The book

L'Opera-Sistema Work-as-System

The contemporary artwork is a living systemic organism, made of forms, data, relations and transformations.

Book website ↗

Work as System, available on Amazon

The thesis

For sixty years, from Jack Burnham's Systems Esthetics to the generative present, the most advanced art has ceased to coincide with the object and begun to live as a system: archives, data, rules, environments, memories, behaviours in time. Criticism, however, kept looking for objects where art was producing structures.

This book proposes a category to close that gap. I call the Work-as-System the smallest critical unit capable of holding together what conventional criticism separates: form and process, image and protocol, data and perception, machine and vision, audience and behaviour, institution and visibility. It is an instrument of analysis for the art of the present.

From the preface, The Dark Room

I enter a dark room. A projection crosses the wall, sound moves slowly through the space, a sequence of images shifts in density before my eyes. The body understands before the mind does that the work also lives elsewhere: in the light, in the rhythm, in the relation between surfaces, in duration, in the architecture that receives the gaze, in the system of decisions that made this experience possible.

Structure

  1. I

    The System

    The threshold, the genealogy from LeWitt to Anadol, the verification in the generative present.

  2. II

    The Grammar

    Systemic Direction, the operational field, time and memory, sound, the politics of the visible.

  3. III

    The System in the World

    Works as arguments, criticism, law, the market, education.

Editions

Cover of L'Opera Sistema, Italian edition
Cover of The Work as System, English edition

Published by Dario Buratti, first edition 2026.