Back to the future: six decades of art and technology

OK computer

It’s 1964. The Beatles are number one (probably) and American inventor Douglas Engelbart shows a prototype of the modern computer, making technology more accessible to the general public for the first time. Meanwhile, in Sweden, Ulla Wiggen creates some of the first paintings to feature the inner workings of technological devices – motherboards and other gubbins (left). Perhaps the most mind-expanding, boundary-breaking and generally groovy art-tech crossover comes from Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), a group of artists and Bell Laboratories engineers. EAT catapaults into life with a series of events, ‘9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering’ (1966), scoring firsts for the use of closed circuit television and TV projection on stage.

DRAM chips and floppy disks

On April 1 1976, young upstarts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak don their best flares to unveil Apple Computers. By the end of the decade, San Francisco artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has made one of the very first interactive artworks. Using laserdisc technology, ‘Lorna’ (1979-82) invites viewers to engage with the titular onscreen protagonist using a remote control. You’ll discover that Lorna’s hobbies include watching TV and that she hasn’t left the house for four-and-a-half years.

The World Wide Web is born

Tim Berners-Lee develops HTML (1990), giving rise to the World Wide Web. By 1993 there are some 600 websites (sales of cargo pants go stratospheric). Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer warns against Big Brother-style surveillance with works such as ‘Surface Tension’ (1992, pictured), an interactive installation that makes use of a computerised surveillance system. It’s the first artwork in which the eye really does follow you round the room.

Facebookers and YouTubers

The decade begins as the dotcom bubble bursts. Facebook goes online in 2004, followed a year later by YouTube. Russian artist Aristarkh Chernyshev uses smartphone technology to create interactive art that subtly takes the piss out of marketing and art history speak.

Wikileaks, selfie culture and cat lols 

The decade sees the first generation of digital natives become artists but themes of narcissism, alienation, and our bonkers attitudes to sex and the human body prevail. For her instagram ‘performance’ ‘Excellences &Perfections’ (2014) Amalia Ulman fakes versions of herself according to various definitions of ‘hot babe’. Based on the life size human holograms found dishing out info in airports and railway stations, James Bridle creates ‘Homo Sacer’ (2014), which greets you with apparently conflicting government statements about your human rights, while ‘Text Butt’ (2015, pictured) by Olaf Breuning suggests we’re all now talking out of our arses.