Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet review – charmingly archaic and constantly prophetic

‘Sets off explosions of after-images in your optical field’: François Morellet’s Random distribution of squares using the π number decimals, 50% odd digit blue, 50% even digit red, 1963. Photograph: © François Morellet; courtesy Atkinson Museum

There is a work in this enthralling show to make you blink and look twice. It’s by the madcap Belgian Pol Bury. On the wall is a large wooden oval sprouting hundreds of fine bristles (think of an enormous hairbrush). Your eyes move over its surface, thoughts perhaps pressing forwards, given the many rooms to go. All of a sudden there is a fractional twitch, somewhere among the thicket, imperceptible as a synaptic leap. It’s as if the sculpture had a mind of its own.

3069 White Dots on an Oval Background – deadpan title – fulfils Bury’s 60s dream of finding the midpoint between motion and non-motion with little more than imagination and a primitive motor. It is one of so many works in this teeming, beeping, flickering, pulsating exhibition of art (dating from roughly 1950 to the 90s) that just cannot keep still. Wonderful contraptions, often involving no more than tin cans and electricity, wobble and vibrate. Screens shudder with static. Black-and-white op art paintings revolve like the spiralling credits to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.