“We’ll always be together, together in electric dreams,” promises the soaring chorus of the infectious 1984 synth-pop banger by Giorgio Moroder and Phil Oakey. You might have it running through your head (I did) while walking through “Electric Dreams,” an exhibition at Tate Modern in London through June 1, as lights flash and dazzle, machines whir and hum, and the air around you pulses with sound.
This ambitious and sprawling show’s subtitle, “Art and Technology Before the Internet,” might conjure images of dry and unwieldy diagrams, complicated terminology and opaque technical processes, and these do feature: A large wall hosts a virtually unreadable “Electric Dreams Circuit Map,” intended to illustrate the connections between the exhibition’s more than 150 works and their makers, and several wall texts include definitions of terms like “binary code,” “algorithm,” “pattern recognition” and “punched cards.” (If you’re encountering these for the first time, they probably won’t stick.)
But overwhelmingly, “Electric Dreams” is full of just that: coursing, pulsing, propulsive, seductive energies, currents and ideas that animate works across a huge range of mediums, leaving visitors with the sense of having passed — pleasantly dazed, challenged and provoked — through a reverie of technological evolution.
Beginning with the 1950s explosion of postwar technologies and ending in the early 1990s, on the eve of the World Wide Web becoming publicly accessible, we move through varied global movements that show how technology in the arts, far from creating ruptures with the past, most often presents new ways of addressing age-old creative concerns: space, perspective, time, light, movement, materials, representation.
Kinetic art, Op Art, multimedia installations, motorized and illuminated sculptures, flashing lights and stacks of thrumming monitors fill several rooms, and the viewer takes an active role, moving in and around, and sometimes engaging directly with, the art works. (In the case of Wen-Ying Tsai’s 1968 “cybernetic sculptures,” they shimmy and shake, gasp and hiss in response to sounds in their immediate environment.) I was most drawn, however, to pieces that hinted at technology’s dark underbelly.
A series of large 1950s drawings by the Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka, a member of the Gutai group known for its raucous performances and experimental forms, are colorful abstractions of energy flowing between floating nodes and swirling lines — ideas she channeled into her “Electric Dress” (1956), a bulky costume made of hand-painted lightbulbs and tubes, attached by a thick morass of wires, that she could turn off and on as she walked around Tokyo, blinking and glowing. But the dress was heavy and cumbersome, wired by an amateur and potentially dangerous. (“Is this how a death-row inmate would feel?” Tanaka wondered.)
Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, another Japanese artist, was making work at the same time that suggested the memory of nuclear annihilation lurked beneath Japan’s brightly illuminated urban landscape, like a permanent afterimage burned on the retina. His “Adventures of the Eyes of Mr. W.S., a Test Pilot” uses a slide projector to flip through images of geometric sculptures as a voice-over describes flying over the blindingly bright lights of a foreign city.
European artists, too, struggled with how to make something beautiful out of technology that had once conjured fear. In Otto Piene’s “Light Room (Jena),” one of the “Light Ballets” he began in 1959 — rotating orbs punctured with elaborate patterns and lit from within —cast delicate, mesmerizing patterns onto the darkened walls around. Piene, a German artist who was conscripted aged 16 during World War II, saw his flickering installations as poetic appropriations of technologies developed for war — as if his dark rooms filled with moving constellations were new skies filled with pleasure instead of violence.
“A lightbulb creates an environment by its mere presence,” wrote the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who also cautioned that “we look at the present though a rearview mirror. We march backward into the future.” With technology, as with anything human-made, the caveat for better and for worse applies, and many of the utopias imagined in the Tate show are wary ones.
Samia Halaby’s “Land” (1988) is a computer-generated “kinetic painting” that morphs across a video monitor: a neon geometric study that also sketches the changing boundaries of the occupied Palestinian territories after 1948. Suzanne Treister’s “Fictional Video Game Stills” (1991-2) offer dark, anarchic prompts to viewers: “Please enact repetition of the crime,” “Error in finding question,” or simply, “No message.” Treister’s game, which cannot be played, confronts the viewer with the idea that technology plugs us into a dark shared psyche, an unpredictable network.
Nearby, Vera Molnar’s “Transformations 1-21” (1976) hang in grid, a series of drawings of squares inside squares that proceed from order to disorder so that tidy lines become chaotic tangles. Before working with computers, Molnar devised algorithms that she painstakingly executed by hand, as though half woman, half machine.
When the source of creativity seems more machine than human, questions about authorship arise. “Anybody who has a visual idea but has no talent for drawing can use the computer and express himself in numbers or in ideas,” says the presenter in a clip from a 1968 BBC TV show about a drawing machine, playing on a monitor nearby. If a machine is executing visual commands, is it artfulness instead of art, bound to produce cheap spectacles, gimmicky effects, or (worst of all) merely to convey information?
Tate’s exhibition closes with “Liquid Views — Narcissus’ Digital Reflections” (1992) by the German duo Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, one of the first artworks to feature an interactive digital screen: Viewers gaze down into monitor that projects their image, rippling as though reflected in a pond, on a wall nearby. Standing and watching as visitor after visitor whipped out their cellphone, adding more screens to the mix I honestly couldn’t tell if they were missing the point or getting it, completely: Together in electric dreams.
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