There is a work in this enthralling show to make you blink and look twice. It’s by the madcap Belgian Pol Bury. On the wall is a large wooden oval sprouting hundreds of fine bristles (think of an enormous hairbrush). Your eyes move over its surface, thoughts perhaps pressing forwards, given the many rooms to go. All of a sudden there is a fractional twitch, somewhere among the thicket, imperceptible as a synaptic leap. It’s as if the sculpture had a mind of its own.
3069 White Dots on an Oval Background – deadpan title – fulfils Bury’s 60s dream of finding the midpoint between motion and non-motion with little more than imagination and a primitive motor. It is one of so many works in this teeming, beeping, flickering, pulsating exhibition of art (dating from roughly 1950 to the 90s) that just cannot keep still. Wonderful contraptions, often involving no more than tin cans and electricity, wobble and vibrate. Screens shudder with static. Black-and-white op art paintings revolve like the spiralling credits to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
The technology of the subtitle runs all the way from simple electricity to prisms and electromagnets, early computers to the first touch-screen devices. Helpful wall guides explain all sorts of science, from alpha waves to Fortran (the first computer language standard) to cybernetics. The ideal art show for anyone interested in science, it is also unexpectedly moving in a quite different way: a poignant and often beautiful vision of human creativity engaging with machines.
Initially, quite a lot of what you see has no technological underpinning at all. Vera Spencer’s collage of coloured punched cards, used in mechanical looms to create complex patterns, makes a semi-abstract skyline of high buildings at night. German artist Günther Uecker’s densely hammered board of white nails seems to shimmer like a windblown wheatfield as you move. By far the most eye-popping exhibit of all is French artist François Morellet’s stupendous corridor of blue and red squares gyrating against each other, and setting off explosions of after-images in your optical field. Its patterns were randomly generated according to the odd and even numbers of a telephone directory.
Pixellated glass panels; mobiles that shift when you blow upon on them; poet-performer-visionary Brion Gysin famously announcing (you listen on headphones) that words do not belong to anyone, and explaining how he pioneered cut-ups with William Burroughs in the 1950s. The buildup to the space-and-data age is pure nostalgia, before the electricity really fires in.
Blue rays dart and twinkle across black screens. Iron filings flitter through revolving wheels. The Italian kinetic artist Alberto Biasi refracts beams of light from shifting angles through crystal prisms to create ever-changing rainbows. Chinese-American cybernetic sculptor Wen-Ying Tsai installs glades of strobe-lit steel rods that vibrate and shudder when passing visitors shout out or clap.
With 15 sections, it’s a crowded show. But the pacing is subtle, with ideal pauses for solo artists. A recreation of Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s 1974 immersive installation Chromointerferent Environment fills an entire gallery with parallel lines of light that ripple over each other like perpetual cross-tides, constantly changing the appearance of people and drifting balloons in the room. Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima uses glowing rings of red and green LED numbers, programmed to move from one to 99 in unique and alternating combinations, to produce what is effectively a Buddhist installation based upon the principle of endless continuity and never-ending change.
And the marvellous American artist Liliane Lijn, now 84, and one of the show’s true stars, has early and late works on show. Best of all is a gorgeous miniature theatre – as it seems – of silver metal curtains across which lights flicker in random patterns, like voiceless and invisible actors.
Internationalism is a curatorial principle here, so that one learns a lot about the boffin-artists who converged on Zagreb’s Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1960, or at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada from 1990. The Grav group, founded in Paris in 1960, were inspired by mathematical principles and pre-determined systems. How dry that sounds, until you enter Morellet’s blazing red-blue corridor (the good old technology, incidentally, of colour).
Later rooms are purely archival, as with too many Tate shows of recent years: research materials laid out in prim vitrines. And here and there the art resembles period cocktail bar decor, the aesthetic shifting from James Bond to psychedelic lava lamp. But mostly these artists were really trying to harness technology to blow your mind.
There is a hilariously solemn sequence from BBC Two’s Late Night Line-Up, in 1968, announcing all sorts of computer-generated art that has been diligently rediscovered by the show’s curators. Choreography, atonal music, a tragicomic computer-generated Mondrian that looks designed by a child, and had to be coloured in by a painter.
Among them is the head of a robot called SAM (Sound Activated Mobile) created by the Polish artist Edward Ihnatowicz. It is a most affecting fragment – a propeller head with a powerful force of personality – that used to be attached to a body that interacted with visitors. You can see historic footage on a nearby screen. Now it stands forlorn, in its case, the relic of a long-ago idea. For the technology is long since surpassed – and effectively dead.
A faint worry that the show should still seem relevant is raised in the catalogue to Electric Dreams. Given the dross so far produced by AI, the curators need not fear. The art in this show is innocent, idealistic, absorbing and highly intelligent. It is both charmingly archaic and constantly prophetic. Look no further than the wondrous Liquid Views: Narcissus’s Digital Reflections, created in 1992 by the German art duo Fleischmann and Strauss, in which you see yourself below in a pioneering touch-screen display, and then again above on a public screen, alone and yet constantly watching and searching and reaching out – just like the world wide web.
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet is at Tate Modern, London, until 1 June 2025
