"The extreme shift from Raptus to the algorithmic language of Programmed Machines shows the need to combine courageously the reason for the gesture with the reason for its sublimation in the autonomous machine. A tension which is only partly contradictory; a paradox that arises within aesthetics and Romanticism, in terms of the separation of art and technology. In the former the gesture and material withdraw, in the latter it is their organic transcendence that withdraws. Gesture and thought guide us to an understanding of the sophisticated meaningful mechanism of the work in question, which is structured through excessive alternation between extreme gesture and extreme absence of movement; perception of the void and filling up infinity. The sublime lies in the "fullness" of the working of the instrument, within the programmed computer where we know the forms of this sublime are in a continuous state of evolution that cannot be understood except in evocative fragments. [...] In the invisible drawings produced by Sealed Computers, which generate images like hidden thoughts, the technological sublime is imperceptible like man's mental processes. Only we are conscious that there is a command, there is a gesture which has set off the process of imagination. The box of the computer, stripped of its peripherals, becomes the perfect alter ego of utopian thinking about form. 
Bolognini's work describes an a priori of the gesture and an effectuality of technology which are unlikely to find afferent meanings in contemporary art. The mixture of instinct and intellect is the manifest and objectively valuable aspect of this artistic work, diffused by the gesture and commanded by the ideal of a utopian vision of the human intellect."

(from Domenico Scudero, The profuse mind)

"When I stand before a work by Maurizio Bolognini I feel: of course it doesn’t matter how I feel, but what does matter is the fact that, contrary to the conviction of what one would call the de-subjectivised, de-passionalised ambit of this post-electronic age, I feel.
When I say "it doesn’t matter", this does not mean that Maurizio Bolognini's work embodies perfectly the presumed emptiness of meaning and the infinitely multiple possibility of interpretation. It can in fact mean that, not too old and thus not yet forgetful as I am (unlike the new unhappy critics), I remember, that he makes me remember. […] I see as in a flash the gesture carried out around that time of showing the unshowable, as in the exhibitions le vide and le plein held in Paris at the Gallerie Iris Clert by artists who still thought that the product and not the concept represented the great future challenge. Maurizio Bolognini, on the other hand, who also thinks of the present world - techno-productive, hard and soft - works at a "decisional" level. He is "political". He handles machines, software, contexts and possibly people, constituting a paradoxical pattern of "modes of use", and only at the end (at the end of the decision and once the action has been made) will he perhaps clarify or give a glimpse of the non-sense that belongs as much to the work as to the appointed place. […] 
Certainly with Museophagia (the artist "exhibits" everything that is given in one particular place, stripping it of its function, then packing it up and exhibiting everything in other places of the planned tour), with his Machines (using stochastic software to program computers and leaving them to work without monitors, while - invisibly - creating random images of various square kilometres) […], Maurizio Bolognini is a thousand times heteronymous: he is at the same time Erik Satie (what is the form of your work? the form of a pear", he replied), Marcel Duchamp (Heros Sèlavy: eros is life), Sergio Lombardo ("project for death by poisoning"), Carlo Emilio Gadda (who, asked about the tendencies of recent literature, replied: I tend to my end, I tend to a brutal deformation of the themes which destiny decided to propose to me as formed things and objects"), etc.
In short, what in the avant-gardes and the neo-avantgardes was the ironic psychological challenge to mechanism and automatism culminated in the existentialist years of the twentieth century, in the scandal of the negation of being and the identified place (man, museum, gallery, city), in Bolognini becomes something eponymous (himself), the kind reduction of the ensemble of his calculating machines into a flock, into an entity which is useless and worthless if we are not there to direct it. A creator, or artist, is a person who institutes a mode of use of the world or of the machine: responding lightly and without fear to the bewildering condition which inevitably (and fortunately) sooner or later presents itself to us. 
So don’t close your eyes, please! Allow the machine its innocent operations - silently and blindly."

(from Simonetta Lux, Silently and blindly)