By Emily Allen: Columnist
A celebration of art before the internet existed, a handshake between perception and reality.
Expect epiphanies.
Most art in galleries is meant to be seen. The Tate Modern’s latest exhibition, however, is not only meant to be seen, but is also meant to be touched, heard, and experienced in glorious (and somewhat psychedelic) technicolour.
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the internet invites viewers to take a deep dive into the fusion of art and technology from the 1950s to the arrival of the computer age. An immersive retrospective, it showcases how artists experimented with, and embraced, emerging tools and technologies in their work long before they became commonplace. Spanning several rooms, the exhibition is divided into zones that take viewers on a journey through kinetic art, cybernetic experiments, and early digital creations.
Featuring over 150 works by over 70 groundbreaking artists from around the world who were inspired to push the limits of creativity, the exhibition challenges viewers to redefine their preconceptions of what constitutes art.
Tate Modern’s Director of Exhibitions and Programmes, Catherine Wood, said that “today’s craze for immersive exhibitions and digital installations has its roots in something far more radical. Artists were creating experimental, psychedelic environments using light, sound, and electricity back in the 1960s, and we want to reveal how that spirit of technological artistic innovation continued right through to the dawn of our own digital world.” The exhibits are varied in size, ranging from minuscule to massive. Some, such as Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Otto Piene’s Light Room, command an entire space in themselves. Never seen before in the UK, this work features a group of motorised light-emitting sculptures from the 1960s that create a synchronised dance of light and shadows across the room.
…if the exhibition were to have one tagline, it could perhaps be “things are not as they seem.” Illusions, perception distortion, and trompe l’œils are, quite literally, woven into the fabric of many of the installations.
By contrast, Vera Spencer’s Artist versus Machine is small enough to hang on the wall, but draws historical inspiration from the Regency era. This colourful collage is crafted from painted cards that were used by automated looms to weave complex patterns, and is inspired by Charles Babbage’s punched-card calculator, one of the earliest computers, called Different Engine No. 1.
The use of everyday materials in Electric Dreams is innovative and inspiring, from Dadamaino’s use of synthetic plastic in Volume of Displaced Modules to Katsuhiro Yamaguchi’s choice to place television screens behind corrugated glass for his work Vitrine: Deep into the Night. Creating beauty from the ordinary, these materials challenge perceptions of beauty and purpose, just as the exhibition challenges perceptions of art.
In contrast to traditional exhibitions, many of the installations actively encourage the viewer to get tactically involved with the artwork. Liquid Views recreates an original piece by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss and features a monitor, touchscreen, and mini camera which seemingly reflects the viewer’s image in a pool of digital ‘water.’ Each time viewers interact with the screen, their image is distorted by ripples, blurring the boundary between the real and virtual world.
Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromointerferent Environment welcomes viewers into a room where perceptions of space and movement are challenged by coloured lines projected onto the floor, floating balloons, and anyone passing by, creating a mind-bending effect.
Indeed, if the exhibition were to have one tagline, it could perhaps be “things are not as they seem.” Illusions, perception distortion, and trompe l’œils are, quite literally, woven into the fabric of many of the installations. Marina Apollonio’s Circular Dynamics 6S+S artwork is a dizzying masterpiece inspired by Gestalt theories of visual perception and features patterns of concentric circles painted onto motorised spinning disks.
François Morellet’s wallpaper exhibition is an explosion of colour. Molleret described his intention behind the work as “creating a dazzling fight between two colours that shared the same luminosity… I wanted visitors to have a disturbing experience when they walked into this room.” Composed of 40,000 squares formed from mind-melting bright red and blue geometric shapes, Morellet certainly got his wish.
The combined impact of light and sound create a whirring, flashing spectacle. Steina and Woody Vasulka’s multi-screen video of geometric shapes, complete with an alien-esque sound-effects, welcome viewers as they enter. Samia Halaby’s Spooling Up invites viewers to don headphones while observing the brilliantly coloured geometric shapes that fill the screen and listen to an accompanying abstract sound element.
No two exhibits in this spectacular exhibition are the same, yet all invoke a sense of dizzying wonder,
redefine the boundaries between science and art, and elicit nostalgic sense of optimistic escapism. A unique showing, the likes of which has never been displayed before at the Tate, Electric Dreams will appeal to art lovers, science and gamer geeks, and captivated children alike. After wandering through this amazing showcase of art, the title of Suzanne Treister’s fictional video game stills, Are You Dreaming? could well be a question the viewers ask themselves, as they make their way to the Tate’s café for a well-deserved pick-me-up.
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