On Thursday, October 16, “Cybernetic Highway,” the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Robert Mallary, opens in Marfa, Texas. Hosted by the Mallary Archives, the short-term exhibition—only on view October 16–19, during Marfa’s Art Blocks weekend—traces Mallary’s seven-decade career, characterized by an experimental and collaborative approach to new technologies. In celebration of the show, Artforum revisits Mallary’s remarkably prescient essay “Computer Sculpture,” published in the magazine’s May 1969 issue, in which the artist elucidates the then-nascent field of cybernetic art and envisions a future in which there exists “a fully interactive, synergistic man-machine relationship.”
 
“The computer is more than a single item in an expanding inventory of art and technology paraphernalia. All of these technologies are promising but the computer is portentous, because for the first time the sculptor has access to a tool which can be used not only for executing a work of art, but conceiving one as well,” writes Mallary. “It has already been demonstrated that the computer can assist the sculptor to some degree; in the future it may, in effect, come to collaborate with him.” Eventually, Mallary predicts, “the sculptor . . . will probably not be able to pull out the plug.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan