The Brooklyn Rail

About twenty-five years ago, I was invited to the artist Lillian Schwartz’s house to see her archives. Schwartz was one of the first artists to work with then-nascent computers and their programming, and her collections included printouts, punch cards, spools of magnetic tapes, and of course, her handwritten notes, computations, and sketches. When Schwartz began working, the home computer hadn’t yet been invented (remember, the earliest institutional computers were the size of rooms and demanded their own real estate, complete with dedicated HVAC and fire-suppression systems), so I asked her how she came into contact with all of the trappings required for advanced computing: she was a “resident visitor” at Bell Labs for more than thirty years, teaming with engineers to produce computer-animated films. “The engineers knew what the programs were supposed to do and what they shouldn’t do,” Schwartz told me. “They brought in artists like me [including others such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg] to figure out what computers could do that the engineers hadn’t even imagined.”

I thought about Lillian Schwartz’s words as I walked through Tate Modern’s inclusive and engaging Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet, not only because Schwartz’s work is included—she is represented by a projection of her 1972 film Enigma, a strobing animation of increasingly complex, chromatically insane plaids—but also for the way that she described her use of computers as if they were playgrounds. She wasn’t the one building the mainframes or the systems that ran on them, but to her mind it was only artists who could imagine ways to exploit them, freeing them from their practical purposes to discover their mis-use value. This way of thinking about the possibilities offered by computers contradicts the way we understand and are using AI software today, in which the program makes something “new” from the information we feed it but is ultimately derivative.¹ It also differs radically from the reductive and inhumanely gleeful “move fast and break stuff” tech philosophy we’re being fed at the moment in that it is productive, generative.

Electric Dreams encompasses both the directionality that might seem more natural to us now—that, as stated in the catalogue, “new technologies provided the artist with fresh ways to realise his vision”²—and Schwartz’s liberatory paradigm shift, emphasizing what the curator Val Ravaglia terms “collaboration,” a working together between computers and artists, computers and computers, and artists and artists. The exhibition does this most immediately by focusing on well-known artists’ groups active in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, such as Japan’s Gutai movement, Germany’s Zero, Zero’s international cousin ZERO, and the multinational Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), as well as by including work from artists engaged in less-known collectives; new to me were the French, Argentinian, Spanish, and Hungarian GRAV (motto: “IT IS FORBIDDEN NOT TO PARTICIPATE”); Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) from Japan; and the Croatian Nove Tendencije (New Tendencies) movement, which called for an “active art [that] should direct creative forces to positive social action.” Thus, Gutai-affiliated Atsuko Tanaka’s rainbow-hued, hand-painted-lightbulb Electric Dress (1956, reconstructed 1999) hangs a few rooms before Jikken Kōbō founder Katsuhiro Yamaguchi’s Image Modulator (1969, reconstructed 2024), a cathode ray tube television playing live programming set behind a piece of corrugated glass, both using insistently physical technology to achieve transcendent effects. Seen through the glass’s grooves, Yamaguchi’s broadcasts become broadly pixelated and read as a mesmerizing foreshadowing of the digitized images with which we’re so familiar. At the time it was made, though, television’s phosphor dots were much more closely linked to the Ben-Day dots of printed imagery. Yamaguchi’s installation is poised equally between Instagram and Roy Lichtenstein’s Image Duplicator (1963).

In addition to its focus on artists’ collectives, Electric Dreams establishes the collaborative by displaying art as “‘systems’ to transmit information, with self-regulating and responsive behaviours (feedback loops) in which the viewer or their environment becomes an active component.”³ Though artists initially used computing directly or inspirationally to work in art historical media such as painting or printing—algorithmic examples include Vera Molnár’s printouts of Transformations 1-21 (1976), which uses a computer to scramble a grid of open squares, and Lucia Di Luciano’s dazzlingly complex house paint-on-panel Discontinuous Structural Articulation (1964), which visualizes mathematical operations without the use of computing—this often translated to new-media kinetic sculptures or situations that could interact with the viewer. In our own period, this is often presented as remade kinetic artworks. While such reconstructions can sometimes be problematic, especially where a certain quality of materiality is lost (such as the digitization of a Super 8 film), they can also afford us the opportunity to grasp more fully the impact such technologically advanced works of art must have made. In some instances, the reconstructions enable the artist’s vision to be more richly achieved. Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromointerferent Environment (1974–2019), for example, creates multi-colored moiré patterns by projecting stripes on walls, floors, and objects including blocks and balloons. It was first executed with 35mm slides and projectors; at Tate Modern, the installation has been recreated with his son Carlos Cruz Delgado using a “vector-based” computer program and digital projectors, which means that the overlaps are faster, the stripes can change orientation more easily, and more colors are generated. Visitors were gleeful. At the same time, I deeply appreciated the dynamic installations that worked as they were originally constructed to, as well as the stewardship required to maintain them. Davide Boriani’s Magnetic Surface (1965) is magnificently janky. Magnets hidden behind the piece’s circular frame move iron shavings throughout the sculpture, creating a world that appears like a stop-motion undersea ecosystem from outer space, complete with levitating flotsam and jetsam. While we can undoubtedly imagine it operating more smoothly, it is of its time and captivatingly magical all at once, like Victorian ectoplasm photographs.

Out of everything included in this wonderful exhibition, I was particularly pleased to sit again in Otto Piene’s transfixing Light Room (Jena) (2007), which brings together several rotating, pierced metal lanterns that beam speckles throughout a darkened room. These sculptures were built and exhibited in the late 1950s and ’60s under titles such as Archaic Light Ballet (1959) and throw out dapples of light that make you feel not as if you’re hurtling through the Milky Way, but rather that the universe has taken you as its dancing partner. “I go to darkness itself, I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it, I turn it into a volume of power with the breath of life like my own body,” Piene observed in 1973. It's the light I feel I might need right now.