There’s a sense of excitement around Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, now open at the Tate Modern, for a number of reasons. First, it’s one of the first major exhibitions to place the current hype surrounding generative artificial intelligence within a historical context. Second, it addresses the historical amnesia of contemporary art institutions regarding the integration of technology in arts practice – something long overdue.
The exhibition revisits a past in which artists dreamed of a future that we are no longer able to envision. The title is a reminder of the 1984 pop song Together in Electric Dreams by Giorgio Moroder and Philip Oakey. It also evokes Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which was concerned with human agency and machine sentience.
This reference gives a sense of what’s at stake with the exhibition – the challenge AI poses to conventional notions of artistic practice and creativity. The show brings together artists who have collaborated with machines to produce works that challenge human-centred ideas about creativity and sense-making.
