Claudia Giannetti

Media Sculpture
The Cybernetic Condition

Abstract
In the twentieth century, sculpture underwent radical changes both aesthetically and technically as a result
of several factors, including the influences of new scientific theories. In this text I explore synthetically some
of these changes in the field of sculpture and in particular the influence of cybernetic theory on sculpture
using electronic and digital technologies. I briefly analyze the impact of these transformations on aesthetic
theories.

Key Words
Media sculpture, cybernetics, media art, art, science, technology, contemporary aesthetics, cybernetic
­aesthetics, Moholy-Nagy, Schöffer, Paik, Bense, Cordeiro, Palatnik

Matter, form, and space have been central concerns for sculptors, along with the tech-
niques, content, and aesthetics pertaining to each historic moment. The way that artists
have interpreted and worked through them has varied enormously. After thousands of years
dominated by techniques involving sculpting, engraving, modeling, or carving, sculpture
underwent radical, paradigmatic changes in the twentieth century. Among them, emerging
twentieth-century scientific theories had a considerable influence on the arts in general and
on sculpture in particular. Along with quantum physics and Einstein’s spatial-temporal rel-
ativity emerged another theory, which was one of the most significant from the late 1940s
onward: cybernetics. In this text, I synthetically explore some of these influences in the field
of sculpture, and more specifically on sculpture that makes use of electronic and digital
technology. Due to the limited length of the text, I have to refrain from in-depth analyses
and interpretations of the artworks mentioned as examples. The selection of artists cited is
also rather restricted, chosen according to the criterion of exemplarity. I would nonetheless
like to apologize for the many and rather evident omissions in this brief essay.

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The thought of Michelangelo Buonarroti was paradigmatic for various generations of

sculptors. According to the Renaissance artist, sculptural form was virtually contained within
the block of stone, making it necessary to liberate it from material excess, allowing it to
emerge. The sculptor’s work was carried out with and as a function of the material, whose
final form, whose solid, three-dimensional volume, was in dialogue with space and the
artist’s iconological conception.
This gesture is the translation of the idea to matter mediated by manual labor. The
sculptor’s gesture seeks to reveal information hidden in the matter. This is the gesture that
traditionally accompanies the act of sculpting.
In the twentieth century, certain sculptors introduced a fourth fundamental factor: spa-
tial-temporal dynamism. Notions derived from physics, namely simultaneity, energy, and
mobility, were explored in the visual arts. Meanwhile, conventional sculptural concepts,
such as line, volume, and mass, lost some of their prominence, as is made explicit in Naum
Gabo and Antoine Pevsner’s 1920 manifesto of Constructivist practices.1 They sought, rath-
er, rhythm and depth with their new spatial-temporal forms.
Starting in the 1920s, apart from Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy had the pioneering vision
to consider the play of movements and effects of light and shadow, projected into space by
kinetic-luminous objects, as key motifs of the sculptural piece, quite beyond the object in
itself, its materiality, and mechanics. The dynamism and fluidity of the forms derived from
the projection of sculptural features in motion onto the walls over time and space became
essential to the work. Rather than proposing a model, Moholy-Nagy put forth a kinetic-con-
structive system to allow for the “recognition of a space condition which is not the result of
the position of static volumes, but consists of visible and invisible activities of forces, e.g.,
of phenomena of movement and the formations that movements take; and may thus under
certain conditions consist of fields of force.”2
His positions were constituted as an essential starting point for the process of the de­
materialization of the sculptural object. Like the scientific theory that establishes the equiv-
alence between mass and energy, Moholy-Nagy defended the substitution of arts of the
mass—the inert physical object—for relational fields or spatial relationships. The rigid sep-
aration between exterior and interior, which was part and parcel of finished, permanent
pieces, had to be subjugated by simultaneous interpenetration, enabled by latent relational
forces in the materials. This new occupation of space was not only intangible, but also

1 Naum Gabo with Antoine Pevsner, Realistic Manifesto (Moscow: Second State Printing House, 1920).
2 “Der Anerkennung eines Raumzustandes, der nicht das Ergebnis der Lagebeziehungen von starren
Volumen ist, sondern von sichtbaren und unsichtbaren Wirksamkeiten der Bewegungstatsachen und
Bewegungsformationen, unter Umständen also aus Beziehungen von Kraftfeldern besteht.” ­László
­Moholy-Nagy, “Von Material zu Architektur – Der Weg zum Erlebnis von Plastik und Architektur,” Bau-
hausbücher, no. 14 (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag 1929), p. 202. Facsimile available at: https://digi.
ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/moholy_nagy1929/0208. English translation from: László ­Moholy-Nagy,
The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (New York:
Dover Publications, 2012).

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processual, interrelational, transitory, and ephemeral in time. Equally revolutionary was the
introduction of the parameter of performativity in the context of sculpture.
Three decades later, Jorge Oteiza revived the principles of physics and the relation
between mass and energy to propose a further step toward “trans-sculpture.” For the
Basque sculptor, in artistic terms, time was terrified by space. Therefore, the arts always
sought to spatialize time by trapping, immobilizing, and appropriating it. The result was
a work that would be increasingly concerned with physical space. In contrast, for Oteiza,
the sculptor’s work meant the creation of a void through the liberation or de-occupation
of space, experimenting with the negative, leading to the very renouncement of the clas-
sic spatial conception of sculpture.3 His posture made it possible to open up another path
altogether.
The gesture of liberation is the gesture of exploration. Hands renounce being trans-
formed into a medium, into an instrument of the prolongation of the idea in the material
(volume and mass). It is a gesture whereby, rather than extracting form from matter, one
wields the concepts of noninformation and information.
These are just three different examples of possible ways to approach the phenomenon
of sculpture.
Another fundamental shift was driven by the incorporation into the arts of period-spe-
cific electronic and digital resources, as well as their corresponding materials, artifacts, tech-
niques, and methods. The changes in artistic productions were diverse and profound. Here
I will focus solely on the influence of cybernetic theory, and especially on its notion of open
systems, on new sculptural conceptions including technological resources, starting in the
1950s.
Cybernetics, as a cross-science that considered the interrelation of various forms of
knowledge that, until the 1950s, had been isolated in different scientific specializations,
was a factor driving processual and transdisciplinary practices. What most attracted the
attention of various artists from the period were factors such as indetermination, feedback,
experimentation, and pluri-mediality.
Information became a key parameter for the understanding of aesthetic processes and
for the structuring of those new artistic positions, influenced mainly by the cybernetic the-
ories of Norbert Wiener. From the mid-1950s on, artists inspired by cybernetic approaches,
such as Abraham Palatnik, Nicolas Schöffer, Nam June Paik, Gustav Metzger, and Les Levine,
appropriated its methods and revolutionized the field of sculpture.

3 Txomin Badiola, Oteiza: catálogo razonado de escultura (San Sebastián: Nerea, 2016). See also
the interview with Jorge Oteiza, “El espacio y el tiempo en la escultura” (ca. 1988), Museo Oteiza,
https://www.museooteiza.org/jorge-oteiza/ also “Jorge Oteiza: El espacio y el tiempo en la ­escultura,”
YouTube video, April 3, 2013, uploaded by Museo Oteiza, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
­dXFUYyo3KRc&t=128s (accessed February 10, 2023).

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1 Abraham Palatnik, Desenho para o projeto de peça Cinecromática 02, Item 29 (Drawing for the piece
project Cinecromatic 02, Item 29), April 1956. 110 × 70 × 20 cm.

The Brazilian artist Palatnik carried out pioneering research into the relation between
art, science, and technology, as well as in the development of participative art. His research
first took on a sensorial form, in his kinetic-objectual series of Aparelhos Cinecromáticos
(Cinechromatic Devices) from 1949 (figs. 1, 2). Later on, he disarticulated the traditional
­references of two- and three-dimensional works, implementing the variability and trans-
formation of forms, colors, and visual fields by means of movements created through me-
chanical, electric, and luminous complexes. In these works, created starting from 1959, he
explored viewer participation, such as with magnetic fields in various works from the series
Mobilidade (Mobility). In 1962, he constructed the object-game Quadrado perfeito (Perfect
Square), based on the movement of pieces on a chess-like board, with its own rules moti-
vating the intuitive participation of the public. Objeto Rotativo (Rotative Object) from 1969
depended on the viewer’s intervention for it to work and move, and questioned Newtonian
physics. Palatnik applied the principles of cybernetic communication to art, and especially
to his kinetic sculptures, following the notion that information exchange between diverse
systems encourages feedback. In a world saturated with information, Palatnik understood
the positioning of art as follows:

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2 Abraham Palatnik, Aparelho

Cinecromático (Cinecromatic ­Apparatus),
1969/1986, wood, metal, synthetic linen,
light bulbs, and motor.
112.5 × 70.5 × 20.5 cm.

Its legitimacy lies in our constant adjusting to the exterior world, which we make manifest t­ hrough
our actions in it, either directly or through our extensions and technologies. A kind of “barter.” …
Likewise, I believe that the form of something is not only its contour, but above all its essence.
Reaching this essence is really intriguing. It is the origin of all aesthetic manifestations managed by
the artist. It is where sensitivity is brought into play, the improvisation mechanism is liberated and
ludic characteristics are presented, once again drawing the human being closer to his condition
of participation and integration.4

His “sculptures”—which he called at the time aparelho (apparatus) or relevo (relief), some
of which also take on the format of tableaux-objets, while others are assemblages—and
kinetic-­participative objects (fig. 3) are exceptional examples of the way in which the pa-
rameter of information plays a decisive role in the conception of the work. They thereby
open up a path toward surpassing conventional uses of forms, materials, colors, spaces,
and times.

4 Abraham Palatnik, “A evolução do ser humano está ligada diretamente a adoção da tecnologia e
da informação” (1977), exh. cat. Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: IAB – Instituto de
­Arquitetos do Brasil, 1981).

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3 Abraham Palatnik, Objetos Cinéticos (Kinetic Objects), exhibition view, 2012, curated by Frederico Morais.

For Nicolas Schöffer, works of art should change just as human beings and nature
do. Therefore, they should avoid the inert state of matter. With his sculptural shapes, this
French-Hungarian artist researched the fourth dimension of time, through real movement,
and applied the cybernetic notion of feedback as a dialogical strategy in the work. In striving
to achieve this aim, Schöffer programmed indeterminist features, susceptible to influence
by natural phenomena (for example, the works responded through electronic sensors to
changes in the weather or the presence of humans), or by the action of performers (as
works which could be manipulated by the viewer). His cybernetic sculptures, such as CYSP 1
(1956) (fig. 4) were prepared with electronic systems and sensors that converted certain
environmental variations around them into kinetic transformations within the piece itself,
whether they involved movements, sound, or lighting.
In this position we find the basis—which was highly important in the context of media
art—for the objection to the cult of the finished object, as well as the emphasis on open
processes and on each work’s potential for variability.
Also highly stimulated by cybernetics, Nam June Paik related the concept of freedom to
communication problems in art. His first works of cybernetic art, and later his video sculp-
tures, considered communication as a form of free interrelation and interaction between
the medium, the public, and the work, and not as a mode whereby purely information-
al and explanatory messages were transmitted. According to Paik, it is necessary to tran-

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4 Nicolas Schöffer, CYSP 1, 1956, aluminum and mixed media (computer, traction motor,
direction motor, two microphones, two photoelectric cells, nineteen micromotors), height: 2.6 m.
This was the first spatial-dynamic sculpture, having total autonomy of movement (traveling in all
directions at two speeds) as well as having axial and eccentric rotation (setting in motion its sixteen
pivoting polychromed plates).

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scend monodirectional experiments with art’s randomness.5 Reflections on indeterminism,

variability, transdisciplinarity, communication, and public participation come to the fore in
the pieces seen in Paik’s first exhibition, held in 1963 at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal,
­Germany. In the show, Paik exhibited his first cybernetic sculptures using electronic devices.
Just as Palatnik and Schöffer drew from Constructivist sources and the mechanical-luminous
­kinetics of Moholy-Nagy, Paik had as his starting point certain Dadaist positions regarding
the ready-made, Fluxus notions of improvisation, and John Cage’s indeterminism to explore
the new field of electronic art. Paik structured the exhibition into two parts, made explicit
in the very title: Exposition of Music—Electronic Television. In the part dedicated to sound
objects, Paik showed (among other works) four “prepared pianos,” following on Cage, con-
ceived for visitors to be able to touch and manipulate. The five sound sculptures consisted of
manipulated audio devices—tape recorders and record players—which encouraged visitors
to interact and create sounds. For example, the piece Schallplatten-Schaschlik consisted of
a record player with the possibility of increasing up to ten vinyl records in movement, and
a large pickup allowing visitors to freely place the needle on any of the records and listen,
which due to the obvious instability of the arrangement gave out random sounds. The
other works, entitled Participation TV, were some of the first examples of electronic and
interactive audiovisual “sculptural” objects. Paik equipped a television set with an attached
switch at its base which, when activated by the viewer, caused a small burst of light on
the screen. Another object had an attached microphone that transmuted the vibrations
of human voices into visual vibrations on its canvas. Following on the same principle, Paik
attached another television set to a working radio whose broadcast intensity enabled a sole
point of light in the center of a dark screen to expand or contract in tandem with the radio’s
acoustic loudness.
Paik’s idea coincided with those of Schöffer and Palatnik on the need to research into
strategies to incorporate indeterminist and random information processes into electron-
ic-visual creation to break with the one-directional principles of broadcaster-receiver, open-
ing up the work to public intervention or its interrelation with its surroundings or other
media. Participation Music and Participation TV are noteworthy examples of the articulation
of participative art as a system based on “interdependent processes,” following on a defi-
nition coined by Hans Haacke in 1968, who was likely more influenced by systems theory.6
It is important to recall that starting in the early part of the 1960s, a series of artists
began to use the television set or frame as an “objectual” feature, to be transcended or in-
tervened upon. This was seen with César, who in 1962 showed Télévision, a sculptural tele­
vision which corresponded to the characteristic proposals of Nouveau Réalisme. Günther
Uecker, for his part, in TV 1963, covered the casing of a television set with nails. This

5 See Nam June Paik and Edith Decker, eds., Niederschriften eines Kulturnomaden: Aphorismen, Briefe,
Texte (Cologne: DuMont, 1992).
6 See Hans Haacke and Alexander Alberro, eds., Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

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t­ransgressive gesture transformed a status symbol of modern life into a fetish object, like
certain African shamanist sculptures done by the Nkisi, from the Congo. In 1963, moreover,
Wolf Vostell exhibited TV Décoll/age, a clear reference to the deconstruction of mass me-
dia’s most stellar device.
Starting in 1965, with the first artistic experiments with video, and especially in the
1970s and 1980s, the format of video-sculpture underwent considerable development.
The video-sculptures of Paik combined the materiality of found objects with the temporality
of audiovisual found footage. They constitute an assemblage of forms and recycled audio­
visual information.
In 1969, Les Levine, in Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture, proposed the active inclusion
of the public by means of a system of closed-circuit cameras that captured images of the
people in the gallery, rebroadcasting them in real time through the televisions found there.
The eighteen CRT televisions were combined into a sculptural structure and their screens
were covered with acrylic gel in different tones. Sharing in the cybernetic spirit, Levine held
that works of art should be established as open systems.7
Besides Paik and Les Levine, Shigeko Kubota, who had studied sculpture in Tokyo, was
another precursor of video-sculpture. Her emblematic Nude Descending a Staircase, from
1976, established a dialogue between audiovisual container and content, moving fully be-
yond the two-dimensional Duchampian simulation of simultaneous displacement.
Now that we have come to this point, it would seem pertinent for both practical and
methodological considerations to reaffirm the need to distinguish between the ­various
formats taken up by media sculpture8—such as TV-based sculpture, video-sculpture or
­monitor-based sculpture (single-channel or multimonitor multi-channel)—and expanded
formats closer to environments and installations, such as audiovisual installation, video in-
stallation, closed-circuit installation, interactive installation, and many more. Video-­sculpture
can use one or more monitors and channels, related or not with other features. Its main
characteristic is the conception of a work with a delimited three-dimensional format that in-
corporates video production, which may or may not be closely related to the support. In this
way, it is unlike video installation and audiovisual installation, which break with the clearly
delimited physical form of the object and put the emphasis on integrating the whole into
the space, on ideas of site-specificity, the transitory or ephemeral nature of adapting each
intervention to each site, the relationship between context (space, architecture, ambience,
surrounding, and so on), time (duration), and the work’s component parts, as well as the
recourse to a certain degree of “staging.”
Some authors do not defend this distinction, although I have not been able to find
strong arguments in their writings that might justify the objections to such groupings. In

7 See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970).
8 The acceptance of the term here is more clearly defined and is differentiated from the meaning Les
Levine gave it, where “media sculpture” encompasses a much broader set of possibilities, expanded
and independent of its use of technologies, and at other times more related to the question of the mass
media.

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fact, there is difficulty in certain cases of setting out clear demarcations between formats
and ways of presentation, especially in the period when the goal was precisely to break with
said limitations and promote hybridism and transdisciplinarity, i.e., “expanded sculpture.”
The term “expanded” in relation to the arts comes from one of the pioneers of electronic
art, Mary Ellen Bute. In the 1930s, she researched the field of expanding cinema and her
ideas influenced a posteriori other artists and theorists. However, the use of the term “sculp-
ture” here is associated (without running the risk of recurring to synthopic forms9) with
various essential and constant characteristics of each artistic expression.
Although they were being broadened and diversified, especially with the use of elec-
tronic and digital technologies (as I have observed above), they are implicitly different from
the unfolding in space-time that characterized the installation. It is also interesting to men-
tion the approximation of sculpture to what is known as time-based art, which decades
earlier would have been considered a contradiction.
Quite independently of formats, the ideas of art as process and as system as well as
the dual position of the observer as receiver and emitter came to be constituted as new
aesthetic parameters in the realm of media art, and more specifically in media sculpture.
Perhaps the main shifts taking place in that first stage of media sculpture, influenced as it
was by cybernetic principles, involved overcoming the dichotomy between materiality and
immateriality, between the tangible and the intangible, as well as introducing notions of
variability and indetermination into the field of sculpture.
One of the effects of these new approaches was the proposal to move beyond aesthet-
ic experience oriented toward subjective, distant fruition, a posture propagated by Roman-
ticism and which would last, to a certain degree, into our century. It is worth recalling what
the gnoseological dispossession of the works, which supported aesthetic reflection based
on taste with neither concepts nor context, precisely was.10 We must recognize that the
renouncement of this kind of aesthetic discourse in favor of a communicative, even informa-
tional, consideration of art, was acutely influenced by phenomenology, hermeneutics, and
semiotics. Examples of this current, developed as it was over the entire period encompass-
ing the postwar up to the 1970s, include informational aesthetics, cybernetic aesthetics,
and generative aesthetics,11 all of whose main starting point, as the terms already suggest,
was precisely cybernetic theory, with certain notions received as well from systems theory.
They deepened the chasm between ontological or metaphysical aesthetics and aesthetics
of a rationalist tendency.

9 I used the concept of “synthopia” in 2000, and after, in Claudia Giannetti, Estética Digital – Sintopía
del arte, la ciencia y la tecnología (Barcelona: L’Angelot, 2002), p. 15, and Ästhetik des Digitalen: Ein
intermediärer Beitrag zu Wissenschaft, Medien- und Kunstsystemen (Vienna/New York: Springer Ver-
lag, 2004).
10 For more information, see Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen, 2004, ibid., pp. 167–70.
11 For more regarding these theories, see Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen, 2004, pp. 29–52; see also a
more succinct text in: Giannetti, “Aesthetics of the Digital” (2003), Media Art Net, http://www.medien
kunstnetz.de/themes/aesthetics_of_the_digital/ (accessed February 10, 2023).

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What clearly set apart their different theoretical lines was above all the emphasis given
to the information parameter. In his Informationsästhetik (informational aesthetics), devel-
oped from 1957 on, Max Bense defended the idea, for example, that art should liberate
itself methodically from objects and forms as the vehicles of aesthetic processes, while re-
ducing aesthetic imitation proportionally to the degree of aesthetic abstraction. This would
allow the introduction of an aesthetic kinetics characterized by the emancipation of aes-
thetic medium. “Kinetics” refers to another way of conceiving the work of art as a structure
that keeps the possibility of transforming itself, converting itself and diversifying itself as
latent, just as what happens with information. His proposal for the objective analysis of the
work of art signified, in other words, an explicit split with aesthetic theories for the most
part derived from a subjective, metaphysical understanding of art centered on styles and on
stable, permanent forms and objects. For Bense, aesthetic objects were not solely physical
and inert; their aesthetics had to be addressed as an informational process. Observation
and communication technique would, therefore, take the place of previous interpretational
aesthetic processes. In other words, works of art would be understood as information me-
diators (aesthetic information): “It might also be stated that works of art are a special class
(that is, created, not given) that are ‘carriers’ of ‘aesthetic information.’”12
Something that was indicative of the rapid expansion of cybernetic thought also in the
artistic/cultural world is found in the various exhibitions of art and technology organized
in various continents throughout the 1960s. These brought together works of art with a
clear processual, behavioral, and communicational foundation. To cite a brief selection of
these exhibitions: in 1968, Computer and Visual Research, held in Zagreb as part of the
biennial of new tendencies created in 1961; Cybernetic Serendipity, held in London in 1968,
which among others featured artists who had taken risks with the sculptural and robotic
format, including Paik with Robot K-456 and his Participation TV, and artists who presented
interactive kinetic sculptures, such as Schöffer with CYSP 1, Edward Ihnatowicz with Sound
Activated Mobile (S.A.M.), and Gordon Pask with The Colloquy of Mobiles.13
In South America, in turn, two exhibitions carried out a vital role in spreading informa-
tion on the new relationship between art, science, and technology. In 1969, the Buenos
Aires-based Centro de Arte y Comunicación – CAyC (Centre for Art and Communication) of
the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research)
organized the first exhibition of Arte y Cibernética (Art and Cybernetics), presented at the

12 “Kunstwerke, so lässt sich auch formulieren, sind eine besondere (nämlich hergestellte, nicht gege-
bene) Klasse von ‘Trägern’ der ‘ästhetischen Information’.” Max Bense, “Ästhetische Kommunikation,”
in “Semiotik: Allgemeine Theorie der Zeichen,” Internationale Reihe Kybernetik und Information,
vol. 4. (Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1967), pp. 18–25. See also Max Bense, Ästhetische Information
(­Aesthetica II) (Krefeld/Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1957); Ästhetik und Zivilisation (Aesthetica III)
(Krefeld/Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1958); Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik
(­Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969); Programmierung des Schönen (Krefeld/Baden-Baden: Agis
Verlag, 1960).
13 Jasia Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (London/New York: Studio
International, 1968).

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city’s Galería Bonino. The exhibition curator and director of the CAyC, Jorge Glusberg, who
was also a member of the Argentina Inter-medios program,14 was one of the early promoters
of the potential of cybernetics in implementing the relationships between art and science
from a transdisciplinary perspective, focused on the inclusion of technologies into the artis-
tic context. In 1971, Glusberg was likewise a member of the Grupo de los Trece (Group of
Thirteen) along with Edgardo Vigo, an Argentine artist who gave an ironic twist to sculpture
with his Máquinas Inútiles (Useless Machines, developed from 1957 onward), which used
rudimentary kinetic mechanisms taken from scrap material. In São Paulo, the exhibition Ar-
teônica (1971) brought together, for the first time in Latin America, the leading international
artists and researchers in the field at that time, such as Manfred Mohr, Georg Nees, Michael
Noll, Herbert Franke, François Morellet, the group from the Centro de Cálculo de Madrid
(Madrid Calculus Centre; Barbadillo, Sevilla, Sempere, Delgado, Alexanco, Yturralde), and
many more. The initiator and the author of the manifesto that accompanied the exhibition
was Waldemar Cordeiro, renowned as one of the most experimental and international artists
and theoreticians on the Brazilian scene. Recognized today the world over as a leading fig-
ure of Concrete Art, Cordeiro took his place as one of the precursors in the Latin American
context of programming and computer art, having done his first pieces in this field in 1968,
in collaboration with the Italian physicist Giorgio Moscati. Notions of processual and random
art were made patent in his electronic artistic praxis from this early period onward.
Artistic use of computer systems, as applied to creative processes, was another radical
transformation. The production of computer art in its first phase is relatively well known, es-
pecially starting in the 1960s, when it was dedicated to generative works, computer graphics,
and software art whose output results were in two-dimensional printed pieces. Less would
be known, however, of the earliest research by artists into computer-generated sculpture.
One of the innovative proposals in the translation of two-dimensional visuality of com-
puter-generated graphics to three-dimensional materials was conceived by a student of
Bense, Georg Nees. This German artist, who studied mathematics and physics, exhibited
his first works with computer graphics in Stuttgart in 1965. The most surprising aspect of
his Plastik 1 (Sculpture 1) a relief created from 1965–68 on an aluminum plate, was that he
used an automatic milling machine to cut the material. His process of carving the material
followed the shapes of images created by a computer by means of an algorithm with ran-
dom parameters.
In Spain, from 1968 to 1973, the Centro de Cálculo (Calculus Centre) of the University
of Madrid developed a series of courses and a research residence program that enabled
artists and architects to learn more about the possibilities of computer technologies. The
“Seminar in the Automatic Generation of Visual Forms”15 was of vital importance for the first

14 See Jorge Glusberg, Argentina Inter-medios (Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1969).
15 See Manuel Barbadillo, “Hommage to Norbert Wiener” (1975), in Claudia Giannetti, ed., El discreto
encanto de la tecnología: Artes en España/The Discreet Charm of Technology­—Arts in Spain (Badajoz/
Madrid: MEIAC/Seacex, 2008), pp. 322–27.

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5 José Luis Alexanco, genesis of Mouvnt, 1969, eight elements, intervened on photographs on baryta
paper, 50 × 100 cm.

generation of Spanish artists to explore the use of computers as tools for art. Participants in
the seminar included Manuel Barbadillo, José Luis Alexanco, José María Yturralde, Eusebio
Sempere, and Elena Asins.
One of the pioneers in the application of the principles of digital combinatorics to the
field of sculpture was José Luis Alexanco. In the period from 1969 to 1973, when he worked
in the aforementioned Centro de Cálculo in Madrid, this Spanish artist programmed the al-
gorithm Mouvnt, written in Fortran IV. This program made it possible to execute topological
transformations on the basis of a three-dimensional form-origin, calculated in functions
of data defining forty level curves in an X, Y, Z coordinate system. The algorithm used five
different types of methods to transform level curves and a series of parameters for each
type. When combined, it was practically impossible for a result to be repeated. The inter-
linking of the different parameters allowed him to create new forms indefinitely. These
forms were ­applied to methacrylic slices, which were grouped together and juxtaposed
to create a sculptural object, as was the case with Mouvnt XX (1972) (fig. 5, 6). They also
served as molds to create sculptures in resin or cast metal, such as Plata (Silver, 1968).16 The
combinatory possibilities were virtually infinite, rendering incalculable the variability of the
sculptural results.
Unlike early cybernetic art, which worked above all with feedback and indetermina-
tion using factors external to the sculpture, this kind of “permutational art”—a term used

16 See Giannetti, ed., El discreto encanto de la tecnología: Artes en España, 2008, pp. 438–39.

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 Claudia Giannetti

6 José Luiz Alexanco, Mouvnt, 1969, ­plotter

output print on paper, 100 × 70 cm.

by Abraham Moles,17 another important supporter of including cybernetic models in art—

sought to research the internal resources of the information processor. Through the crea-
tion of combinatory algorithms that encompassed diverse possibilities, the machine could
systematically analyze the totality of the field, something quite beyond the mental capacities
of a person in a reasonable time frame. Using a repertoire as a foundation, the artist created
an algorithm in the function of the definition of certain parameters for the manipulation of
symbols. Though the artwork was so algorithmically defined, the responsibility for the final
work may or may not be assumed by the artist.
In this kind of system, the machine can generate proposals of possible works of art. The
artist analyzes and selects them, establishing human-machine co-authorship.18 The process
of actively integrating the machine into the creation of the work gives rise to new que-

17 See Abraham Moles, Informationstheorie und ästhetische Wahrnehmung (Cologne: Du Mont, 1971),
see also Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1958).
18 For the question of the co-author and the meta-author, see Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen, 2004,
pp. 102–18.

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ries on aesthetic paradigms and the meaning of authorship. Various theoreticians, Douglas
Hofstadter19 among them, propose the figure of the meta-author, i.e., the author of the
author of the result. However, it is vital to underline that the relationship between the
meta-author and the author—person and machine—cannot be hierarchical in the creation
process where the machine is playing an active role. Indeed, their respective contributions
are always complementary and grounded in complicity. This point of view contradicts the
traditional idea of the machine as a simple, passive, non-mediating tool.
Another highly interesting experimentation was the use of computer processes in the
definition of corporeal movements, abandoning the objectification of the body—such as
Piero Manzoni’s Sculture viventi (Living Sculptures, 1961)—and opting for the programming
of body dynamics. In 1973, the visual artist and dancer Analívia Cordeiro carried out her first
experiments with an algorithm to interrelate dance and audiovisual language, which found
its practical application in the audiovisual piece entitled M3x3 (1973), considered the first
work of video art in Latin America. Cordeiro continued her research in the development of
a computer program for dance notation in 1982. The resultant software, called Nota-Anna,
was programmed in Fortran IV in collaboration with Nilton Lobo. This made it possible to
analyze specific body movements, decompose them, and formalize them using spatial lines
that schematically symbolize the succession of the dancers’ gestures. The objective was to
graphically express corporeal action and define its spatial-temporal positioning. This process
of codification, of translating an ephemeral movement or sequence of movements into in-
formation, allows for the conservation of the gesture’s expressive potential.
In the period 2015 to 2017, Cordeiro used Nota-Anna to make a series of smaller
computer-aided sculptures with very concrete gestures as their visual leitmotifs. Examples
included two Pelé football kicks or a Yoko Geri Kekomi blow by Bruce Lee, both from 1960s
audiovisual sources. This program transforms body movement into symbolic coordinates—
geometric diagrams in space—which are then formally condensed with extreme exactitude
into a single three-dimensional virtual model. The dematerialization of the body takes place
through the transformation of mass into energy. The linking of pure dynamic lines present
in the trajectory of a specific gesture is thereby conserved. In this way, the memory of the
dynamics of the action over time is maintained. The final pieces, as spatial volumes with po-
tentially condensed complex mobility, are modeled and printed in 3D using various ­materials
(figs. 7, 8).
This kind of creative process demonstrates the dual function taken up by the creator
regarding computer-assisted sculpture: that of aesthete, and that of manipulator of sym-
bols.20 The aesthete sets out the artistic criteria (repertoires) that he or she believes must be
present in the work, which will be processed and generated by the computer. On the other
hand, there is the defining of the algorithm’s programming, which must balance the cre-
ative necessities of art practice with the formal language of the machine. The algorithm is

19 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
20 See Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen, 2004, pp. 34–42.

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 Claudia Giannetti

7 Analívia Cordeiro, Materialization of Sight II, 8 Analívia Cordeiro, Tribute to Oskar Schlemmer I,
2015, computer-assisted sculpture, blue polyamide, 2016, computer-assisted sculpture, red polyamide,
28.43 × 22.42 × 21.38 cm. 23.36 x 16.74 x 10.31 cm.

understood as an extension that increases limited human perceptive capacities. Humans, for
instance, cannot precisely register a sequence of movements presented at a higher speed
than the time required for an impression on the human retina (almost a quarter of a sec-
ond). In this sense, the exactitude of the forms and the dynamics, regarding the reality of the
movement, can only be artistically expressed with the support of technological resources.
Continuing research and technological advancement has opened up new possibili-
ties for art, such as computer-generated sculpture (such as through systems of Artificial
­Intelligence) or virtual sculpture (from holography to stereoscopic vision techniques), which
would be the subject of a different essay. Nevertheless, in essence these formats do not
involve changes in the central parameters mentioned previously, while varying the degrees
of autonomy of the technological systems wielded. With this in mind, the human-machine
relationship (as the co-author or meta-author) as well as the final results regarding the art-
work’s degree of materiality or immateriality also become far more variable.

Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Swartz

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