Auro Lecci — Italian computer-graphics pioneer

1968

Artists: Auro Lecci · Year: 1968 · Medium: Plotter drawings — algorithmic compositions produced with Italian computing-center access · Substrate: Italian mainframes at CNUCE (Centro Nazionale Universitario di Calcolo Elettronico, Pisa) and University of Florence; plotters; custom FORTRAN programs · Place: Florence, Italy · Institution: University of Florence (CNUCE computing center access) Auro Lecci was one of the earliest Italian practitioners of computer-generated art, working from the Centro Nazionale Universitario di Calcolo Elettronico (CNUCE) in Pisa — Italy's principal post-war academic computing center — from the mid-1960s forward. His 1968 works, shown at the Gruppo 70 exhibitions in Florence that year and at the Olivetti-sponsored Arte e Calcolatori exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in 1968, were among the first Italian computer-art works to receive institutional exhibition. Lecci's method was specifically Italian in a sense that matters to this archive. He worked with the CNUCE's IBM 7090 — one of the largest academic mainframes in continental Europe at the time — and used plotter output not to produce finished works on paper but to generate source material for his subsequent paintings, screen-prints, and silk-screens. The Italian post-war avant-garde tradition in which Lecci was embedded (the Gruppo N in Padua, Gruppo T in Milan, Gruppo 70 in Florence) was committed to the painting-and-printmaking tradition in a way that the German and English computer-art scenes were not; Lecci translated between the computational and the hand-made in specifically Italian terms. What makes Lecci important to this archive is that his 1968 work is one of the earliest sustained Italian statements in the computer-art genealogy. The Italian computer-art scene of the 1960s-70s has been consistently underrepresented in English-language criticism — the Stuttgart-school German work dominates the historiography — and Lecci's position as a genuinely original Italian figure has only been recovered gradually since the 2010s through the work of the Italian critic Renato Barilli and the Archivio Mario Sturani at the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan. Lecci continued to work through the 1980s, was Professor of Digital Graphics at the University of Florence in the 1990s, and died in 2013. His archive is at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Lore Lecci's access to the CNUCE's IBM 7090 was brokered through the mathematician Vincenzo Cocilovo, who had been his classmate at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and had subsequently joined the CNUCE staff. The informal arrangement allowed Lecci to run his programs during CNUCE's weekend down-time, which meant Lecci spent many Saturday nights in the Pisan computing center while the rest of his Florentine art-scene colleagues were in Florence bars. The Olivetti company's late-1960s cultural program (which also supported the Programma 101 programmable calculator's artistic deployment) underwrote the 1968 Palazzo Strozzi exhibition in which Lecci participated. Olivetti's cultural philanthropy, which was substantial in the 1960s, is a significant under-documented part of the Italian computer-art story. Sources • Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze — Auro Lecci archive. • Barilli, Renato — Arte e Calcolatori (Olivetti / Palazzo Strozzi, 1968; exh. cat.). • Gallerie d'Italia Milano — Archivio Mario Sturani (Italian post-war computer art).