Earl of Clancarty reviews 'Electric Dreams'

‘Electric Dress’ by Atsuko Tanaka, 1956 | © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library. Courtesy of YOKOTA TOKYO

Earl of Clancarty

@NickClancarty

With the topicality of artificial intelligence, now is a good moment to look at how art has responded to and engaged with technology. The current exhibition at the Tate Modern, Electric Dreams, does precisely this in a survey that spans a period from the late 50s to the early 90s, just before the internet took off.

The work is arranged in roughly chronological order, from the earliest motorised experiments with sound and light to later work with video and computers.

This is a busy exhibition, featuring more than 70 artists from across the world, largely drawn from those countries where the artists themselves had the clearest interest in technology including, amongst others, the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan and Brazil; it is impossible to take everything in in a single visit. But it is also busy in another way: from the moment you walk in, your senses are assaulted visually and aurally by work that ideally needs more space than is given it. Nevertheless, the depth of the survey is a plus point. Some artists, such as the kinetic artists Panayiotis ‘Takis’ Vassilakis and Jean Tinguely, are well-known to gallery goers, while others are much less so. 

The most fascinating thing about the exhibition is how utopian it feels. Many artists were members of groups, such as the Zero Group in Germany, whose name tells you everything you want to know about the need for a new beginning, particularly following the ravages of war, with technology co-opted into this ambition.

The most fascinating thing about the exhibition is how Utopian it feels

We are reminded of Harold Wilson’s famous words from 1963 – of “the white heat” of a “scientific revolution”, necessary for building a “new Britain” – and there are echoes of today, though that shared excitement and optimism is less conspicuous at a time when artists themselves are increasingly worried about the loss of rights to their work in the face of technological progress. 

You can watch some of the machines in action – although others are now too fragile to switch on. I waited patiently for Davide Boriani’s Magnetic Surface (1965) to begin moving and adopt an entirely unique configuration (which half an hour later would be gone forever).

But it is a strange Proustian experience viewing the earliest video pieces from the 70s, which today feel like museum pieces – in comparison to the 1957 paintings by Atsuko Tanaka (made in response to her own Electric Dress), which – ironically – look as though they could have been done yesterday. Nothing dates as quickly as new technology.

The final piece in the exhibition, Liquid Views – Narcissus’ Digital Reflections (1992-3) by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, poses helpful questions about the use of technology. You peer into a small screen below you and appear on a big screen on the wall as a face in a stream. To get the sense of what Narcissus was about, you could look into a real stream and see your own reflection in nature. But here the personal becomes something that can be viewed by anyone. Both, then, the benefit and curse of our contemporary digital lives. 

Earl of Clancarty is a Crossbench peer

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet
Curated by: Val Ravaglia and Odessa Warren
Venue: Tate Modern until 1 June 2025

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