1960 IMMEDIATE PROJECTS

In the second half of the year, Manzoni announced to his German friends, now definitively preferred to the Dutch group with which he nonetheless continued to collaborate sporadically, a number of Progetti immediati (Immediate Projects) that were to be published in issue no. 3 of ZERO in July 1961: “a series of bodies of air which will have diameters of approximately two and one half metres and which can be set up in parks and gardens. By making use of a small device they will pulsate slowly as if breathing, but not in a synchronised fashion (I made the first experimental examples in 1959, but in smaller dimensions. And making use of the same principle I have also designed a pulsating pneumatic wall which can be used architectonically). In the same park or garden I will plant a small forest of lengthened pneumatic cylinders resembling pillars (four to seven metres high) which will vibrate in the wind.

I am also preparing for the same park a sculpture with autonomous movements. This mechanical animal will draw its nourishment from nature (solar energy): at night it will pause and contract into itself, whilst during the day it will move about slowly, emit sounds and project antennae that will absorb energy and act as warning signals against obstacles.

I am developing in addition a new series of ‘Absolute bodies of light’. The absolute bodies I have created up to now are plastic spheroids with a diameter of forty centimetres; they remain immobile, suspended in space by a jet of compressed air and by changing the direction of the jet, they can be made to revolve vertically to the point of obtaining a virtual volume: an ‘absolute body of light’). ‘Absolute bodies of light’ can be made in any dimension (I am planning one now for a particular architectural project) but at the moment I am working on the realization of a series of very small ‘absolute bodies of light’ which will be kept in action by a very tiny independent motor that will require no special installation.”

These projects also included the Placentarium, a pneumatic theatre conceived for the Lichtballette, Piene’s “ballets of light”, shows of pure luminous events that entailed a condition of visual immersion for the spectator.