on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
Model, Metaphor, Analogy: The Computational
Imaginary in Arte Programmata’s Experimental
Environments, 1964-68
LINDSAY CAPLAN
Electronic brains, even if they are still far from producing all the
functions of the human brain, are nonetheless capable of providing us
with a convincing theoretical model for the most complex processes of
our memory, our mental associations, our imagination, our conscience.
(Calvino 1967)
When Italo Calvino spoke these words in 1967 to an audience in Turin, he
captured one of the central ways that artists and writers had been engaging with new computational technologies for the last decade: as a robust model for conceptualizing the creative and cognitive capacities of human beings. The terms drawn from computers may be new—coding, patterns, programming, and information, to name some of the most prevalent at the time—but, Calvino claimed, they described operations as old as writing itself: «writers, as they have always been up to now, are already writing machines,» he asserted, elaborating that «the struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape the confines of language.» (Calvino, 1986, p. 13; 16)
Individual expression constitutes a dynamic process of working within
and beyond technological, linguistic, social, or material constraints. The advent of computers simply helped to make this clearer than ever before.
Much has been written about what computers model for Calvino (a world
of discrete instead of continuous structures and experiences; art as a
combinatorial game, with radical implications for understanding the nature of authorship). However, less attention has been paid to how modeling worked to articulate the political agency of art—in mixed and often contradictory ways—and why it was so widely used to describe computer art, specifically, especially among artists working with these new technologies in Italy in the 1960s….