‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’
Where there is something new, there are artists: experimenting, expanding, imagining the untold possibilities of possible innovation. So when computers started to become an everyday reality in the 1950s, artists were there, straining at the leash to see how this new technology could be used for art, for beauty.
This huge, complex, ambitious show looks at the artists who were present at the dawn of the computer age, artists filled with hope and creativity, long before that tech became fridges that can spy on you and an internet good for nothing but trolling and doomscrolling.
Utopianism is there from the start of the show, especially in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem imagining a future for humanity where we’re ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’. Vera Spencer’s amazing 1954 punch card collage is like a circuit board rendered as modernist minimalism, Steina and Woody Vasulka’s multi-screen video of geometric shapes pushes TV monitors to breaking point: technology, computers, machines, they’re all rife with artistic potential. It’s a great start to the show.
The next few rooms deal with kinetic and light art experiments: Brion Gysin’s mindmelting epilepsy-in-a-spinning-tin sculpture, the Zero Group’s shimmering lightboxes, Katsuhiro Yamahuchi’s distorted glass vitrines, Wen-Ying Tsi’s amazing audio-controlled dancing rods.
Radical experimentation with programming, when computers become the medium, the method
I like all of it just fine, but it clashes with the real...
