Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet

From a dress made from 200 lightbulbs to works made by computer, the Tate takes us on a dizzying, dense trip through half a century of electrically augmented art, fretted with optimism for a future that never came

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Environnement Chromointerférent, Paris, 1974/2018, installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024. © Carlos Cruz-Diez / Bridgeman Images, Paris 2024. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green).

Tate Modern, London
28 November 2024 – 1 June 2025

by JOE LLOYD

I know I am not the only person to leave Electric Dreamswith a headache. The Tate Modern’s latest exhibition abounds with dizzying psychedelia, whirring machines and blinking lights. There is a corridor bedecked in a wallpaper by François Morellet (1963) with a pixel-like arrangement of deep red and blue squares. The artist drew a grid of 40,000 squares and had his family read out numbers from the phone book, and he would colour the square based on whether each digit was odd or even.

Spending a moment with this pattern is enough to induce nausea. But escape is not close at hand. The next room, devoted to a digital recreation of Carlos Cruz-Diez’s installation Chromointerferent Environment (1974), is even more unsteady. Parallel lines shoot across the gallery’s walls and floor. When interrupted by a box, they seem to speed up. You are welcome to play with a pair of giant white balloons, if you can steady yourself enough to do so.

François Morellet, Random distribution of squares, 1963 and Julio Le Parc, Double Mirror, 1966, installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green).

The giddiness is part of the point. Electric Dreams captures the art of a prolonged era, from the 1950s to the early 90s, in which electronic technology proliferated at bewildering breakneck speed. The wartime association of machinery with destruction had begun to fade. Avant garde artists and groups across the world responded with excitement. Some harnessed the power of motors and machines to create works that integrated electricity.

Kiyoji Otsuji, Tanaka Atsuko, Electric Dress, 2nd Gutai Exhibition, 1956. Tate © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library. Courtesy of Yokota Tokyo.

There is a pleasing craziness to many of the projects featured. In Paris, Jean Tinguely created sculptural Métamatic “painting machines” from scrap, which shakily moved a pencil across the page to create smudged abstracts. In Japan, Atsuko Tanaka donned an Electric Dress (1956), a robe made of 200 lightbulbs that transformed her into a bizarre, blinking creature, like the glowing Mr Burns from The Simpsons. Tanaka was inspired by the neon advertising signs at Osaka train station. She walked slowly around a gallery in the 50kg coat, with scant regard for her own health and safety.

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, installation view, Tate Modern, 2024. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green).

The range of artistic responses to technology is vast. Electric Dreams is dense with artworks and wall text, which includes a glossary of related terms. A “circuit map” of the exhibition printed on an early wall captures something of the staggering range of artists and groups it attempts to draw together, many working in places on the fringes of the art world such as Zagreb. Even this diagram is disconcerting, with reams of names and surprising connections.

The complexity of this pattern captures something of the multiplicity of practices and approaches present. Electric Dreams is the result of an impressive amalgamation of research. Such is its scope and ambition that it can sometimes feel alienating, with its relentless succession of interesting stuff. But so many of the exhibits are fascinating in themselves. And, given that the internet took technological development down a very different path, the entire exhibition is suffused with a melancholy for futures that never quite arrived. 

Harold Cohen, AARON #1 Drawing, 1979, installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024. © Harold Cohen. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green).

The exhibition’s earlier rooms feel like repositories of sinister sci-fi devices from classic Doctor Who serials, or the deadly modern art gallery in Dario Argento’s giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). Not all of them actively used electric technology. Vera Spencer’s magnificent collage Artist Versus Machine (c1954) brings together rows of punched cards of the sort used by Jacquard looms. It looks handmade, and Spencer has placed her own pieces of coloured paper cutouts above them, sabotaging the machine-made order. It was created – and named after – an exhibition that sought to celebrate the aesthetic value of the machine. Jesús Rafael Soto’s Cardinal (1965) features an interlocking nexus of stems criss-crossing as they protrude from a board striped with nylon threads. The stems sway a little, but the interplay of all these lines creates an illusion of movement, turning the analogue work into a sort of screen.

Liliane Lijn, Lines of Power 1983 and The Bride, 1988, installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024. © Liliane Lijn. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green).

But it is not long before Electric Dreams homes in on kinetic art, much of which has a charmingly lo-fi bent. Pol Bury’s 3069 White Dots on an Oval Background (1966) features a fuzz of nylon hairs bristling from a canvas. Every now and then a motor causes a twitch, to unnerving effect. Takis uses an electromagnet to move a needle so that it strikes a string and creates sound; Liliane Lijn flickers lights across metal screens; David Medalla rotates a tree stump through sand, causing hanging beads to make rippling drawings in a pool of sand. Zero group founder Otto Piene takes things further with one of his light rooms, with holes punched in walls allowing constellations of light to dance through the darkness.

Otto Piene, Light Room (Jena), exhibited 2007, installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024. © Otto Piene Estate / DACS 2024. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green).

In these works, and many others, electricity becomes a tool for expanding the possibilities of avant-garde art – and avant-garde art becomes a place for teasing out the potential of electronic technology. Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine No 9 (1961), a blindly hot, white light surrounded by a rapidly spinning column with irregular-shaped apertures, uses electronics to unlock a higher state. Viewers are meant to close their eyes and journey through the patterns that sear through their lids.

Samia Halaby, Spooling Up 4, 1988, still from kinetic painting coded on an Amiga computer. Tate © Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg.

After touring through this wunderkammer, the exhibition turns its eye towards art that addresses the future that did arrive. Computing begins to take centre stage. Lillian F Schwartz, who died in October, used computers to generate abstract and geometric animations. Enigma (1972) has all the trippiness of the Dreamachine but manifested on a screen rather than in our heads. By the 1980s, artists such as Samia Halaby and Eduardo Kac were programming their own computers. Suzanne Treister’s blackly amusing Would You Recognise a Virtual Paradise? (1991-92) is a series of fictional video game stills, made using an Amiga computer, that prefigures the recent appearance of games as an artistic medium.

Suzanne Treister,​ Fictional Videogame Stills/Would You Recognise A Virtual Paradise? 1991-92​. Photographs from original Amiga computer screen 16 x 20 in (50.8 x 40.64 cm). Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.

We have travelled a long way from automatic painting machines and dresses covered in lightbulbs. The leap from miniature electric motors – a technology that had existed since the mid-19th century – to this codable computer software is enormous. Electric Dreams thus feels like at least two exhibitions bound together, one devoted to analogue devices and the other to digital experimentations that point ahead to our screen-based present. What unifies many artists from the two is the belief that technology would lead to a new frontier of artistic creativity. I wonder how many of them anticipated what happened next instead.