On Electric Dreams

Experiencing nostalgia for an exhibition that is still ongoing, I recently returned to “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” for a fourth time. Creating a linear pathway through systems of fractal emergence, in this case creative explorations of electric and electronic media in the age before the World Wide Web, is no trivial task. Tate Modern’s landmark exhibition meets this challenge in the way it situates technologically-engaged works produced over forty years through a circuit of fifteen very different rooms. 

Consisting of 150 works by 70 artists, the show not only narrates a complex genealogy of works by artists and researchers who have often been framed outside the canon of fine art, it also offers a pathway to reread the advanced art of the present. Contemporary practices that rely on the dynamic generation of data, or else virtual or multisensory environments that adapt to human presence, are given roots and much-needed feedback loops for a public increasingly mindful of culture’s disappearance into the latent space of a deep learning algorithm. What connects all the works shown here in London, especially works from the period prior to the 1970s, is a collective machine dream for the eyes and minds of its human audience, whether coding or communing, or simply standing still and looking.

In contrast to the iconic exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity,” which took place at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts back in 1968, the curatorial focus of “Electric Dreams” is on works made decades in the past, rather than the present. Yet some of these works look like they have been lying in wait for the shifting gaze of the future to comprehend why they matter. Otto Piene’s relatively simple but enduringly brilliant architectural intervention Light Room (Jena) reflects the exhibition’s appeal to all ages. 

On my most recent visit, I heard a group of primary schoolchildren asking their teacher if they could “please, please, come back later…”

For those bent on decoding the exhibition’s overall conceptual design, a glance at the “Electric Dreams Circuit Map” placed to the right of the opening room, in something of a darkened recess, illuminates the show’s layout while charting its ambitious scope. We see an outline of the various rooms of the exhibition in which links between different individuals, groups, places, and historical exhibitions are interwoven graphically. According to the show’s lead curator, Val Ravaglia, this diagram was inspired by the concept of a printed circuit board as well as Fluxus drawings by George Maciunas (with some echoes of an earlier schema entitled Electric Love, that drew lines of lateral connection between Kraftwerk, Leon Theremin, Brian Eno, etc.). Many of the wall texts reinforce the value of situating projects dispersed in time and place in meaningful relation to each other. 

Regarding the choice of works included in (and left out of) the exhibition, Ravaglia considers those selected as “case studies” that point to a broader narrative. It was never meant to be an “encyclopedic” look at the whole territory as that would have been impossible to do within the time made available for its preparation and in the limited space it would be shown. Certainly, a survey approach often erases the sense of personality that ensures a clear curatorial “vision”. Moreover, new media history is always rewriting its own story using the latest techniques. 

Here we see, perhaps for the first time in a major international museum, an effort to demonstrate how emergent network thinking, implicit within the cybernetic turn, became a critical force behind a series of collectivizing groups and exhibitions in different post-war contexts. 

A room dedicated to the fertile zone between the Italian artists of Arte Programmata and the foundational contributors to “New Tendencies” events in Zagreb and Paris intimates the early stages of programmatic and systems thinking, which are given form through perceptual, permuted movement of previously static visual elements. Such exhibitions broke new ground in exploring the concept of the participant-viewer as an active agent within the realization of the work. By spotlighting their importance, this show lays the institutional groundwork for wider public understanding of new developments in generative art, which often involve co-creation between artists and their audiences. 

To achieve high levels of sentient immersion, which is what these works were designed to stimulate, one needs to spend time with them. Projects such as Brion Gysin’s and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine, beautifully staged here, feel designed to trigger different degrees of subliminal response. Having to slow down and wait for some of the dynamic works to awaken from time-coded periods of slumber has been one of my favorite aspects of the experience of visiting this exhibition. 

Sharing such moments of anticipatory stillness engenders momentary connections with strangers that contemporary digital experience militates against. 

Bronac Ferran: Congratulations on the exhibition, which I know must have involved a considerable amount of work behind the scenes. Now that it is approaching its close, how do you feel about the show’s critical and public reception?

Val Ravaglia: It has been better received than I had expected. I wanted to find a happy medium between telling stories that point at groups, places, and moments in time when there were intense exchanges between like-minded artists in a pre-internet era […] and doing a deep dive into the work of specific groundbreaking artists. 

When I took on the role of organizing the exhibition I was asked to extend an existing Tate “op and kinetic art” exhibition, that was touring internationally, in a more immersive direction. I then inserted what may be viewed as niche scholarly elements. I thought that a slice of the public would breeze through and only stop at the more immersive elements, but having spent time in the gallery, it is not like that. For example, I have seen Hiroshi Kawano’s Artificial Mondrian being discussed a lot by young people whom I thought might not have exposure to this kind of computer art. 

It has been a joy for me to see this happening and to hear people talking about the way that images were being generated from code so early on. From the point of view of the general public’s response I am delighted. 

The exhibition has also been generally well-received even by the mainstream press, with a few exceptions where it seems clear that the journalists were operating by confirmation bias and not taking time to delve more deeply into the ambiguities and paradoxes residual in art and technology from the outset. For example, some of the commentary around the exhibition conveys that initially there was an enthusiastic embrace of technology and that then the field became more politically engaged later on. Well, I made sure there was an issue of the Computer Arts Society’s magazine PAGE, edited by Gustav Metzger, in the first vitrine, precisely to make the point that awareness of the imbrication of military and technological developments was present from the outset. 

We only have to look at Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress at the beginning of the exhibition. Tanaka’s work is riddled with anxiety and paradoxical feelings about the “sped-up” development of consumer tech that was very evident in Japan at the time. It inspired her to make that work. In other instances, what appears as superficially joyous and colorful was in many ways a form of counterpoint to technologies that were viewed solely as part of a military-industrial context. 

Artists such as Otto Piene, who had served in the anti-aircraft artillery during the war, set out to reclaim technology from its militaristic and violent uses and put it towards more creative purposes. Piene was trying to reclaim the night sky. 

BF: One of the exhibition highlights for me was seeing the works by Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, including his extraordinary slide show (a technical first) that simulated a pilot’s sci-fi-style flight that brought him into an encounter with an advanced alien civilization whose weapons would blind him. I agree that much of this work took the direction it did because many who had managed to survive the most destructive war in human history carried with them a powerful sense of the forces that had been unleashed. That context precipitated changes in cultural forms and languages that heralded much of what is happening today. 

One critique that I have heard, which is in many ways positive, is that the exhibition has been overly praised for its restorative multisensory and kinetic environments at the expense of its value as an archival undertaking. Do you see this as a tension?

VR: I agree that there is a tension there, but I was especially careful to find a balance between the two. 

What is also important to remember is that the artists involved in the creation of many of the works being shown here, such as the light-based or responsive environments, were also highly engaged in researching what we might now call immersivity as a mode of participation as well as an aesthetic experiment. 

They were identifying themselves as artist-researchers and were experimenting with and on their public by plunging them into dynamic environmental circumstances and engendering shifting perceptual fields. We can recognise this now more clearly as a trajectory that leads to the kind of popular, immersive installations that are exhibited today. 

At the outset, the idea was not simply for people to come and have fun and be seduced by what was happening (though that was a part of it, of course) but also to realize that a primary driver for this kind of work was to democratize the overall idea of art and to open it up for a wider public. In fact, it was hoped that by stimulating shifts at a sensual-perceptual level that would then lead to a different kind of engagement in society through abstraction; so again it is all highly cogent to our contemporary circumstances.

BF: How easy has it been to bring some of these vintage works back to life for the purposes of a six month-long exhibition that has been open seven days a week and receiving large audiences?

VR: I was genuinely surprised that we were able to turn some of the works on for as long as we have throughout the day. Most of the kinetic works have specific running schedules, set with timers. Where these have been borrowed from other collections, those schedules were integral to the loan process. We had specific conversations with lenders about what type of intervals are best for particular works, as well as with our own conservators regarding works in the Tate Collection. In some cases, we have to let the motor cool down regularly. 

Every work is different and they all have a personality. When the machines were “younger” I am sure they would have been a bit more resilient! 

Of course, having to make everything work consistently for the general public has been an interesting part of this exhibition, and we have learned a great deal. For instance, Aleksandar Srnec’s work Luminoplastic originally ran on vintage motors from 1960s sewing machines. I think that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb that owns it had to buy up all of the suitable sewing machines that they could find on the market, and later had to find a motor that was similar enough to be swapped in for the vintage sewing machine model. Even so, we have had some challenges with the motors breaking down a few times and have had to adjust the running times in response. 

At Tate, we are fortunate enough to have an in-house team of sculpture and time-based media conservators keeping a close eye on how everything is going, who sometimes take items off display to repair them and then bring them back. This happened recently with Martha Boto’s Helicoidal Chromokinetics, which involves colored bulbs that switch from one to another. When this malfunctioned, we consulted the lenders, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and a solution was found by temporarily putting an Arduino inside to replace the old mechanical switch. But guaranteeing the work’s practical functionality and making sure that it appears in front of the public in the way it was supposed to was my primary concern. It is also one of the few works that has a proximity sensor instead of a timer. 

I was very particular about making sure that every time a visitor enters a room with works of kinetic art, there is always something on. It was almost a choreography, with these kinetic works passing the baton from one to the other. 

BF: I’d like to end by asking you about the inclusion of works by the Arte Programmata group, which is a strong part of the curatorial offer. How do you think such work benefits from being looked at through the lens of the present?

VR: Arte Programmata used the concept of programming as it applies to analog artworks with mechanical and mathematically-derived components. I wanted to point to this fact as a way to gesture towards how brief the step was between that kind of work and using computers, and digital algorithms specifically, to generate visual patterns that the artist may not fully predict or control.

Generative art is still following the same idea of setting out rules and following a process that generates visual outputs that the artist may not know fully from the get-go. 

Even more rudimentary kinetic works use a motor as a way of programming movement, sometimes including elements of chaos or unpredictability, as with Jean Tinguely’s machines. I really wanted to assert Arte Programmata and its connections to and influence on the New Tendencies movement as an important moment in the passage from analog algorithmic art to the use of computers to execute algorithms.