from Garfield Benjamin, The Cyborg Subject: Reality, Consciousness, Parallax, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2016,  pp. 87-88:
"This limit of consciousness at the edge of the anthropic principle is demonstrated in Maurizio Bolognini’s Sealed Machines (1992). Described as a key development in software art, the work consists of a collection of computers, set to generate images according to Bolognini’s programming, with sealed monitor bus ports. The complete inaccessibility of the vast quantity of visual imagery created by the work references a technological sublimity of the void beneath the digital world. Meanwhile Bolognini’s intervention at the programming level, perhaps the only point at which the work could be said to be ‘viewed’, mirrors the role of the conscious observer in the anthropic principle, defining the fundamental laws of the universe as presupposed. In this split of control and inaccessibility, the engaged spectator can only be the artist himself, constructing the ‘universe’ of his work within a perceptual vacuum that creates a subjective void [...]. This creation of an inaccessible space between Real and Virtual displays the self-positing nature of Virtuality from the void, and a potential arena for reframing the emptiness of the subject. Bolognini’s position “at the crossroads of conceptual art and generative art” (Bolognini 2012) can be associated with the post-conceptual practice Peter Osborne identifies as “the fictional ‘presentness’ of the contemporary” (2010) favouring presentation over representation in “the interpretation of what is through the construction of new wholes out of its fragments and modalities of existence”. Rancière’s notion of unrepresentability (2007) appears again in the necessary and affirmative conditions of representation, described by Galloway as “less a question of the failures of representation on its own terms and more a question of the historical shift out of one regime into a subsequent regime” (2011). This shift towards presenting rather than representing the unrepresentable draws into art theory the shift that has occurred in quantum physics, the same shift that this thesis suggests in relation to consciousness: the necessity of an impenetrable void in order for the appearance of substance (as image, world, or consciousness in the formation of the subject). For Galloway and Rancière, for Bolognini, and for understanding the vacuum of quantum mechanics, the process by which we can speculatively engage with the unrepresentable and inaccessible void is the creation of a limit, staging a similar conceptual space against which the antagonism of denied direct engagement forces the spectator to examine the relation of the surface of the work and of their own parallax position to what might lie beneath."  

from Andreas Broeckmann, Machine Art in the Twentieth Century, MIT Press, Cambridge Ma 2016, p. 1:
"My fascination with the aesthetics of machines began with a number of encounters. Maurizio Bolognini’s Sealed Computers (1992) - an art installation of desktop computers, networked, audibly running, yet without monitors, so that it is impossible to know what is being computed, or whether there is a conversation, or even a conspiracy, going on between them - has been the clearest example for me to explain what it is that got me interested in the topic (figure 0.1). The astonishment and irritation one feels about these machines’ autonomy; the impossibility of understanding what is going on; and this impossibility, this irritation, serving as the aesthetic hinge of our experience, forcing us to acknowledge the distance that we have as the audience of an artwork from something that unfolds right in front of our eyes [...] got me thinking about machines."

from Eduardo Navas, Art, Media Design and Postproduction, Routledge, London 2018, pp. 190-191:
"Maurizio Bolognini's Sealed Computer Series (1992-present) consists of about a dozen computers installed in a gallery. The computers are on the floor and interconnected with cables. They appear to be processing information, but what exactly is taking place is unverifiable. Bolognini claims that the computers are producing randomized images ad infinitum, which will never be accessible for viewing. At this point one may equate this installation with large rooms filled with servers maintained by Google and other major online juggernauts who are constantly processing online data. Unlike such servers, however, Bolognini's installation does not provide access to the information being produced. This, in effect, is an open statement on negation as an aesthetic experience. Indeed this work has been discussed explicitly in terms of the machinic sublime […]. Bolognini's work demonstrates how the aesthetics of negation are integral to the ongoing experience not just of art, but also all forms of communication and expression of ideas. It is the selective process that must be carefully understood in a time when media communication can overwhelm the senses."