Navigating Internationalism from Buenos Aires: The Centro de Arte y Comunicación

This article maps the complex socio-political terrain negotiated by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) during the early 1970s from Buenos Aires. It shows how the CAYC attempted to continue the internationalising aims which the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella had pursued in the 1960s, while also providing a space for the exhibition and development of Conceptualism that engaged with political conditions in Argentina and in other countries including Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Columbia, developing the framework of “systems art” in order to do so. The compromises necessitated by CAYC's balancing act opened the organisation, and in particular its director Jorge Glusberg, to accusations of cultural imperialism and complicity: from almost the very beginning, the CAYC project was characterised by dissensus and disagreement. The controversy generated by CAYC – documented in archives, publications and exhibition catalogues – now offers a rich historiographical resource for Latin American art, revealing how competing models of internationalism and Conceptualism were closely intertwined rather than diametrically opposed.

USE OF CREATIVE PROJECTS FOR THE FORMATION OF INFORMATION COMPETENCE OF TEACHERS OF ART WORK

The article considers the possibilities of using creative projects to form the information competence of teachers of artistic work. A theoretical model for the formation of information competence of teachers of technological education in the process of performing creative projects is proposed. The formation of information competence of teachers of technological education requires the identification and theoretical justification of the necessary organizational and pedagogical conditions as a set of measures aimed at ensuring the effectiveness of the formation of information competence. Since in our research work, the formation of information competence was carried out in the process of performing creative projects using CAD, the requirement to ensure interactive interaction of students with the teacher and other students came to the fore – creative co-executors of the project as a whole or its individual stages, as well as with all necessary to complete the project information-educational environment (educational-methodical materials, recommendations on the development of theoretical and practical material, Glossary, systematic list of the literature, the system of consultations in the form of newsgroups, forums, computer technology of collective creative activity, etc.). This condition allows the realization of each student's individual educational trajectory in the process of developing a creative project and maximize the use of all the possibilities of a creative project as a form of training to build the necessary level of information competence of teachers of technological education. Keywords: creative project, information competence, technological education, computer-aided design systems, art teacher

The Use of Copyrighted Works by AI Systems: Art Works in the Data Mill

We shall first introduce the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in producing new intellectual creations, distinguishing approaches based on knowledge representation and on machine learning. Then we shall provide an overview of some significant applications of AI to the production of intellectual creations, distinguishing the extent to which they depend on pre-existing works, and the different ways in which such pre-existing works are used in the creative process. In addition, we shall discuss some methods to automatically assess the similarity of works and styles, in the context of AI technologies for text generation. Finally, we shall discuss the legal aspects of AI-reuse of copyrighted works, focusing on the rights of the authors of such works relative to the process and the outputs of AI.

Jurij Lotman

Jurij (or Yuri) Lotman (b. 1922–d. 1993) was a Russian semiotician and cofounder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. A Russian philologist by education, his interests ranged from aesthetics to literary and cultural history; from narrative theory to intellectual history; from cinema to mythology. At the core of his theory is a holistic approach to culture as a system whose main feature is the modeling property. Culture is a structural mechanism that generates structurality through a primary modeling system (the verbal language) and secondary modeling systems (art, literature, religion, mythology, etc.). Clearly inspired in the 1970s by the emergence of structuralism in Moscow, over the years he gave an increasingly dynamic interpretation of “structure,” focusing on the evolution of systems and continuous hybridizations of languages. The idea of dialogue as a condition for cultural evolution is a personal echo of Bakhtin’s theory, which assumes an absolute centrality in Lotman. Cultural evolution comes from the relationship with the Other and the exchange with spaces different from our own. In this frame, the idea of border is also pivotal: cultural identities need to define their own borders, but it is precisely on the borders—lines of separation—that we find the maximum exchange. These ideas form the basis of the theory of semiosphere, a successful neologism that, echoing the biosphere of Vernadskij, points out the holistic, functional, and self-organized quality of cultural systems. In his last works (published posthumously in 2009 and 2013), Lotman’s interest in history and temporal layers of cultures is increasingly in the foreground. He focuses on the predictability or otherwise of historical situations, putting the category of explosion at the center of his reflection, as a moment of unexpected acceleration of the historical-cultural dynamism and the creativity of systems. During the 1970s, Lotman’s works and those of other Soviet semioticians were widely read and proved influential, especially in the field of Slavic studies. In the 1980s, they become influential in American and West European academia. Among the scholars who used Lotman’s concepts are the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, the semiotician Umberto Eco, the reception theorist Wolfgang Iser, and the feminist critic Julia Kristeva. From 2000s onward, Lotman’s legacy has been pivotal in the field of semiotics, and relevant also to the field of cultural and media studies.

Generating Art in Symbiotic Systems

This essay reviews the book by Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds (London: Routledge, 2018). This illustrated monograph discusses the primarily computer-generated work of Ernest Edmonds (b. 1942) in the context of twentieth-century art in Europe. Franco provides relevant technological history as she analyzes Edmonds’ paintings and interactive and digital projects, often created in collaboration. This book is a significant contribution to the history of computer art in which Franco affirms Edmonds’ focus on “the human’s way of working.”