page_title: Maurizio Bolognini
section_title: Programmed Machines / Sealed Computers
hierarchical_section_title: Maurizio Bolognini / Programmed Machines / Sealed Computers
caption_attribution_description: English: Maurizio Bolognini, ICB (Interactive Collective Blue), Round 144, 42 x 64 cm, 2006
context_page_description: Maurizio Bolognini is a post-conceptual media artist. His installations are mainly concerned with the aesthetics of machines, and are based on the minimal and abstract activation of technological processes that are beyond the artist's control, at the intersection of generative art, public art and e-democracy.
context_section_description: In 1988, Bolognini began using personal computers to generate flows of continuously expanding random images. In the 1990s, he programmed hundreds of these computers and left them to run ad infinitum (most of these are still working now). About his Programmed Machines he wrote: "I do not consider myself an artist who creates certain images, and I am not merely a conceptual artist. I am one whose machines have actually traced more lines than anyone else, covering boundless surfaces. I am not interested in the formal quality of the images produced by my installations but rather in their flow, their limitlessness in space and time, and the possibility of creating parallel universes of information made up of kilometres of images and infinite trajectories. My installations serve to generate out-of-control infinities."
  The Programmed Machines (and in particular the Sealed Computers, since 1992, whose monitor buses are closed with wax and whose graphic outputs cannot be displayed)  are considered among his most significant works. These Machines were exhibited in many museums and art galleries, in Europe and the United States. In 2003 some sixty Machines were exhibited in three simultaneous shows arranged at the Laboratory Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, the CACTicino Center for Contemporary Art in Switzerland, and the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center in New York. In 2005 the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art, Genoa, dedicated a retrospective and a monograph to these works.
  Since 2000, Bolognini has concentrated on combining the Programmed Machines with communication devices, as in the Collective Intelligence Machines. These are interactive installations connecting some of his generative machines to the mobile telephone network, to allow a real-time Delphi-like interaction by members of the public. These installations delegate choices to both electronic devices and processes of communication and e-democracy with the aim of involving the audience in new forms of “generative, interactive and public art”.
  Maurizio Bolognini's work has been considered relevant to the theory of the technological sublime and the aesthetics of flux (as opposed to the aesthetics of form), and has been seen as a further development of conceptual art within neo-technological art.
caption: ICB144 (Interactive Collective Blue, Round 144), 42 x 64 cm, 2006. The interaction structure of the CIMs was also used in ICB (Interactive Collective Blue), in order to define a series of Democratic Blues.
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