Electric Dreams and Digital Futures

Tate Modern’s exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet begins with a video installation. A grid of CRT television screens flicker and cascade with geometric shapes, prefiguring a future of integrated technologies and televisual domination. Today it evokes a sense nostalgia for a time before screens were hand-held and ubiquitous.

With the launch of Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, the definitive guide to art in our technological world, we reflect on kinetics, immersion, and the “post-digital” age to explore how new media art continually shapes our relationship to technology.

Electric Dreams invites you to “enter a dreamscape” of retro-futurism. The exhibition presents visions of artists inspired by emerging technologies and scientific breakthroughs from the 1930s to the 1980s. Viewing the arrival of new media art though this lens raises fundamental questions central to the discipline. How has the relationship between people and technology evolved? Does this open up new ways of thinking, creating, and interacting with art? Discover Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, as the authoritative reference on all aspects of new media art and the significance of these questions.

Foregrounding kinetic sculptures, Electric Dreams reminds us that technology is a physical artefact: machines, circuit boards, punch cards, motors, spherical mirrors. These analogue inventions assert themselves in real space and not just virtually via on-screen interfaces. Art and Technology in the Mid-Twentieth Century by Nick Lambert looks at the birth of kinetic art in the 1940s, and later the pioneering computer work undertaken by artists and curators in the 1960s. In what has been described as the “era of experimentalism” in art, Lambert highlights the artist’s role as a radical innovator whose duty it is to engage with these new technologies to build new understandings.

One such innovation can be found in a side room of the exhibition. Otto Piene’s “Light Room (Jena), exhibited 2007” creates an immersive visual experience through motorised sculpture and synchronised theatrical light play. Media historian Oliver Grau’s statement that “every epoch uses whatever means available to create maximum illusion” summarises how artists like Piene continue to innovate multi-sensory, immersive environments. In Arts of Immersion, Sarah Kenderdine, citing Grau, explores the ways in which media art makes viewers into mobile agents and interactors, concluding that these encounters are the result of a long history of technological immersion.

As technology’s evolution allows for ever more sophisticated, realistic forms of illusion, the cultural significance of new media art also evolves. In Art In, On and About the Web, Christiane Paul looks at how the advent of internet art (or “net art”) with the invention of the web in the early 1990s shifted art from the site-specific to the global, from private to public and non-governmentally regulated. One area of web-based artistic practice enables the audience to participate in the creation of work through contributing or assembling constituent elements, blurring the boundary between creator and spectator through the use of a new, world-wide technological medium.

As we enter the “post-digital” age, where digital tools are deeply integrated into artistic practice, our focus shifts away from technology as a discrete, separate category to a technologically composite one, as we live and work within a digitally saturated world. In Adopters of Creative Technologies, Lilia Chak and Olga Kisseleva write that “art has always been at the forefront of the processes that determine the development vector of society”. At this forefront, they challenge how to envision the role of technology, art and science in the complex relationship between humans and non-humans.

New media art is speculative, forward-thinking. A movement always at the forefront, with its unorthodox approaches, often unfamiliar mediums and bold outcomes, it encourages us to consider new horizons in approaching the current cultural moment and those to come.

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For full access to the new collection Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art on the Bloomsbury Visual Arts hub, visit our Librarians page for information on trials and purchasing.

“Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” is displayed at Tate Modern until 1st June 2025.