A voice-over cuts through the typical background noise of a television broadcast: “Neither machines nor artificial brains can produce art. Our defense of the artistic creator stems more from our confidence in human creativity than from any lack of trust in scientific and technical achievements. Nevertheless, this does not mean we fail to recognize that if the creator does not venture through the maze of scientific and technological advancements of the present day, they would not only be unable to incorporate them into their work, but, what is worse, they would be unable to conceive other forms of art.” This reflection appears in the video From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution (1980), produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC). The video traces a specific genealogy of the relationship between art and technology. It starts with Leonardo da Vinci, portrayed as an artist, scientist, and technician (figs. 1–3), then moves to Marcel Duchamp’s experiments (fig. 4), the teachings of the Bauhaus, the works of Soviet Constructivism, and Futurist explorations. It concludes with Conceptual art and, naturally, the work of CAYC itself (fig. 5).

One could say that From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution serves as a remediation of the famous 1969 exhibition Argentina-Intermedios. Along with Arte y cibernética (1965), this exhibition helped CAYC pioneer the relationship between technology, society, and contemporary art practices (fig. 6). Founded in Buenos Aires by Jorge Glusberg in 1968, the CAYC quickly became a hub for experimentation with new media. However, its activities were also inevitably marked by ongoing tensions between art and politics.

Since these tensions have been widely studied, this essay proposes a different framework for understanding the legacy of the CAYC. I suggest that the Centro should be viewed within the context of television’s rise as the dominant technological medium of the time. This shift not only reconfigured the domestic sphere but also gave rise to an alternative media scene that challenged the audiovisual dominance recently secured by large corporations. Among the artists and critics who best captured the television boom were Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, John Berger, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams. Enzensberger, for instance, participated in “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television,” at the Museum of Modern Art (1974), an event in which Glusberg also took part. This suggests that Glusberg’s early reflections at CAYC likely aligned with similar critical viewpoints. While we cannot confirm whether Glusberg was familiar with the work of the other authors, it is clear that he shared their interest in how emerging video technology was transforming both art and its relationship to society.

By examining CAYC against the backdrop of a time when new media were both increasingly widespread and contested, I argue that the Centro’s greatest success—and simultaneously its greatest failure—lies in what I will refer to in this essay as its sociotechnical impetus. 1  By this, I mean the force with which CAYC positioned itself as a platform where technological mediations fostered new modes of sociability that allowed for critical possibilities and resistance within the arts. On the one hand, CAYC’s art practices successfully repositioned Latin American art on the international stage. On the other, the Centro failed to foster novel and dissident forms of engagement with technology.

Rather than focusing only on CAYC’s videos, exhibitions, and efforts to promote discussions, education, encounters, and dialogues about the technology of the time, I suggest studying the CAYC through the lens of its audiovisual assemblages. By this, I refer not only to CAYC’s own production but also to its promotion of other artists, including the events it organized, its marketing and editorial strategies (such as their well-known “gacetillas” and other publications), and its public relations efforts (partnerships, sponsorships, and participation in biennials and festivals), as well as its material conditions (equipment used) and its discursive framework (vocabulary and conceptual statements). 2  My hypothesis is that what we know as the CAYC represents a temporary stabilization of a complex audiovisual assemblage that actively experimented with the sociotechnical conditions of artistic practice while intervening in the prevailing narratives of contemporary Latin American art—albeit not without frictions and disputes, some of which are still ongoing.

The recent acquisition by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) of several videos produced by CAYC offers a valuable opportunity to delve deeper into its audiovisual assemblages. The videos produced by the CAYC, however, were not proper conceptual explorations of the medium; rather, they “could best be characterized as documentary and promotional materials.” 3  In these videos, the audiovisual logic remains unquestioned, serving instead as a linear narrative that documents the experiments of CAYC artists. However, these videos also incorporate powerful self-referential mediations intended to promote CAYC’s work. 4 

One such video is Arte de sistemas (Systems Art), which not only references one of the CAYC’s most important exhibitions but also became the term commonly used to describe its most prominent conceptual claims. In the video, Glusberg states: “Systems art is an attempt to develop the necessary intersection between a selected set of discourses and the realization of a conceptual model suitable for interpreting the process of their constitution.” We should highlight the word attempt: Systems art does not appear to have been presented as a definitive art program; rather, it was a broad concept that encompassed various art practices that shared an interest in their environment, although they were not necessarily uniform in their approaches or interventions.

For Glusberg, “art as idea, ecological art, poor art, cybernetic art, art of propositions, political art—all of these will be grouped under the term Systems art.” 5  This eclectic definition highlights Glusberg’s “unavoidable ability to interpret and assimilate diverse aesthetic trends.” 6  By employing such broad definitions, CAYC was able to position itself at the forefront of various experimental movements and remain legible to different critical perspectives. Glusberg’s sly use of vague terminology significantly contributed to CAYC’s early international recognition. 7 

However, it is important to note that Systems art, due to its conceptual vagueness, was both a sincere techno-scientific experiment in the arts and a kind of informatics illusion that was never fully realized. In CAYC’s first exhibition, Arte y cibernética (1969), six artists collaborated with computer technicians to use IBM software and equipment to generate drawings (fig. 7). Yet instead of fostering genuine collaboration—where both groups exchanged knowledge and experience on equal terms—the artists were treated as “disciples” and “test subjects,” immersed in a “jungle of plotters, equations, matrices, and punched cards.” 8  For this reason, Systems art should not be understood simply as art shaped by technology. Instead, it draws the notion of systems from the field of cybernetics to emphasize the importance of an art form that is aware of the sociotechnical assemblage of its environment. Perhaps this is why Glusberg claimed in the aforementioned video that “the goal of the artist is to work on life itself” in order to “take its organizational structure and the way it functions as materials” (fig. 8).

With its interstitial approach to Systems art—situated between technology and its broader social implications—the CAYC developed a diverse program of activities, organizing exhibitions in Argentina while promoting Latin American art to institutions worldwide. However, exhibitions were merely the most visible instances of a broader network of activities, which included research seminars, publications, symposia, workshops, and other platforms for exchange and experimentation with audiovisual media.

The problem with the CAYC’s efforts to create non-hierarchical spaces for audiovisual experimentation was that they inevitably took shape in grandiose and frequently costly formats. One of the most criticized aspects of CAYC was its funding, as it is well known that nearly all its activities were financed through Modulor, a company owned by Glusberg (fig. 9). 9  Several of CAYC’s booklets also mention that its events were sponsored by major companies, including Sony (and its authorized distributors across various countries) and Labadié (Laboratorios Argentinos de Industria Electrónica—Argentine Laboratories of Electrical Industry) (fig. 10). These corporate relationships became a target of criticism, as did Glusberg’s other partnerships, including his alliance with Televisa executives in Mexico and the Argentine military dictatorship through Modulor’s services. These controversies underscored the tension between CAYC’s corporate entanglements and its efforts to create circuits for alternative, non-commercial video formats (figs. 11–12).

The contradictions and tensions within the CAYC reached their peak with the famous and controversial Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video. Glusberg developed this format after participating in Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1974 and following the Arte de sistemas exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London that same year. Organized in multiple cities around the world—London, Paris, Ferrara, Buenos Aires, Antwerp, Caracas, Barcelona, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo—these ten Encuentros served as platforms where all of CAYC’s efforts converged. Videos by artists from across the globe were showcased, educational activities were conducted, booklets announced upcoming events and featured excerpts from previous editions, institutional partnerships were fostered, new vocabularies were explored, and new equipment was acquired for future activations. The most crucial element in this assemblage was the collection of videos produced by the CAYC itself, functioning like a closed circuit that both documented and promoted its activities, emphasizing its “self-invention.” 10 

However, the issue with the Encuentros, as with other “monstrous” events at the CAYC, 11  was that they followed the same program without adapting to the specific characteristics of each of the cities where they were presented. For this reason, “the Encuentros failed to adequately be in dialogue with or responsive to the local video communities in each city, thus broadcasting the existence of an international video art network to which local participants felt neither connected nor welcome.” 12 As a result, and due to their large-scale and ambitious formats, the Encuentros ultimately became mere exhibition platforms that missed the opportunity to elevate audiovisual media as a form of revolutionary mediation. 13 

What is undeniable, despite any criticism, is that the CAYC successfully established a complex, multiscale audiovisual assemblage. This assemblage was not solely built around communication as “the new magic word,” 14 but rather it emerged from a more complex articulation of aesthetic, economic, institutional, political and technological relationships (figs. 13–14). Paradoxically, this achievement also led to its most significant flaw: the CAYC failed to transcend the boundaries of this assemblage to incorporate its own critique through insurgent forms of video use. 15 

In the catalogue of the Third International Open Encounter on Video (1975), Glusberg asserted that “video in the artists’ hands is developing a new image culture challenging the triviality and cretinism proposed by the TV corporations.” 16 While this statement appears to hold true in conceptual terms, it doesn’t fully capture the social relationships fostered by video. CAYC’s strategic alliances with large corporations made it difficult to move beyond this cretinism and effectively challenge their technological infrastructures. Although the democratizing potential of the audiovisual was not fully realized, the CAYC assemblages created fissures significant enough to open un pathways toward the future of an alternative imaginal politics. 17 

A quick glance at its videos reveals that “the history of CAYC … presents a dilemma for scholars.” 18 It is clear that a well-defined history of CAYC has yet to emerge; it remains “a story to be told.” 19 This is a phenomenon similar to others in contemporary Latin American art, whose memories, while not entirely forgotten, seem to have not yet regained their power and vibrancy.

In his contribution to the publication for Open Circuits (The Museum of Modern Art, 1974), Glusberg stated, “In Latin America an art does not exist, but its impetus exists, in line with its revolutionary situation.” 20 Although it would be a stretch to draw a direct analogy and claim that CAYC does not exist, we could certainly adapt Glusberg’s words to suggest that what we now recognize as the CAYC is, above all, a product of its impetus—what I have referred to here as sociotechnical impetus. This impetus allows us to outline a tentative history of the CAYC. The audiovisual assemblages examined in this essay offer a glimpse into that sociotechnical impetus—at times delirious, at other times guided by a clear strategy. Regardless, the legacy of the CAYC lies in its commitment to experimenting with the technological mediations that shape our social relations and the ways it reactivated these mediations in unexpected ways.