Into the ether

How should we talk about technology in the 21st century? In the recent past, technology referred to things: new appliances at home, new equipment at work, new ways of getting from here to there. It filled space; it wasn’t always welcomed with open arms, but at some experiential level it could be understood. Compare that with today, where if new or emerging technologies are said to have any characteristic it’s that they have no characteristic. We all know what it feels like to have a car speeding past us; we can’t say the same for the “speed” of fibre optic. We talk about virtual worlds, digital spaces; events happening as if they’re in a reality removed from our own. How did we get here?

The Tate’s latest exhibition, “Electric Dreams”, about art and technology before the advent of the internet, offers us a glimpse at how technology went down this path of “dematerialisation” – from something physical to ethereal, from the machine to the cloud. Stretching from the 1950s through to the 1990s, it captures a unique period that saw developments in cybernetics, electronics, algorithmic processing and, most crucially of all, the arrival of the personal computer – all of which shape how we understand “technology” today.

Just as Le Corbusier decades earlier saw the automobile as not just a mode of transport but a symbol of modernity, artists in the latter half of the 20th century were keen to interrogate what these emerging technologies represented for the societies that used them. With electrical equipment becoming smaller and more accessible to the general population – such as photocopiers, LEDs and, later on, the Amiga series of computers – they could also shape their critiques of technology in technology’s own idiom.

In some of the earliest works on display, this critique is very much marked out by its sheer physical presence: big metal boxes, spinning dials and clicking parts; light refracted through glass prisms and shiny silver sheets; things that move, things that make a noise. In 1956, Atsuko Tanaka was prompted to make “Electric Dress” after spotting a broken pharmaceutical sign at Osaka Station. The result, a garment made from flashing Edison and incandescent bulbs that covers her from head to toe, is brash and ostentatious – and yet the idea that electrical devices are something we can carry around isn’t so unusual nowadays.

Brion Gysin’s “Dreamachine”, from 1962, is likewise a simple but affecting contraption: a cylinder with leaf-shaped holes spins around a single bulb, throwing patterns of light across every surface. We are invited to sit around this machine with our eyes closed and watch as the light flutters across the insides of our eyelids. Much of the time there is a sense here of artists trying to create spaces in which we cannot deny technology’s intervention into the ordinary order of things; its impact on the world is literal and direct, and in many respects embraced.

As might be expected, it’s when we reach the computer-based works dating from the mid 1960s onwards that the “thinginess” of technological art becomes much less keenly felt. In 1965 Frieder Nake, a computer scientist based in Stuttgart, attached a SEL ER65 computer to an automatic plotter – a kind of printer that draws images from inputted commands – to create small, tightly executed abstractions of tessellating grids of colour, based on number sequences. Just over a decade later, the British-born artist Harold Cohen devised his own computer programme, “AARON”, which he also set to work drawing with a plotter. Unlike Nake, however, Cohen was much more interested in how a machine might work both as freely as possible and in creative tandem with a human counterpart. AARON’s parameters and rules were elaborate, allowing it to make line drawings that appeared as freeform as possible. Later, Cohen himself would fill in the drawings with colour.

One collaborative AARON drawing on show at “Electric Dreams” is a giant mural of sketchy, blotchy shapes that wouldn’t look out of place in an exhibition of abstract art by the likes of Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró. The final work is still more or less a large drawing that reveals nothing of its automated origins, at least not without a concerted peek behind the scenes. The inconspicuousness of technology in these works was often deliberate on the artists’ part, so as to broker questions about the nature of intelligence and creativity. “I want the work to look as if it has been made by an intelligence,” Cohen remarked in 1996, “but it doesn’t have to be a human intelligence.” Who says only humans can make meaningful art?

By the time we get to the end of the exhibition, this allegorical “disappearing act” is taken a step further in “Liquid View”, a 1992 installation by Wolfgang Strauss and Monika Fleischmann. A screen with a digitised pool reflects our own image back at us, in an allusion to Narcissus; touching the screen distorts our reflection in ripples of fake water. It’s a message about the onset of the internet age, in which technology splits reality between this world and a virtual one, held together only by our self-image. In another sense it’s a premonition about artificial intelligence, at least if we are to look at AI as the logical endpoint of dematerialisation. Soon enough, the shroud will cover everything; there will be no divide to mediate between the virtual and real worlds. The technology people use will be indistinguishable from the people who use it.

It’s perhaps because we’re fast approaching this juncture that some of the issues raised by artists in “Electric Dreams” – about automation and what it means to “live” with technology – have found renewed relevance. For much of this current century, debates about technology have centred on what Val Ravaglia, one of the show’s curators, calls the “social aspects of computing” – that is, its role as a means of communication and spreading knowledge. “As long as everyone feels comfortable using electronics to communicate with other human beings, knowing that they definitely are other human beings, the machine disappears,” she tells me. This is in marked contrast with the past, where “there were a lot of people who didn’t have a computer at home and didn’t trust the idea of living with these machines.” AI, however, has shifted the dial back to that place of discomfort. Once again, the implications of mass technology, in the here and now of the real world, are worrying us, as they did 80 years ago.

This all being said, Ravaglia stresses that by and large technology’s dematerialisation has always been overstated, sometimes even by artists. Technology, rooted in hardware and run on enormous amounts of energy, has always existed in the material world. To suggest otherwise is to ignore its very real ecological consequences, some of which are still not fully understood. Further, the idea that there exists a “parallel reality that is not bound to physical restrictions” is and always has been “pure theory”, she says. This also holds true for art, where even “process-oriented artists” who claimed their practice “didn’t need a physical manifestation” still wound up giving their work some kind of form, in order for us to make sense of it – “even if it was just painted words or stickers on a wall, or printouts of paper”. Yet this point goes beyond talk of simple practicality; it also, at least for Ravaglia, gets right to the heart of what art is supposed to be in the first place: “a type of activity that focuses on human senses, which are bound to bodily experience”. If art cannot make the intangible tangible, if it fails to stir our physical senses, can we even plausibly call it art?

So to think of technology’s current state as immaterial is unhelpful at best or, worse – what with its accelerating environmental impact – pernicious. All the same, it’s hard to deny that our current technological landscape, not to mention the pace of technological change, makes the world feel that much more fragile. A study by the Pew Research Center last year found that more than a third of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 have disappeared. Another report from November found that two million scholarly articles were missing from digital archives. Insurance firm Beazley found that more than a quarter of global businesses they surveyed said technological obsolescence was the biggest threat to their digital operations. The faster technology develops, it seems, the harder it is becoming for us to keep up with the past.

This also holds true for an exhibition like “Electric Dreams”. “Every year, nay, every day, becomes a little bit harder to put on this exhibition,” Ravaglia says. She cites one simple example of Cathode Ray Tube monitors, used in several of the works on display. CRTs are no longer manufactured. (Apparently, somebody on eBay is buying up all the extant ones in hopes of cashing in.) There will come a day when galleries will have to decide whether they make and repair their own bespoke CRTs, at immense cost, or display the works shorn of their original context. Ravagli says some works are capable of being updated; swapping old bulbs for LEDs, for instance, if the point of the work is about light rather than the source of that light. Others, however, might lose their power and meaning if they become too removed, especially if an artist’s message is inextricably tied to its given medium.

It’s strange to think that, just because of the technologies they are made from, some art from the recent past may well disappear far sooner than paintings and sculptures that predate them by centuries. Without continued and concerted documentation and adaptation, it seems all but inevitable that the gaps in our cultural memory will yawn wider.

But then again, the very idea that great art is somehow special in that regard – a human achievement unique by dint of being everlasting, a testament to the relentless march of artistic progress – is in itself just another carefully constructed illusion. “Nothing is permanent,” Ravaglia says; all art decays. At any given time, the greatest works of art in the world are fading away piece by piece. And that’s what it really means to live in a material world: that one day, sooner or later, whether we like it or not, we all disappear into the ether.

“Electric Dreams” is at the Tate until 1 June 2025. This article is from New Humanist’s Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.