Invisible Environments: CAyC and Countercultural Cybernetics

In 1971, the artistic collective Centro de Artes y Comunicación participated in the Argentine Biennial with the exhibition Arte de Sistemas. Luis Benedit’s Laberinto Invisible, a dematerialized labyrinth that required the interactor to navigate a complex series of invisible boundaries, formed part of the core of this exhibition. Expanding on his earlier Laberinto de Hormigas (1970), Benedit created a distinct cybernetically informed political statement by treating the human as a variable element in a system of invisible control. Despite the international profile of this exhibition, however, CAyC and Benedit have remained invisible in the art historical canon. This chapter explores CAyC’s contribution to the global postmodern avant-garde through an engagement with cybernetics, makes explicit the difference between a counterculture within a neoliberal democracy and a military dictatorship, and demonstrates through CAyC how the use of a cybernetic mode of interpretation can illuminate otherwise obscured systems of communication and technocratic control through sound.