Sociotechnical Impetus: CAYC’s Audiovisual Assemblages
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Jun 3, 202506.03.25
Writer in Residence

Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 12:57 featuring Luis Benedit’s work Jaula para pájaros. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate. Benedit artwork © Familia Benedit

AUTHORS
Renato Bermúdez Dini

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).

Black-and-white film still of a dome

Fig. 1. Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). Produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 0:56 featuring a description of Leonardo da Vinci as the first intermedia artist. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate

Black-and-white film still of a dome

Fig. 2. Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). Produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 1:04 featuring a description of Leonardo da Vinci as the first intermedia artist. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate

Black-and-white film still of church interior

Fig. 3. Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). Produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 1:10 featuring a description of Leonardo da Vinci as the first intermedia artist. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate

Black-and-white film still of wheels and gears

Fig. 4. Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). Produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 5:42 partially depicting Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), by Marcel Duchamp. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate. Duchamp artwork © ARSNY

Black-and-white fill still of plastic structure and water drops

Fig. 5. Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). Produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 12:57 featuring Luis Benedit’s work Jaula para pájaros. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate. Benedit artwork © Familia Benedit

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.

Fig. 6. Jorge Glusberg, dir., From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution, 1980 (still). Produced by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. U-matic video, color, mono sound, 19:35 min. Frame from 0:25 displaying the video’s title against the cover of the Argentina-Intermedios exhibition catalogue. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Jorge Glusberg Estate

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).

Fig. 7. Centro de Arte y Comunicación, “Argentine Computer Art at Zagreb (Yugoslavia) in Tendencies – 5,” gacetilla no. GT-240, June 11, 1973, featuring a photo of the IBM 1627 Plotter, used in 1969 to create drawings for the Arte y cibernética exhibition. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA)

Fig. 8. Jorge Glusberg, dir., Latin American Artists, 1973 (still). Produced by Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 12:22 min. Frame from 4:29 featuring a poster by Lea Lublin with the inscription “Arte será vida” (Art will be life), and a shadow resembling the silhouette of Jorge Glusberg. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Danilo Galasse / Jorge Glusberg Estate / Pedro Roth Estate. Lublin artwork © Nicolás Lublin and 1 Mira Madrid.

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).

Fig. 9. Jorge Glusberg, dir., Jorge Glusberg talks to Luis Benedit, 1973 (still). Produced by Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse. 16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 7:32 min. Frame from 1:05 featuring Glusberg and Benedit at the entrance of CAYC’s headquarters in Buenos Aires, with the logo of Modulor—CAYC’s main sponsor—visible near the entrance sign. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Danilo Galasse /Jorge Glusberg Estate / Pedro Roth Estate. Benedit artwork © Familia Benedit

Fig. 10. Centro de Arte y Comunicación, “Video tapes: CAYC alternativo—Hacia un futuro de la televisión,” gacetilla no. GT-452, September 2, 1974, featuring the equipment used by CAYC and highlighting sponsorship by Labadié. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives

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Fig. 11. Centro de Arte y Comunicación, “Festival Para Formatos No Comerciales,” gacetilla no. GT-292, September 27, 1973, announcing the Festival para Formatos No Comerciales. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives

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Fig. 12. Centro de Arte y Comunicación, “Alternative Video,” gacetilla no. GT-348, January 19, 1974, announcing the participation of CAYC in “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives

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 

Black-and-white film still of collage

Fig. 13. Jorge Glusberg, dir., Works by Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Polish, and Yugoslavian Experimental Artists, 1973 (still). Produced by Pedro Roth and Danilo Galasse. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 19:28 min. Frame from 0:55 showing a work from the series Asociácie, by Stano Filko. The work presents an intricate assemblage of human and non-human actants, where space rockets, satellites, and astronauts coexist with diagrams, numbers, and other textual notes from a sociotechnical perspective, reminiscent of the themes explored in this essay. Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) Archive, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) Library and Archives. © Danilo Galasse / Jorge Glusberg / Pedro Roth Estate. Image courtesy Linea, Bratislava & Layr, Vienna. Filko artwork © Stano Filko

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Fig. 14. Catalogue of the exhibition Arte de sistemas (Centro de Arte y Comunicación and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 1971). Page featuring an intervention by artist Stano Filko, with sketches from his Asociácie series. The drawing presents a chaotic diagram intertwining technical objects, human figures, landscapes, maps, and texts, evoking the notion of audiovisual assemblage discussed in this essay. Significantly, at the center of the diagram is a drawing of a television. © Jorge Glusberg Estate

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.

1. I borrow the term “sociotechnical” from the Actor-Network Theory, which posits that “technology is society made durable.” Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” Sociological Review Monograph 38, no. 1 (1991): 103–32. This approach emphasizes the mutual constitution of the social and the technological, forming a new kind of relational ontology.
2. This rather diverse approach to the notion of audiovisual assemblage is also aligned with Actor-Network Theory. The concept of assemblage suggests that agency—the ability to produce something—arises from diverse, sometimes unequal, relationships between human and nonhuman actants. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano, “Encounters: CAYC and the International Encuentros,” in Elena Shtromberg and Glenn Phillips, eds., Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2023), 23.
4. See Benjamin Murphy, “An ‘Intermedia Revolution’: Audiovisual Experimentation at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación,” Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) website, https://islaa.org/explore/an-intermedia-revolution-audiovisual-experimentation.
5. Centro de Arte y Comunicación, “Arte de sistemas en el museo de arte moderno,” gacetilla no. GT-54, June 28, 1971, Buenos Aires.
6. Mariana Marchesi, “El CAYC y el arte de sistemas como estrategia institucional,” Sztuka Ameryki Łacińskiej 7 (2017): 145.
7. Soon after its founding, the CAYC was featured in major publications worldwide, including the second edition of the renowned book Del arte objetual al arte de concepto, by Spanish theorist Simón Marchán Fiz, in 1974; in the academic article “El ordenador como instrumento de ayuda a la creatividad artística,” by Pere Botella, published in 1977 in the sixteenth issue of Novática: Revista de la Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; and, from August 1969, in several issues of Page, Computer Arts Society’s famous bulletin.
8. Centro de Arte y Comunicación, «Por qué incluimos a Benedit, Berni, Deira, Mac Entyre, Romberg y Vidal en esta muestra», Primera muestra del Centro de Arte y Comunicación de la Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria, exh. cat. (Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1969), n. p.
9. Luis Camnitzer describes the CAYC as “a gallery space … that combined the display of art with the lamps manufactured by its owner.” Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (University of Texas Press, 2007), 248. Marta Traba refers to the CAYC as a “company.” Marta Traba, Arte de América Latina: 1900–1980 (Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, 1994), 141.
10. Katarzyna Cytlak, “Hacia el arte latinoamericano globalizado. La auto-invención del CAYC —Centro de Arte y Comunicación— desde la perspectiva transmoderna y transregional,” Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo 5, no. 1 (2017–18): 53–85.
11. Catherine Spencer, Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (Manchester University Press, 2020), 60.
12. Phillips and Serrano, “Encounters,” 52.
13. Ignacio Estella, “Entrevista a Eugeni Bonet,” Desacuerdos, no. 4 (2007): 208.
14. Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970 (Siglo XXI, 2005), 197.
15. This failure is not unique to the CAYC; it extends to many other projects that view the technological potential of the audiovisual as a vehicle for criticism and rebellion yet are persistently stifled by the hegemonic uses of media. While these media introduce new forms of information circulation, they also generate new—and increasingly imperceptible—forms of control and oppression. Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017), 106–11.
16. Jorge Glusberg, “Alternative Video (Against TV),” in Third International Open Encounter on Video, exh. cat.(CAYC; Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna), n. p.
17. Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014.
18. Phillips and Serrano, “Encounters,” 67.
19. Cristina Figueroa Vives, “Arte digital latinoamericano, una historia por contar,” Revista de la Casa de las Américas 290 (2018): 142–7.
20. Jorge Glusberg, “Video in Latin America,” in Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, eds., The New Television: A Public/Private Art (MIT Press, 1977), 203.
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The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art.

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