Electric Dreams: a 'nerd's nirvana' at Tate Modern

Atsuko Tanaka's 'potentially lethal' dress 'made of neon tubes and industrial light bulbs'

(Image credit: Tate)

"We are living in an age of geeks", and Tate Modern's "Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet" is an exhibition that would delight "our techie overlords in Silicon Valley", said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph.

It is "a nerd's nirvana of experimental artworks", filled with "flashing lights", "intermittent beeps" and "curious machines". The show's premise is "simple, smart, and – yes – electrifying": it is a survey of art inspired by science and engineering from the end of the Second World War to the emergence of the internet in the early 1990s, featuring dozens of works by more than 70 artists from around the world who grappled with the implications of technology.

The exhibits on display run the gamut from kinetic art (with automated moving parts) to psychedelic light shows to painted optical illusions to pieces created with early PC technology. And while much of this once-cutting-edge art now seems "as up-to-date as a Romanesque corbel", there is often genuine beauty to it. It makes for a thought-provoking show full of "surprising stories" and "beguiling" works.

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There's some good stuff here, said Sarah Kent on The Arts Desk. We see, for instance, how Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka responded to the neon signs lighting up postwar Osaka by creating a "potentially lethal" dress "made of neon tubes and industrial light bulbs". Particularly fascinating are a number of fragile, machine-driven sculptures created by European artists in the 1950s and 1960s, notably David Medalla's "Sand Machine" – a "deliberately wonky contraption" that propels a string of beads across a bed of white sand, generating a "magical poetry". Yet if "you believe art should be an expression of what it means to be human", this is not the show for you. Much here feels cold, academic and sometimes plain boring. A case in point is a "smoothly anonymous" computer-generated replica of a Mondrian painting conceived by Hiroshi Kawano in 1969. It is a "pointless exercise" bereft of "originality or effort".

On the contrary, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, this show offers "a poignant and often beautiful vision of human creativity engaging with machines". There are eye-catching and oddly "moving" exhibits at every turn. "Wonderful contraptions, often involving no more than tin cans and electricity, wobble and vibrate. Screens shudder with static. Black-and-white op art paintings revolve like the spiralling credits to Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'." One of the show's stars, the "marvellous" American artist Liliane Lijn, presents a "gorgeous miniature theatre", with "silver metal curtains across which lights flicker in random patterns, like voiceless and invisible actors". This is an "enthralling" display which, in contrast to the "dross" produced so far by AI, is almost uniformly "innocent, idealistic, absorbing and highly intelligent".