The Artist Who Saw Our AI Crisis in 1969
I've been staring at a painting from 1969.
It shows a ghostly human silhouette in muted flesh tones. Embedded directly onto the canvas are actual microchips and circuit boards from early calculators and industrial controllers. Not artistic representations. Real technological artifacts that once processed electrical signals, now frozen in thick layers of oil paint.
The title: "Who programs who?"
When Ruffo Caselli created this work in 1969, people dismissed him as "a humorist, a refined intellectual with a touch of eccentricity." Today, as curator Carmen Gallo notes, "nobody is laughing."
The Conversation That Named a Movement
In the 1980s, legendary gallerist Leo Castelli was talking with curator Carmen Gallo in SoHo. Gallo said: "Ruffo is an Existentialist and a Cybernetician."
Castelli responded: "Cybernetic Existentialism."
That's how the movement got its name. In a conversation. In New York. About an artist most people had never heard of outside Milano, where the artist was living and exhibiting his work.
The core question of Cybernetic Existentialism: What does it mean to be human when machines increasingly define that meaning for us?
Sound familiar?
The Timing Nobody Recognized
Here's what gets me about Caselli's work.
He started painting "human-biocomputers" in the late 1960s. He treated computers as extensions of the human nervous system before anyone was seriously talking about brain-computer interfaces.
The first brain-computer interface experiments with monkeys happened in 1969 and 1970. The term "Brain-Computer Interface" wasn't even coined until 1973. Human BCI experiments didn't occur until the 1990s.
Caselli was exploring this integration artistically at the exact moment scientists were just beginning to experiment with it.
And here's the strangest part: he never owned a computer, smartphone, or even an answering machine.
Yet half a century before ChatGPT, before Neuralink, before our current wave of artificial intelligence, he grasped the core dilemma with unnerving clarity and fixed it forever in oil and silicon.
When the Art Critic Saw the Future
About 50 years ago, Carmen Gallo recognized what others couldn't see in Caselli's work.
She didn't just sponsor his art—she understood its profound implications for humanity's relationship with technology.
We're living in the future she saw coming through Caselli's work. The one he painted before it existed.
The Shift We Can't Ignore
Recent surveys show that fewer than one-third of Americans now categorically rule out the possibility of machine consciousness.
Five years ago, that number was dramatically different. In 2024, approximately 17-18% of Americans believe at least one AI system has subjective experience. About 8-10% believe at least one AI system has self-awareness.
What Caselli proposed as artistic provocation has become mainstream existential concern. We're asking his questions now. We're living in his paintings.
The Humanoids With No Emotions
I've looked at dozens of Caselli's paintings now.
The figures are unsettling. Human-shaped but not human. Technological beings with blank expressions. No empathy. No warmth. Just presence.
Some UFOlogists looked at his work and speculated he'd been abducted. That these weren't imaginative creations but memories.
Caselli never confirmed it. Never denied it either. The mystery remains.
The Warnings We're Only Now Hearing
The median AI researcher in 2024 estimated a 25% chance of conscious AI by 2034 and a 70% chance by 2100.
Caselli's decades-old warnings carry renewed urgency.
He studied under Lucio Fontana in Milan during the 1950s and 60s. He learned to paint and work with ceramic until, as he put it, "I became obsessed with technology and robotics and my artistic life took a different turn."
That turn happened in the late 1960s. He started painting technological beings and human-like robots decades before such themes became mainstream.
The Question We Still Can't Answer
Caselli died in 2021. His work is recognized in the US, Russia, Korea, and across Europe.
Carmen Gallo discovered him, championed his most radical experiments, and later founded the Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Cybernetic Existentialism to safeguard his legacy.
But I keep thinking about those circuit boards glued to canvas in 1969. About the question: "Who programs who?"
We still don't have a good answer. Maybe that's the point.
Caselli paid attention before the rest of us knew what to look for. He saw the future not because he owned the latest technology, but because he understood what technology would do to us.
We're finally catching up to what he painted 50 years ago.
Conclusion;
A question first embedded in canvas and circuitry in 1969 now defines the technological present.
Human identity and machine intelligence continue to converge without clear boundaries.
Caselli’s vision endures as both warning and framework for understanding this shift.
The answer to “Who programs who?” remains unresolved.
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Media Details:
Lennox R.
Assistant art curator
Web page: www. Cyberneticexistentialism.com
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