Matko Meštrović (curator-organizer) — Tendencies 4 — Computer and Visual Research

1969

Artists: Matko Meštrović (curator-organizer), Vjenceslav Richter, Ivan Picelj, Abraham Moles (theorist) · Year: 1969 · Medium: Series of exhibitions with accompanying theoretical conferences and journal bit international · Substrate: Exhibition of international computer-generated artworks alongside Yugoslav concrete and kinetic art · Place: Zagreb, Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia) · Institution: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb (Gallery of Contemporary Art) The New Tendencies series of exhibitions in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, ran in major editions from 1961 through 1973. The fourth edition (1968–69) was the first to focus specifically on computer and visual research, and along with Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA the same year, it established the international public presence of computer-generated art. Tendencies 4 was organized by the local art theorist Matko Meštrović, drew artists from across Europe and the United States, and was accompanied by a theoretical conference and the publication of the journal bit international, which ran through the early 1970s with the French cybernetician Abraham Moles and others on its editorial board. What Zagreb did that London and Stuttgart did not was situate computer-generated art within the broader Yugoslav project of socialist-modernist concrete and constructivist art — the tradition of the local EXAT 51 group, of Ivan Picelj, Vjenceslav Richter, and others. In Zagreb, computer art was not a novelty imported from Western research institutions; it was the latest phase in a locally grounded modernist tradition with Marxist theoretical underpinnings. This is a distinct framing, and it shaped the selection of artists and the discussion that followed. The Zagreb scene is systematically underrepresented in English-language histories of computer art, which tend to treat Yugoslav new-media practice as a regional footnote. The scholarship produced at Zagreb in the late 1960s and early 1970s — including bit international's full run — is a major primary-source archive of the period's theoretical discussion that most non-Slavic-reading historians of the field have never encountered. The post-Yugoslav Croatian scholarship of the 2000s and 2010s has begun to reintroduce this material. Lore Tendencies 5, in 1973, took place during a more troubled political period in Yugoslavia and was the last major edition of the series. Meštrović and his colleagues continued to write and organize after Tendencies ended, but the international infrastructure that had supported the earlier editions dissolved. bit international's complete run is held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. The Nouvelle Tendance, the broader international affiliation that Tendencies was part of, included Gruppo T, Nouveau Réalisme, and ZERO group figures; the network connected across the Iron Curtain in a way that was unusual for the period. Sources • Rosen, Margit (ed.) — A Little-Known Story About a Movement, A Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 (MIT Press / ZKM, 2011) • Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb — bit international archive • Fritz, Darko — Bit International 1968–1972 (scholarly essays, various publications)