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Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet

Tate Modern

London, UK

November 28, 2024 – June 1, 2025

View exhibition at tate.org.uk

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet - Tate Modern - Exhibitions - PPOW

Suzanne Treister
Fictional Videogame Stills/Are You Dreaming?, 1991-2

From the birth of op art to the dawn of the internet age, artists found new ways to engage the senses and play with our perception. Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works.

This major exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.

One of Tate Modern’s most ambitious exhibitions to date, Electric Dreams offers visitors a rare chance to experience incredible works of vintage tech art in action – a look back at how artists imagined the visual language of the future.

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet - Tate Modern - Exhibitions - PPOW

Portrait of the Artist. Photo © Tate (Josh Croll)

Suzanne Treister (b. 1958) has been a pioneer in digital, new media, and web-based media art since the late-1980s. Utilizing various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolor, Treister has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military, or paranormal. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity. Treister studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982) and currently lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include solo and group shows at the ICA London, UK; 10th Shanghai Biennale, China; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), the Netherlands; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; Raven Row, London, UK; Secession, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Contemporary Art (CAPC) Bordeaux, France; and Annely Juda Fine Art, London, UK. Treister’s work is held in private and public collections including Tate Britain, London, UK; Science Museum, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, Frances; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria. Treister's work, HFT The Gardener (2015), was recently on view as part of Spiritual Technology at the High Line, New York, NY. Her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Kabbalistic Futurism, was on view September 8 - October 21, 2023. The RYDER, Madrid, Spain, hosted her solo exhibition, From Fictional Videogames to Hypothetical Museums of the Future, in Fall 2024.