Madrid, Octobre 1968, La Communauté Inavouable
In 1968, the first computer appeared at the University of Madrid, marking the beginning of the activities of the Computing Centre. After decades of cultural isolation, artists, musicians, architects, engineers, scientists and intellectuals began to think about using computers in their creative processes. The Computer Centre became the most significant space for creative freedom at the end of the dictatorship, asserting itself as a structure for collective experimentation, in a context where the gathering had an almost subversive significance.
The immunity provided by the seemingly non-ideological aura of technology enabled the Centre to give unprecedented impetus to the Spanish innovation that was still in gestation. The result was a double rupture: the collapse of the cultural bloc imposed by the political regime; and the disappearance of the boundaries between the different fields of creation, opening up experimentation to new avenues of expression.
By building "bridges between an absolutely virtual and imaginary world, and a real world", the Centre de Calcul opens up writing to other horizons of experimentation, such as music and the visual arts, while drawing inspiration from Noam Chomsky's new linguistic theories and Max Bense's information theory.
The book looks back at the historic work of Javier Seguí de la Riva, which forms the corpus needed to understand the context of the period and to link the works of architects and artists, in an ongoing questioning of the cohabitation of the imaginary and experimentation. José Luis Alexanco's forms in movement sit alongside José María Yturralde's Impossible Figures, in dialogue with the poetry of Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and Guillermo de Searle.
Authors : Collective work edited by Mónica García Martínez and Abdelkader Damani
With contributions from José Luis Alexanco, Florentino Briones, Abdelkader Damani, Mónica García Martínez, Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, María Jesús Muñoz Pardo, Javier Seguí de la Riva...
Bilingual French / Spanish - 300 pages
Co-publishing Lienart / Frac Centre-Val de Loire - 2018