In "New Tendencies -- Computers and Visual Research, Zagreb, 1968-1969", Rosen suggests that it is “the specific political position of Yugoslavia as a nonaligned socialist nation belonging neither to the USA and its allies nor to the Soviet Union and the member states of the Warsaw Pact” that makes the country a site of the New Tendencies movement. Another noteworthy fact is to consider the internal political neutralness that New Tendencies movement signaled, amid highly politicized styles such as social realism and abstract expressionism. Its focus on the process/program to produce artworks, the analytical methodology, and the absence of any figurative or realist representation all contributed to a relatively depoliticized context, appealing to artists from different backgrounds. 

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However, I’m not optimistic about the impact of technology in liberating art from its commodified exclusivity. Although Compos Hobby Box received an award for its “serial, industrial production of art effects” and a rejection to fetishized commodity in the capitalist art market at exhibitionTendencije 4: Computers and Visual Research, its widespread application in public space, which probably relies on incentivized merchants, was not enacted. Do the abundance and reproducibility of art liberate itself from the capitalist market? In Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain & NFTs, Quaranta cunningly points to the dilemma of art being commodified in the age of internet today through citing artist David Joselit’s statement “Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form: the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information.” Joselit’s observation reveals an interesting fact that art is not necessarily commodified because of its rarity but more often the privilege that its possession implies. 

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For New Tendencies movement, the premise of how technology de-sacralizes art is based on its ability to create multiples distributable to the wide public, to drain the aura of single artworks and convert them to industrial products with standardized manufacture instructions. For me, that’s just another way to mystify the concept of technology while demystifying the art itself, transferring the aura of single artworks to the panacea-like, all-compassing term - technology. “With technology, we don’t need genius artist anymore because we can rely on a system of preset rules and the mechanical productive forces to produce as many art as we want!” While the concept of artist is on the wane, scientist/programmer becomes the new “artist”. Also, if we consider the historical context in 1968, when “Yugoslavia had 5 computers per million habitants, as compared to Germany with 51 per million and the United States with 261 per million,” computers were introduced as a new technology, viewed through a rose tinted glass with aura. It’s not surprising that they are placed with utopian hopes to demystify art and liberate it from the capitalist market. 

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Thinking about the AI tools today, I do agree that technology can demystify art in some extent, but also keep in mind that we might only be demystifying art in a very narrow understanding — the image per se. What we can benefit more from the New Tendencies movement is its explorative attitude towards the established paradigm of art, and we should adopt that attitude in investigating the popular terminology and myth of technology, the new “art” in the twenty-first century.