A brave new world, revisited | Electric Dreams at Tate Modern

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Environnement Chromointerférent, Paris, 1974/2018. © Carlos Cruz-Diez / Bridgeman Images, Paris, 2024. Photo © 2023 Andrea Rossetti

I’m in one of the fifteen rooms the Tate Modern has filled with artworks, films and installations in its engaging new show Electric Dreams, which examines how groups of innovative artists used technology in their practice between the end of WW2 and the advent of the internet.  

The room is lined with strip lights, which turn everything within it - namely five large white balloons, several wooden cubes, and the face of only other person in the room, a middle-aged guy like me - the same fluorescent pale-blue colour.  

The guy kicks one of the balloons, bouncing it off a cube and into the air. I think ‘that looks entertaining’ and do the same. Soon we’re kicking the balloons to and at each other, turning the art installation – Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromoinferent Environment – into a mini football pitch. 

Cruz-Diez, I later find out from the show’s catalogue, first displayed the installation in 1963, aiming to ‘reactivate or awaken, through elementary manifestations, the dormant perceptions of a hyper-baroque society, which unloads onto people an immense, heterogenous and continuous bombardment of information’.  

And that was thirty years before the internet! Whether he succeeded or not with me, I’m not sure: I do know I’ve never had as half so much fun in an art gallery. 

This fusion of earnestly serious ideas and participatory enjoyment runs through the exhibition, which I leave reluctantly after two absorbing hours. There is far too much of interest to catalogue fully in this article, so I’ll stick to the pieces I liked best.  

François Morellet, Random distribution of squares, 1963, and Julio Le Parc, Double Mirror, 1966, installation view in Electric Dreams, Tate Modern, 2024. Photo courtesy Tate (Lucy Green)

Marina Apollino, Dinamica Circolare 6S+S, 1966. Tate. Presented by the artist 2024. Photo courtesy the artist

Francois Morellet’s Random distribution of squares using the π number decimals, 50% odd digit blue, 50% even digit red (1963), for example. An entire room is wallpapered, ceiling and all, with a pattern of red-and-blue cubes, which creates an optical illusion of movement. Visitors are invited to look at themselves in hand-held mirrors, with this flickering, pulsating pattern in the background. I had to get out of there quickly, for fear of fainting.  

In a similar vein is Marina Apollonio’s Circular Dynamics 6S + S II (1968-70), a rotating disc of black and white lines, which, while it is entirely flat, tricks your mind into thinking it is three-dimensional. It’s like looking at the inside of a whirling cone, which mysteriously inverts itself: the opening credits of Hitchcock’s Vertigo come to mind.  

Then there’s a piece by Alberto Biasi, who was recently exhibited in Mayfair’s Cardi Gallery: two bulbs beam white light though several rotating prisms, and – now refracted – onto mirrors, where they multiply. This one, constructed in 1966, is called Light Prisms, Spectral Kinetic Mesh. They certainly knew how to title their works, those heady-sixties artists, while happily mining the rich seam of creative possibilities provided by the post-war explosion of exciting new technologies. 

Alberto Biasi, Light Prisms (Cinereticolo spettrale), 1962-1965. Photo © ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo Franz Wamho

There are a few duds: some of the pieces work better than others. Two of them don’t work at all. Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, in front of which you are invited to sit with your eyes shut, while stroboscopic flickers are beamed onto your eyelids, seems to be suffering from a blown lightbulb. In front of Davide Boriani’s 1959 work Magnetic Surface, in which iron shavings within a circular container are meant to shift into unpredictable configurations, there’s a sign reading ‘Out of Order’. Maybe they should have tried switching it off and on again. 

Boriani was part of Gruppo T, one of a rash of artistic collectives which formed in the fifties and sixties: others included a British group gathering around the Signals Gallery, the multinational ZERO, and the New Tendencies, based in Zagreb. These were days of intense collaboration, with artists riffing off one another’s ideas, participating together in eagerly anticipated shows, appealing to a new breed of art lovers. A brave new world, then: which leaves me thinking - whatever happened?  

Of course there are contemporary artists integrating scientific principles and technological advancement, producing ground-breaking work: the scientific data-driven films of British duo Semiconductor come to mind; Joey Holder whose constructed environments explore hybrid natural and technological worlds; Anicka Yi blurring the lines between living organisms and machines. But, in sixty years’ time, will these artists be considered as a cohesive movement, and exhibited together in national galleries? Somehow I doubt it: maybe we have been jaded by too much technological advancement, too quickly changing our lives. Though, hopefully, I think, as I exit the gallery and mingle with the crowds on the South Bank, exhilarated by what I’ve just seen… hopefully a new breed of artists, experimenting with the toolkit provided by generative artificial intelligence, will come to the rescue, and make art cutting edge again.