Third Text

19 June 2025

Pauline de Souza

‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet’, Tate Modern, London, 28 November 2024 – 1 June 2025

If you wanted to see an exhibition that combines the historical with the art object made in the same time frame but which failed mostly to bring the artwork to life, you could have headed for the ‘Electric Dreams’ exhibition at the Tate Modern. This was an exhibition that could not decide if the artwork was artefact or live art for the audience to engage with. Do they remain static objects fulfilling a historical moment? Or do we learn from them as living artworks for the present and future artists interested in working with technology? Overall the exhibition did both, but inevitably it had its gems. Tate Modern might not have the budget to maintain the artworks but the curators should have decided more clearly what kind of exhibition they wanted to put on. 

I want to work backwards, beginning with Liliane Lijn’s The Bride (1988) in Room 14, towards the end of the exhibition. Standing alone in a dark space, light illuminated from the top of the sculpture. But why was it here? Like most of the work in the exhibition, light dominated the surroundings. This is a work meant to explore light and matter, intended to be comprehended as poetry in emotion. Light hits the copper surface and the patterns made provide the entertainment that seemed to be the main function of the exhibition. But is that enough for this show? Lijn’s energy is present, as The Bride transmits energy through her light source while hoping desperately that anyone will recognise the importance of death and mythology as well as the role light and technology plays in her work. Her work came into its own in the group exhibition ‘Portals’ organised by the Neon Foundation in Athens in 2021, but in the context of ‘Electric Dreams’ Lijn’s sculpture became almost an allegorical figure representing new media, and in the process the work lost its significance as a figure fighting against the perception of the female body.

Liliane Lijn, Lines of Power, 1983, and The Bride, 1988, installation view in ‘Electric Dreams’, Tate Modern, 28 November – 1 June 2024, photo courtesy of Lucy Green and Tate

Moving from the older woman and back, to the confirmation of European artists in Room 15: here we had E.A.T., which stands for Experiments in Art and Technology. This is where Robert Rauschenberg was placed with Fred Waldhauer and Robert Whitman, along with engineers Fred Waldhauer and Billy Kluver in Room 13. Together, these men, in 1967, really thought about the collaborations that could take place between artists and engineers. E.A.T., with their residencies, were only concerned with making networks between other artists and engineers, during the 1960s into the early with 1970s. Collaboration is fine, but the group’s relationship with new technology served to strengthen the bonds with like-minded people and avoid making their work, where possible, for an audience only interested in gimmicks. Technology as a new form was taken more seriously commercially, but over the period covered by ‘Electric Dreams’ the level of respect for technology as an art form in its own right remained niche until the general public had been introduced to the importance of AI. E.A.T. was part of the New York Collection for Stockholm in June 1973. ^[1]  The main aim was to purchase work by New York artists, to enable people to be aware what status the artists had in the collection and in the artworld in general. This is significant, because most of the work in this exhibition came from the Tate’s own collection, but has only been added in the last decade.

So, who is made visible, who is left out, and what is understood by art and technology, even when the title of the exhibition can be related to the 1980s song Electric Dreams and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? David Medalla and Gustav Metzger are natural contenders for this exhibition. They made kinetic work, the main attraction of the exhibition, and they both have work in the Tate Collection. Medalla and Metzger had connections to the Signals gallery in London; Medalla was the founder, and Lijn was invited to show there in London during the early 1960s. Yes, they were cutting edge, evident in the artists they invited to London from Asia, Latin America and Europe, yet they were still artists of the establishment.

An artist such as Atsuko Tanaka, however, is given just a corner for her experiment in art and technology. The switching-on-and-off electric light bulbs in her Electric Dress (1956) were part of her creative progress in the construction of her living dress, which is equally a sculpture. The wearable dress covered in industrial light bulbs is very much connected to the kinetic theme of the exhibition – but Tanaka is much more than that. In Japan, Tanaka actively participated in the Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai group founded by Jirō Yoshihara, who was both an artist, educator and businessman. The group learnt stage design, but Yoshihara ensured that the relationship between commerce and industry was essential to his postwar avantgarde collective. His activities enabled Tanaka to engage with a growing global artworld, but she was more radical in her approach to making art than Yoshihara. Pondering how to forge her own path away from the Yoshihara’s expressive abstract painting, she combined the performative with design and the decorative. Her wearable dress tested the values of the commercial industry. Well-known brands had already established themselves in Japan, and there was a need to highlight modern Japanese industry as well as projecting Japanese culture into the future at that time. Grassroot experimentation went along with a postwar Japanese culture and society that embraced innovations in technology to promote the image of a futuristic nation. What could be commercial and experimental resulted in the wearable dress where light, aka electricity, reinforces the country as a hi-tech nation. 

Kiyoji Otsuji, Tanaka Atsuko, Electric Dress, 2nd Gutai Exhibition, 1956, © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum and Library, courtesy of Yokota Tokyo

Tanaka was not the only artist from Japan in the show. The exhibition would have been stronger with a more in-depth section on them, but I can only assume this is partly due to the financial debt the Tate is in. Asking senior staff to take redundancy packages and relying on work from the Tate collection saves money but raises questions about the quality of the exhibition. Katsuhiro Yamaguchi’s work is in the Tate collection; given a room to himself, his work could be found in Room 5. Yamaguchi was also involved in an artistic foundation, which he co-founded in 1951, called Jikken Kōbō. This experimental workshop also focused on design and the impact of the performative. The idea that artists depended purely on European art fails to comprehend the importance of Japan as a hi-tech nation in the 1950s and 1960s. Even now we fail to fully comprehend Japan’s role in the global tech market and its impact on Japanese culture – which includes the arts. Yamaguchi and his peers are being looked at through rose-tinted Western glasses, and it is about time their work was better understood through a greater awareness of Japanese history. Like Tanaka’s light bulb dress and David Medalla’s work, these works remain in the kinetic mode. Displaying electronic signals is not enough context for these works. What does begin to become evident in this exhibition is the history of video art, however. The Valuskas (Steina and Woody Valuska, aka Valuska Video) were pioneers of multimedia work who made major contributions to creating the video art scene in New York in the 1970s, and are now well known as video artists whose work is shown at the Frieze art fair. For any survey of the history of internet art and art that used technology, such as ‘Electric Dreams’, their inclusion is essential. Here, Room 2, ‘Materialising the Invisible’, had kinetic works which aimed to combine technology with ideas of computer programming and optical experimentation. The room allowed the audience to comprehend the analogue programming that was crucial in developing kinetic works. 

Woody Vasulka and Steina Vasulka, Matrix II, 1974, installation view in ‘Electric Dreams’, Tate Modern, 28 November – 1 June 2024, photo courtesy of Lucy Green and Tate

Later, the Zero group in Germany, founded by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in 1957, and joined by Gunther Uecker in 1960, saw the many possibilities of space technology, where the depiction of the space technology is paramount. Using film and immersive exhibitions, their experiments with light, movement and pattern take centre stage in a room called ‘Zero and the Zero Network’, with Heinz Mack’s 1968 film, Tele-Mack, and in the single room housing Otto Piene’s Light Room. Yves Klein, Pol Bury and Jean Tinguely, as well as Daniel Spoerri, joined the group and their work was in the exhibition (and is in the Tate collection). There were a number of artists and avant-garde movements that shared the same aims as this group. The Japanese Gutai group, for example, that Atsuko Tanaka was part of, were not fully represented in this exhibition. The show excluded Shozo Shimamoto, acknowledged as the future leader of the Gutai group. Even though he became a painter later in his career, his early works involved immersive stage design and he was very active in mail art, a precursor of internet art and an artform that was missing from the exhibition. Mail art, with its collaborative approach, enables the techniques of posting small-scale artworks and relies on the analogue programming of postal delivery.

Like the other collectives in Japan, the group Katsuhiro Yamaguchi co-founded (Jikken Kōbō) embraced technology only to subvert it to their interest in optics and sound that was dominating the Japanese nation via the development of aircraft, trains and advertising. Technology was developing quickly in Japan, more so than in the West, and it was Europe that had much to learn about the possibilities of technology, even though Japan suffered so much destruction in World War Two. Tōru Takemitsu was another founding member of Jikken Kōbō, and as a self-taught writer and composer, his book on aesthetics became influential in the collaborative workshop and he was seen as an important figure in the twentieth century.

Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Fujitsubo (Barnacle), 1966, courtesy of Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Room 9, ‘Dialogues With The Machines’ featured cybernetics, the science of systems. This room couldn’t escape the 1968 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) exhibition ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’. But the same room also featured the international touring exhibition ‘Arte y Cibernética’, put together by the Centro de Arte Y Comunicación (CAyC) and which opened at Galeria Bonino in Buenos Aires in 1969. A number of artists participated in this exhibition, in which visitors could see the latest in art and technology in France and London. Gustav Metzger was one, along with John Gosling, Katherine Nash, Jaume Estapa and Auro Lecci, among others. This was a very important partnership between the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Institute of Studies on Latin American Art in New York. These artists promoted mail art, and roughly 900 forms of mail art were posted across the globe. Established in 1968, the collaborations spread across continents, and its newsletters reached media organisations to ensure its experiments in systems went to people who comprehend how systems work beyond an artistic community. These experiments spread to computers and visual research. Moving from letter fonts into visual research was essential to show how systems worked and how analogue systems created a network of participants, to keep a dialogue going. ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ at the ICA was equally instrumental in depicting the creative possibilities beyond the visual arts. Jasia Reichardt organised the ICA exhibition, which was partly concerned with algorithms and technology devices that had a generative system and which at the time had limited ways to be manipulated but could potentially be reconstructed to follow a computer programme. Gustav Metzger’s self-destructive Five Screens With Computer (1969) was in the exhibition, a work based on dance choreography and a computer programme, originally located in a hospital setting where people could be lost in their own thoughts while being surrounded by art that was experimental and stimulating but more abstract compared to the kind of work usually placed in hospitals.

Nam June Paik was represented by his Robot K-456 (1964–1996), and his distorted television screens, also to be found in the Tate collection. The exhibition’s determination to show a different perspective on visual research was given in Room 10, where Wen-Ying Tsai’s artworks demonstrated his engineering skills that resulted in kinetic objects. The works combine optics with electronics – but who is this artist? A Chinese American artist, Wen-Ying Tsai used cybernetic and other technology forms to create his sculptures. He did not see himself as part of a Western tradition, which is where this Tate exhibition wanted to place him. He saw himself working within an Oriental tradition and he was an inspiration to Chinese artists worldwide. Even though Wen-Ying Tsai’s work concentrates on technology, Taoism formed part of his creative philosophy. His works are things as ‘other’, they are in constant flux, forever changing. For him, the engineer had to be emotionally connected to nature. The need to unite opposites motivated him to make his artworks using electric motors, stainless steel rods, light works, audio works and feedback control. While establishing an international reputation, he was working at the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when Mao became a cult figure and social realism was seen as the norm for Chinese art. He was a member of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which helped to establish his international reputation. Both E.A.T. and Jikken Kōbō were concerned with how artists worked in a society where electronics had a purpose beyond art for entertainment value.

Jasia Reichardt (originally from Poland and later awarded British citizenship) was already part of the establishment and as Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, she had the space to put on the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ in 1968. Although this exhibition included architecture and reflected the more concrete impacts of technology and mass media consumption on postwar British society, Reichardt’s approach was different from Wen-Ying Tsai. For her, computer art needed to have a commercial element. She had written many reviews for contemporary galleries in the 1960s. The ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ exhibition catalogue was a special issue of Studio International, a journal with a wide international readership under the editorial leadership of Peter Townsend, with support from the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Now, in 2025, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, it has been reprinted by Studio International. 

Despite the interest in humanity, the work of Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima moved away from that in Room 10. Miyajima’s artwork is more concerned with systems. His two artworks from the early 1990s on display here, Lattice B and Opposite Circle (part of the artist’s 133651 series, and both also in the Tate collection), are made from LED lights and look at potential combinations that the ever-changing two works can offer, especially Opposite Circle. Formulated in a geometric shape creating a three-metre ring rising from the floor, with the flickering circle constantly changing, it aims to be an immersive work – yet fails to be so, since the work’s geometric shape acts as a barrier being so low to the floor. One steps in and out of the circle, easily ignoring the viewer to life cycles, but this does not come across clearly when the work centres on mathematical possibilities. Room 11 presented the Japanese group Video Hiroba, founded in 1972 by Fujiko Nakaya, along with artists Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Nakahara Michitaka and Eizaburo Hara, among others, a group influenced directly by E.A.T. as well as the rapid technological developments in portable video and editing led by Sony at that time. Video Hiroba’s workshop-exhibition ‘Video Communications: Do-It-Yourself Kit’ in 1972 in the Sony building in Tokyo, and subsequent exhibitions, show the importance of community participation in the production of work that reflected Japan. In the process they pioneered the ‘open access’ ideology that became crucial to creating an alternative constructive relationship with technology and society. Video Hiroba’s engagement with real world subjects presents an alternative path to the increasingly slick video works influenced by IBM and Bell Laboratories that came to be identified with electronic art in the 1980s and 1990s.


Tatsuo Miyajima, Lattice B, 1990 and Opposite Circle, 1991, installation view in ‘Electric Dreams’, Tate Modern, 28 November – 1 June 2024, photo courtesy of Lucy Green and Tate

‘Electric Dreams’ was frustrating as it gave glimpses of what might have been a more innovative exhibition. It included lesser known movements and artists with ‘New Tendencies’ and the works from Japan from the 1960s that suggest a more radical approach to the incorporation of technology into art. These artists manifested a common cause informed by their reaction to conservative political and artworld establishments and embraced the potential of technology to liberate art. It would have been informative for the curators to have followed through these practices to see what their influence in the following decades was, but instead ‘Electric Dreams’ presented them as a dead end. The appeal for the Tate of selling a show based on the well-trodden premise of how artists predicted the internet or AI detracted from a more interesting exploration of artists promoting technology as a means to escape present crises.

^[1]   For more on this collection, see The New York Collection for Stockholm Portfolio

Pauline de Souza is Director of Diversity Art Forum, and has written essays and articles for various publications.