There’s a popular meme of two lovers embracing against a digital field of sunflowers. Their pursed lips would be locked were it not for their bumping VR headsets. “What if we kissed at the intersection of art and technology?” the text reads. The meme makes fun of a route heavily trafficked by museums with declining attendance figures, keen to lure viewers away from at-home streaming with digital art displays. On a darker level, it points to the more antisocial aspects of our hyper-connected age.
If this kind of cynicism feels familiar, it’s because we’ve drifted far from digital technology’s optimistic early days. Walking through Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, a showcase of artists who used or incorporated machines in their work from the 1950s to the early 1990s, it’s possible to imagine how things might have turned out differently. Although working against the backdrop of the cold war, when a nuclear arms race threatened to wipe out humankind, these innovators saw technology as a means to augment perception and creativity. The exhibition is a sensory overload of whirring motors and flashing lights, as experiments in early kinetic op-art give way to abstract compositions produced by rudimentary algorithms.
A flow chart at the start of the show purports to explain how this all happened. Designed to resemble a computer chip, with artist names in nodes and intersecting lines denoting their influences, it’s no more elucidating than the copper-plated patterns on a circuit board – mesmerising but muddled, like the exhibition it outlines. The show’s chronological organisation short-circuits as early as the first room, where computer punch cards, painted and collaged by Vera Spencer in 1954, are smothered by the strobing Matrix II, a loudly beeping bank of cathode-ray televisions that artists Steina and Woody Vasulka manipulated 20 years later.
More instructive are works by artists who supported each other’s experiments in electronic art when the medium was still commercially unviable. The groundbreaking Signals gallery, founded in London in 1964, took its name from a series of kinetic sculptures by the Greek artist Takis, several of which appear here. The large, blinking blue bulb in Télélumière No 4 releases light by passing electricity through mercury vapour, while a white ball swinging from a wire is guided by electromagnetic currents, in what the artist referred to as a “magnetic ballet”. A sculpture by Signals co-founder David Medalla, Sand Machine Bahag – Hari Trance #1, hides a motor in its birch trunk, which drags beaded necklaces in a bed of white sand from slowly rotating branches. Although crudely mechanical, such works scratch at the sublime.
Much of the exhibition is given over to kinetic works from the 1960s, era of lava lamps and acid tests. Brion Gysin’s whirling Dreamachine No 9 lantern and Marina Apolloni’s Circular Dynamics 6S+S, which resembles a rotating tondo by Bridget Riley, are all the more trippy for their technical simplicity. Light cast off the blinkered mirrors of Julio LeParc’s Continuous Light on Ceiling dances across the walls of a dimly lit gallery, where they are perceptible even when you close your eyes. An astonishing cybernetic sculpture by Wen-Ying Tsaimade of undulating silver rods that stick up like a thicket of cattails, will slowly dance if you sing or clap your hands.
A large gallery is devoted to Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromointerferent Environment, a projection of red, blue, green and black lines that glitch across the walls, a few scattered boxes, and bouncing white balloons. First presented in 1974 with 35mm slide projectors, the installation has been digitised at Tate, where it feels a little too slick and only mildly disorientating. There’s an immersive quality to these displays that the museum surely hopes will compete with popular attractions such as the Van Gogh experience, and you’ll want to film and photograph their effects – though don’t be disappointed if your camera flattens their illusions. This is a show best seen IRL.
Not everything in Electrical Dreams is so, well, dreamy. The blurry, 8-bit graphics of Suzanne Treister’s Would You Recognize a Virtual Paradise? with desolate plains, a weeping moon, and a soundtrack of buzzing flies and helicopters, feels less like an electric Eden than an incandescent nightmare. Land, a 1988 “kinetic painting” by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, animated with the aid of an early Commodore Amiga 1000 computer, is unassuming in its cheerful, jewel-toned colours, until its jagged, blinking shapes start to resemble the State of Israel, from which Halaby and her family were forcibly expelled in 1947. Atop these shifting forms – a reference to the political abstraction of borders – the tinny sound of a computer recalls the whine of a missile.
“Power is no longer measured in land, labour or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it,” the opening editorial of Radical Software, an anarchist videographers’ journal, declares from a nearby vitrine. Yet such prescient warnings, confined to fine print, are likely to be drowned out by the cheerfully singing robots in this show. Mostly, Electric Dreams lacks bite to match its bark, framing artistic experiments in technological terms, with scant attention to the underlying conditions – cold war politics, environmental concerns, struggles against government censorship – that initiated them.
Instead, the last work on display is a better evocation of our heedlessness. By Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Narcissus’ Digital Reflections (1992) pairs a touchscreen of water that ripples when you tap it with a camera that projects your image on its surface. The same image appears enlarged on the wall behind it, so passersby can watch you play with your own face. It’s a social media test case launched decades before Instagram filters, but one that plays to our self-obsessions just the same. Narcissus fell so in love with his own reflection that he forgot the world and died. In the future, let’s hope we fare better when art and technology kiss.