follow, taking on a variety of connotations as artists and designers sought to understand the potential of computers and visual research.
ARTE PROGRAMMATA
BRUNO MUNARI | 1964
We are all familiar with the traditional methods and techniques by which artists have given substance to their fancies in all epochs. We know that images in two or three dimensions (pictures and sculptures) are obtained by these means, and we know also that these images are subjective, static, unique, and definitive. This is true whether they are reproductions of visible nature, personal interpretations, impressions, stylizations, deformations of visible nature, or even invented relationships and chromatic, formal, and volumetric harmonies, as in the case of abstract art.
We know too that art is always the same even if the methods and techniques of setting it forth change, that changing the means does not change the art, that art is not a method and method is not art. One might say in fact that every creative intuition has, in the absolute sense, its ideal means, more suitable than any other for revealing itself, and that not all visual art must perforce be painting or sculpture.
As times change, man’s sensibilities change with them. A static image, unique and final, does not contain that quantity of information sufficient to interest the contemporary viewer, who is accustomed to live in an environment subject to simultaneous and multifarious stimuli from the most varied sources.
This situation gives birth to programmed art, which has as its ultimate aim the production not of a single definitive and subjective image, but of a multitude of images in continual variation. The “programming” of these works, which necessarily, because of technical reasons and limitations, are neither paintings nor sculptures, is to be understood in the sense that each artist chooses a particular material and the structural, kinetic, and optical combinations that he considers most suitable for the embodiment of his artistic intuition. Consequently, in keeping with the rules of “good design” (in the same way as a fish has the form of a fish and a rose the form and substance of a rose) the object he makes will have its most natural form.
In these works of programmed art the fundamental elements, which, along with the kinetic and optical combinations, will give life to a continuous series of images, are in a free state or are arranged objectively in geometrically ordered systems so as to create the greatest number of combinations, often unpredictable in their mutations but all programmed in accordance with the system planned by the artist.
A work of programmed art is thus to be observed and considered not as an object representing something else, but as “the thing” in itself to be observed. It is a field of events, an area of a previously unknown world of creativity, a fragment of a new reality to be observed in its continual variations.
1 To read more about the New Tendencies movement, see Margit Rosen, A Little-Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).
2 Umberto Eco, introduction, Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opera moltiplicate. Opera aperta. (Milan: Olivetti, 1962).