The Disintegration of the City. Correspondences between a letter from the Archigram Group and the audiovisual project of Ugo La Pietra

Abstract

The essay examines a programmatic letter written by the English neo-futurist group Archigram to the magazine “IN. Arguments of images and design” in 1972. Informed by the theories of Marshall McLuhan and the coeval practices of Guerrilla Television, the letter was decisive for the project of La cellula abitativa, an experimental audiovisual communication system designed by Ugo La Pietra that forecast the characteristics of web and social networks. The propotype of the device, that was technically practicable, was presented the same year in the pivotal exhibition Italy the New Domestic Landscape at the MoMA of New York.

Keywords

• guerrilla tv
• cinematic devices
• experimental
• video
• radical design