Electric Dreams review – the future ain’t what it used to be

Tate Modern, London
The singing robots and 8-bit graphics are diverting and sometimes sublime, but there’s a darker story to be told in this show about technologically-assisted art before the internet

There’s a popular meme of two lovers embracing against a digital field of sunflowers. Their pursed lips would be locked were it not for their bumping VR headsets. “What if we kissed at the intersection of art and technology?” the text reads. The meme makes fun of a route heavily trafficked by museums with declining attendance figures, keen to lure viewers away from at-home streaming with digital art displays. On a darker level, it points to the more antisocial aspects of our hyper-connected age.

If this kind of cynicism feels familiar, it’s because we’ve drifted far from digital technology’s optimistic early days. Walking through Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, a showcase of artists who used or incorporated machines in their work from the 1950s to the early 1990s, it’s possible to imagine how things might have turned out differently. Although working against the backdrop of the cold war, when a nuclear arms race threatened to wipe out humankind, these innovators saw technology as a means to augment perception and creativity. The exhibition is a sensory overload of whirring motors and flashing lights, as experiments in early kinetic op-art give way to abstract compositions produced by rudimentary algorithms.