bet88 The Electric Dreams of a More Analog Age
“We’ll always be togetherbet88, together in electric dreams,” promises the soaring chorus of the infectious 1984 synth-pop banger by Giorgio Moroder and Phil Oakey. You might have it running through your head (I did) while walking through “Electric Dreams,” an exhibition at Tate Modern in London through June 1, as lights flash and dazzle, machines whir and hum, and the air around you pulses with sound.
This ambitious and sprawling show’s subtitle, “Art and Technology Before the Internet,” might conjure images of dry and unwieldy diagrams, complicated terminology and opaque technical processes, and these do feature: A large wall hosts a virtually unreadable “Electric Dreams Circuit Map,” intended to illustrate the connections between the exhibition’s more than 150 works and their makers, and several wall texts include definitions of terms like “binary code,” “algorithm,” “pattern recognition” and “punched cards.” (If you’re encountering these for the first time, they probably won’t stick.)
But overwhelmingly, “Electric Dreams” is full of just that: coursing, pulsing, propulsive, seductive energies, currents and ideas that animate works across a huge range of mediums, leaving visitors with the sense of having passed — pleasantly dazed, challenged and provoked — through a reverie of technological evolution.
ImageBeginning in the 1950s and ending in the early 1990s, the exhibition shows how technology in the arts most often presents new ways of addressing age-old creative concerns.Credit...Lucy Green/TateBeginning with the 1950s explosion of postwar technologies and ending in the early 1990s, on the eve of the World Wide Web becoming publicly accessible, we move through varied global movements that show how technology in the arts, far from creating ruptures with the past, most often presents new ways of addressing age-old creative concerns: space, perspective, time, light, movement, materials, representation.
Kinetic art, Op Art, multimedia installations, motorized and illuminated sculptures, flashing lights and stacks of thrumming monitors fill several rooms, and the viewer takes an active role, moving in and around, and sometimes engaging directly with, the art works. (In the case of Wen-Ying Tsai’s 1968 “cybernetic sculptures,” they shimmy and shake, gasp and hiss in response to sounds in their immediate environment.) I was most drawn, however, to pieces that hinted at technology’s dark underbelly.
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