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“So cool” reads the legend scrawled on the final page of my notes from the morning I spent in Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Electric Dreams. It was in reference to the last piece, on display in the 15th room (the show is massive): an interactive video work by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss entitled Liquid Views – Narcissus’ Digital Reflections, made in 1992 when interaction with your own digitised image was still a new experience.
Capturing you on video in real time, it projects your reflection into a limpid pool on the wall. When you touch the screen in front of you, as well as making an incongruous electronic boop noise, it sends a ripple across the water.
The piece was intended as a metaphor for the then-emerging internet, but the artists can't possibly have predicted just how accurate it would be, more than 20 years down the line, as younger generations slip seamlessly between real and virtual existence, and social media endlessly reflects our own selves and biases back at us. It’s chilling, when you think about it – but it’s really fun if you don’t.
In fact this show is really fun overall, punctuated with “ooooh” moments, and infused with the energy of experimentation and discovery. It tells the broadly chronological story of electronic art from the 1950s (Atsuko Tanaka’s brilliant and potentially lethal 1956 Electric Dress was a response to the newly electrified cityscape in Osaka after the Second World War) right up to just before Skynet went live, sorry, I mean the internet emerged into the mainstream.
Artists explored and embraced the possibilities that this period of rapid technological advancement afforded, as computers shrank from the size of a room to a box on the desk. Some took inspiration from the developing field of cybernetics (the study of systems) and generative algorithms (Mary Martin’s restful drawings, for example) or sought to reveal the invisible forces surrounding us – Takis’s elegant Electro-Magnetic Music harnesses electromagnetism to create randomised sound.
Some used electronics to continue the long-standing tradition of light and sound art – Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) is a lovely example of the kind of thing that paved the way for the immersive digital environments now all the rage – while others were interested in the effects of art on social behaviour. I think you’d have to look at Stephen Willats’s Visual Automatic for quite a while to tune into its flickering (it mimics the frequency of the brain’s alpha waves, which occur when you’re awake but mentally at rest) but I like the idea.
Artists such as Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam or Paolo Scheggi saw the potential for democratisation in works that relied on the viewer, or the choices of the person who displayed it. They and others saw their art as a form of visual research, using scientific and mathematical principles, and materials such as light and movement, that cut across cultural backgrounds to communicate directly with international audiences.
Aleksandr Srnec’s Luminoplastic 1 is an utterly mesmerising contraption which projects coloured shapes onto a rapidly rotating structure of metal wires to stunning effect, and Alberto Biasi’s effortlessly beautiful Light Prisms: Spectral Kinetic Mesh sends beams of light through prisms to create a rainbow of dancing colour. Elsewhere, Wen-Ying Tsai’s Square Tops and Umbrella will appeal to children, who can make their strobe-lit vibrating metal rods shudder with a shout or a clap.
Computing or electronics became tools for making – Harold Cohen created AARON, the first computer programme capable of autonomously generating drawings (hand-coloured, they look charmingly like those of a slightly aimless, highly intelligent child), while Analivia Cordeiro pioneered the use of the computer to create choreography.
Some things have aged a bit, in unexpected ways. I appreciate Martha Boto’s striking Helicoidal Chromokinetics sculpture but in the intervening years it has acquired an unfortunate Vegas strip club vibe. And towards the end of the show I fear that documentary material, such as the issues of Radical Software magazine or CopyArt, the newsletter for the organisation that used photocopying as a medium, will suffer as visitors run out of steam. Which is a shame, because they’re rather fascinating.
In truth though the sprawl of the show is tempered by the fact that several rooms are dedicated to only one artist, whose work warrants the space needed for both it and us to breathe.
Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, for example (his 1953 film Adventures of the Eyes of Mr W.S., a Test Pilot seems to revel in the cutting-edge slide projector used to make it while warning against the dangers of advanced tech); Carlos Cruz-Diez, whose immersive Chromointerferent Environment will make your legs go funny, or Liliane Lijn, whose Lines of Power give the impression of being made of liquid light.
It’s all thoroughly engaging, so take your time. From these radical beginnings came the dawn of our own digital age – it’s nice to meet the ancestors.
From November 28 to June 1; tate.org.uk
