By James Brewer
Is it, was it, science or art? Ahead of the internet, numerous high-powered intellects were beavering at the crossroads of technology and artistic expression – and of poetry, and of the Greek classics. The physics of light and matter are pure poetry, wrote Liliane Lijn, who is said to have been the first female artist to work with kinetic text, when justifying in 2018 much of her experimentation, some in collaboration with her former Greek partner Takis, who died the following year at the age of 93. Takis was a pioneer of such art, using electricity, magnetism, sound and other unseen forces to create his projects.
Liliane and Takis are among trailblazers whose work is celebrated in Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet. This is Tate Modern’s extensive exhibition of the achievements of man (and woman) and machine in an era of immersive sensory installations and automatically generated works. These were to pave the way for 2022’s leap to artificial intelligence, the phenomenon which despite its promise or hype, turns out to have made the world for many people more, not less, confusing.
The exhibition lays out vintage optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art in action. It ranges from psychedelic environments created in the 1950s and 60s, to machine-made art from the 70s and 80s with minimal human direction. The practitioners used machines and algorithms to create signature art imagining visual languages for the future. Few of the standard–bearers were widely recognised, but their quiet initiatives teach us that in a sense, AI owes much to the insights gained. Under the aegis of cybernetics and algorithms, experts were in 1968 creating ‘paintings’ based, for instance on the coloured geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), the Dutch pioneer of modern art styles).
Electric Dreams describes what it says is “an international network” of the more than 70 artists it profiles. It contends that they took common inspiration from science to create art “that expands and tests the senses.” These investigators from across Asia, Europe and the Americas responded to the growing presence of technology in day-to-day life by finding new ways to work with machines, often mimicking or following on from the development of martial appliances by the state’s military laboratories.
Common motifs thus feature among the 150 works, many of which are shown for the first time in the UK. The vintage tech art ranges from mesmerising psychedelic installations to experiments using home computers and video synthesisers.
The exhibition is replete with startling images and sounds: an unnerving succession of flashing screens, whirring circuitry and beeping motors radiates, dings and clangs in the often dimly lit ambience. Just as we are befuddled with the overload of today’s ubiquitous visual media…
Liliane Lijn, born in the United States but whose grandfather had been a shipping agent in Berlin for the Hamburg–American Line, has lived in London since 1966. She seized on surrealism, Greek mythology, female identity and technological innovation, but she has clarified “I wasn’t interested in the movement of kinetic art. I was interested in the relationship between art and science. Science I found very poetic.”
She credits Takis, with whom she lived “together and apart” for seven years, with introducing her to the Greece of myths and history, and for inspiring her with his edgy work with magnetism, fireworks, and explosives. When she visited the Parthenon, she would sit against one of its marble pillars and listen to the hum of the wind through the scaffolding, imagining ancient murmurings. She read Herodotus, Homer, Plutarch, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aeschylus. Sophocles, Aristophanes and the lesbian poet Sappho.
Takis, born Panayiotis Vassilakis in Athens, lived in Paris from 1954, where he met Alberto Giacometti and fellow figures in the kinetic art scene including Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely, known for his machine sculptures. In 1958, Takis began to experiment with ‘telemagnetic’ sculptures to evince the ‘fourth dimension’ or the intangible energies of the universe. In the Tate Modern array, his electromagnetics prompt a metal needle to make metal strings quiver. Takis, to whom Tate Modern devoted a solo exhibition in 2019, described himself as an ‘intuitive scientist.’
Liliane Lijn has a stark “performing sculpture” called The Bride, from1988 in the Electric Dreams exhibition. She has said that she at first thought of The Bride as Persephone, who is taken away to the underworld, but then preferred the version according to a Sumerian myth where she goes there of her own accord because the Queen of the Underworld is her sister, Ereshkigal. The late American scholar and art critic Joseph Campbell wrote of The Bride as a caged being, pulsating with repressed energy. He said that the Bride’s enclosure acts as a ‘temenos’ which in ancient Greece was a sacred protective enclosure in front of a temple. The Bride , Campell wrote, is always seen through the grid of her enclosure.
Another of Liliane’s works, Lines of Power, consisting of tightly wound bands is one of a series of rotating copper sculptures called Linear Light Columns.
Liliane’s idea of using machines to create poetry aligned with the Surrealist theory of automatic writing – letting subconscious thoughts and dreams guide the writing hand. She had met André Breton, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement and inventors of automatic poetry, in Paris. Raymond Roussel, an early 20th century French poet and playwright who influenced the Surrealists, had written: “Relive your dreams awake.” He included that exhortation in a coded message in a long poem in book form (which took him 17 years to produce).
Around 1954, Vera Spencer (1926-2021), an avant-garde British painter and textile designer, made Artist versus Machine with punched cards which were used to enter data in the first generation of computers. Symbolic of the changing complex relationship between humans and technology, the work represented hope that technology could be harnessed for the collective social good. That would have been a total contrast to World War II, in which machines were used on a vast scale for violence and destruction.
Photographs document the remarkable Electric Dress of 1956 made by Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) of the Gutai performance and conceptual art group. The dress, first exhibited in Tokyo, is a ‘transformation’ by modern technology of the traditional kimono. She was inspired in part by the dazzling neon signs introduced in Osaka, at the time something of a novelty. With its 100 pulsating tube lights and 90 bulb lights, half of which were painted in colours, the work is both a sculpture and a dress to be worn on the stage, albeit suspended by wires because it weighed some 60 kg. Her favourite part of Electric Dress performances was when she turned on the motor, causing the lights to “blink like fireworks” although the artist admitted to worries that she might be electrocuted by the contraption.
Most fun is provided by Chromointerferent Environment devised by the late Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz Diez. In an entire room, a sequence of red, blue, green and black parallel lines jitters across the walls and ceiling, as visitors wander among cubes and pat bouncing white balloons. The effect is disorienting, but Cruz-Diez (1929-2019) was aiming for a new understanding of chromatic phenomena in art.
British-born artist Harold Cohen (1928-2016) who moved to California, created AARON 1979, an early computer designed to produce paintings and drawings autonomously; while during five decades US artist Rebecca Allen has developed human motion simulation, 3D modelling techniques, AI and Artificial Life algorithms and other generative techniques.
Multidisciplinary artist Eduardo Kac, born in Rio de Janeiro, produced colourful text poems using Minitel machines, a form of networked computing that anticipated the widespread adoption of the internet. In 1983, he began to work with holography as an interactive art form. His ‘holopoetry’ explored the relationship between experimental poetry and new media.
Art made on home computers includes Palestinian-born US artist Samia Halaby’s kinetic paintings created after teaching herself how to code on an Amiga 1000, an early personal computer made in Japan and launched in 1985, and which retailed at US$1,285 (1985), equivalent to $3,600 today. Her website says she was displaced from Palestine in 1948 with her family and was educated in the American Midwest at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalised. Her influences have included early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde.
Also on home computer, from the early 1990s, is London-based Suzanne Treister’s series of Fictional Videogame Stills from the early 1990s. She describes her fields as “making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Stills are shown from her series entitled Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?
She had been making paintings about computer games, when in January 1991 she bought an Amiga computer and made a series of stills using Deluxe Paint II. She took photos from the screen and the effect “perfectly reproduced the highly pixellated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image… it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction.”
Throughout the show, it can be hard to follow the flow of development – the exhibits seem compartmentalised rather than offering a cogent narrative, but that was the name of the game in those days, as it still is today. The thrill of new technology has given way to the predicaments of modernity including addiction to the internet and social media.
The exhibition is in partnership with the luxury fashion group Gucci, supported by Anthropic in which Amazon has a large stake, and which describes itself as a safety-conscious AI research company: “We build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.”
Curators are Val Ravaglia, curator of international art, and Odessa Warren, assistant curator of international art (Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational) at Tate Modern, with Kira Wainstein, research assistant.
Images:
At play in the installation Chromointerferent Environment. Software projection, painted wood and balloons. By Carlos Cruz-Diez, 1974-2009. Atelier Cruz-Diez.
The Bride, 1988. By Liliane Lijn. © Liliane Lijn.
Watching stills from Samia Halaby’s kinetic paintings. Fold 2 and Spooling Up 4, coded on an Amiga computer. Tate. coded on an Amiga computer. The artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg.
Fictional Videogame Stills/Would You Recognise A Virtual Paradise? 1991-2. By Suzanne Treister. Photographs from original Amiga computer screen. Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
Fictional Videogame Stills/Would You Recognise A Virtual Paradise? Not Enough Memory 1991-2. By Suzanne Treister. Photographs from original Amiga computer screen. Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York.
Horny, 1985. By Eduardo Kac. Tate. Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2018 © Eduardo Kac.
Tanaka Atsuko wearing Electric Dress, 2nd Gutai Exhibition, 1956. Photo by Kiyoji Otsuji (1923–2001). Tate © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library. Courtesy of YOKOTA TOKYO.
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet is at Tate Modern’s Eyal Ofer Galleries until June 1, 2025.
