Supervisor: Professor Giuliana Pieri

Institution email: Martina.Borghi.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk

My PhD project aims to analyse the pioneering role of the Italian movement “Kinetic and Programmed Art” in the development of the study of the relation between the artwork and the observer. In my research I intend to analyse the specific environment that led to the growth of this movement in Italy in the 1960s. Kinetic and Programmed Art, in its link between art and technology, mainly focused on the concept and creative possibilities of motion. It was the result of a strong relationship between Art and Science and a wider interest in interdisciplinary intersections which characterised Italian culture throughout the 1960s, bringing together disciplines like Literature, Sociology, Philosophy, scientific and technological research, art theory, and the visual arts and design. Through an interdisciplinary method my intention is to examine this movement from an innovative viewpoint that takes into consideration the empathetic and emotional responses of the observers to kinetic motions. I will concentrate my attention, in particular, on the “Ambienti” – immersive artworks realized from the second half of the 1960s in which the observer was exposed to multisensory stimuli – by examining the role of the observer as an active subject of the artwork and by analysing his/her engagement in this kind of experimentation. Moreover, I will explore the role of Cybernetics in the 1960s, especially in and around Milan, as an interdisciplinary field of research that had many connections with specific Kinetic groups of the time. Kinetic artists were inspired by this new discipline that had a wide reach, influencing studies on communication, language and visual perception.My PhD project is in dialogue with current research on the relationship between Art and Cognitive Scienceand aims to contribute to this body of scholarship by proposing a new approach to examining artisticexpressions from the viewpoint of the observer.