102 shockwave that Pop Art has been. The signals to be grasped and to know how to interpret were all within world art: relationship with matter, recovery of waste produced by growing consumerism, new importance to movement and to the word, the irruption of technology into everyday life, direct impact facing the form, interdisciplinarity of art. An art both critical and complicit in modernity, ready to reveal its contradictions, but irresistibly attracted to the new mechanisms of production and consumption. Everything was changing, in that frenetic post-war period. It was 1949 when the Nobel Prize in Physics Enrico Fermi, paying a visit to the Ivrea plants, suggested Adriano Olivetti to focus on electronics, a hot topic in the United States where he worked. Thus, Adriano went directly to America to look for one of the leading electronics experts, identified in Mario Tchou, to entrust him with the Elea 9003 project, the first fully transistorized electronic computer, Golden Compass in 1959 for Ettore Sottsass’ design. That it was a real revolution, and as such also a bit dangerous, Adriano Olivetti sensed it, to the point that he always took care to keep the Electronics Division away from Ivrea and from the powerful caste of mechanical engineers. Electronics has been his last great dream, his last great premonition. No more strength but intelligence, information before action. An artificial apparatus having processes somehow similar to thought – such as logic, such as linguistics – able to solicit man, society and, of course, industry and art to build new dynamics, to re-elaborate a new grammar of forms and behaviors, to live in a present ever so much future. Despite the sudden deaths of Adriano (1960), and Mario Tchou (1961), and in spite of the clouds gathering over the Electronics Division, increasingly opposed by the Italian lobbies of mechanics and finance, Olivetti – if only in memoir of Adriano – did not interrupt its relationship with art, its own language and its own image, which in that period took the form of a collaboration in a transversal collection of studies spanning science, poetry and cybernetics, in full Adriano's interdisciplinary approach, contained within the Almanacco Letterario Bompiani (1962), dedicated to the applications of electronic calculators to moral sciences and literature, with cover by Bruno Munari and critical text by Umberto Eco. This almanac was antechamber of the first exhibition on Programmed Art, an artistic avant-garde entirely born within Olivetti. The occasion was the renovation of the Olivetti Store in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan; front-runner was Bruno Munari who, a few months earlier, introduced Giorgio Soavi, Olivetti’s artistic consultant and Zorzi’s right-hand man, to the experimental works, inspired by Kinetic Art, coming from a collective of young Milanese artists, the Gruppo T (Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele Devecchi, Grazia Varisco), to which Munari added the five members of the Paduan Gruppo N (Alberto Blasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi, Manfredo Massironi) together with Enzo Mari, Getulio Alviani and himself. Twelve artists for twelve artworks: twelve abstractions, twelve kinetic compositions, changing thanks to the interaction of elements moving as the viewer moves. That of Programmed Art, a definition coined by Munari himself, was a current that placed the accent on the fundamental moment of the programming, either movement or optical illusion, zeroing the distance between the technical-scientific language and the artistic-humanistic one. A mechanism – an electric engine, but also just a human movement – generates a kineticism, whose quantities are measurable and whose dynamism is preordained, but whose formal result is unpredictable, so much so that it is different at each cycle: a premise fully programmable, therefore, corresponds to an imponderable outcome, above all thanks to human interaction. The rise and fall of iron filings in Boriani's Magnetic Surfaces, the iridescent mutating for each movement of the eye of Alberto Biasi's Optical-dynamic reliefs, the subtle highlighting of the force of gravity in Mari's Self-guided composition object are hypnotic works, because their premise is simple, but their result is potentially infinite. «Prophecy – later verified – of a new society, art for all, industrial art, mass and international diffusion, circumventing and exclusion of the traditional market, mutation of the role of the artist, preordained linguistic encroachments, multidisciplinary theoretical debates: there is enough to place Programmed Art among the leading movements of modernity» Marco Meneguzzo, L’importanza di chiamarsi programmati, in: E. Morteo, M. Meneguzzo, A. Saibene, Programmare l’arte: Olivetti e le neoavanguardie cinetiche, 2012 Vision and artistic planning, combined with Olivetti's technical knowledge and economic strength, coexisted to give life to the latest Italian avant-garde: Olivetti not only hosted the exhibition and had it circulated around the world (Düsseldorf, London and North America, entrusting its photographic documentation to Mario Dondero), but actively intervened in the production of individual objects15. 15 In an undated letter to Gruppo N, Munari wrote: «Olivetti wants the objects to be well finished and, if they have a mechanism, that this does not fail during the exhibition. It features excellent doers, skilled in any material, who could build the object».
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