Installation view of Samia Halaby After the Green and After the Black Dune 2024 at Outernet London, 14 November 2024 – 2 February 2025 © Samia Halaby. Photo © Tate. All rights reserved.

How will current Internet-inspired art look in fifty years’ time? Tate Modern provides a potentially equivalent opportunity to explore 20th century artists’ employment of technologies that were novel to them. ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’ (to 1 June, 2025) brings together 70 international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. It includes characteristic work by two artists who have been prominently featured in Seisma: Takis, who worked with electro-magnetic forces to make visible the energy fields that surround us (‘Magnetic Attractions’, 2021); and Harold Cohen, one of the first artists to pass much of his production to a computer (‘Computer Collaborations’, 2022). Like many artists, they were constantly assessing how newly-available technologies might best facilitate their expression. Here we look at six works in the show by others who used or prefigured recent developments for art purposes – in materials, lighting, motion capture and computing.

Harold Cohen, *AARON #1 Drawing,* 1979. Tate, Purchased 2015. Photo courtesy of Harold Cohen Trust © Harold Cohen

In terms of how our everyday world looks, two of the key developments in industrial production during the twentieth century were the expanded variety of both lighting and plastics that became available. Katsuhiro Yamaguchi’s Fujitsubo (Barnacle), 1966, consists of fluorescent lights in modular units of translucent acrylic.

Fluorescent lighting emerged in the 1930’s, and was officially launched in 1941. In a fluorescent lamp – or tube – an electric current excites mercury vapour, to produce ultraviolet light that causes a phosphor coating to glow. Fluorescent lamps convert electrical energy into useful light much more efficiently than incandescent lamps, though they are less efficient (see the next work) than LED lamps. Dan Flavin (1933-1996) was from 1963 onwards the artist most associated with importing them from everyday life into art.

Katsuhiro Yamaguchi: *Fujitsubo (Barnacle)*, 1966 - acrylic, light, 84.5 x 84.5 x 21 cm. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London © Katsuhiro Yamaguchi

Polymethyl methacrylate – or PMMA, a synthetic polymer derived from the petroleum-based product methyl methacrylate, was also discovered in the early 1930’s. That led to acrylic paints, perhaps the most significant new art material of the 20th century, as well as the acrylic glass productions trademarked as Perspex (Imperial Chemical Industries, UK), Plexiglas (Röhm and Haas, Germany / USA), and Lucite (DuPont, USA) – all transparent thermoplastics that are lighter than glass and shatter-proof, albeit also less resistant to scratching. Again, commercial and domestic uses took off from the 1940’s onwards. Other plastics had been used previously for sculptural purposes. In the 1920’s, for example, Nuam Gabo (1890-1977) was already making work by cutting, bending and gluing sheets of cellulose acetate. That, however, proved unstable, and he later replaced it with Perspex or Plexiglas, mirroring industrial developments.

The Japanese artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi (1928-2018) was one of the founder members of the Experimental Workshop, initiated by the critic Shuzo Takiguchi, that ran from 1951-58. Fujitsubo (Barnacle), appropriately given the subject, doesn’t have the movement or instability that Yamaguchi often employed as a means of emphasising the role of the viewer. It also unusual among his works in using recent technologies to arrive at a version of natural, organic form – the cone shapes typical of the order Balanomorpha, commonly known as acorn barnacles. The addition of light might seem ironic – surely barnacles cannot see? Perhaps not as we understand it, but they do have three photoreceptors, or ocelli, that detect light and dark. That can be confirmed by observing how they close up if a sudden change in light levels occurs.

Tatsuo Miyajima, *Lattice B*, 1990 and *Opposite Circle*, 1991 installation view in *Electric Dreams,* Tate Modern, 2024. *Opposite Circle,* 1991 - 30 light emitting diodes units, 3 transformers and aluminium panel, displayed: 3.5 × 350 × 885 cm © Tatsuo Miyajima. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green)

It had been known since the early sixties that the movement of electrons in a semiconductor can have the side-effect of producing light (be it infrared, visible or UV). However, it was not until the 1970’s that the light-emitting diode (LED) that exploits such transduction became commercially viable. LEDs bring several advantages over incandescent light sources. They are up to 90% more efficient, mainly because energy is not wasted in producing heat instead of light. They have a longer lifetime – they don't have filaments that burn out, and so last just as long as a standard transistor. They are more physically robust, and facilitate faster switching. In summary you can generate the 750-900 lumens of a 60-watt incandescent bulb using only 6-8 watts of an LED bulb; and the LED bulb can last up to 25,000 hours, against 1,200 hours for the incandescent bulb. Fluorescent lamps get only part of the way there, with a projected lifespan of 10,000 hours, and 14-15 watts needed to replicate the lumens of a 60-watt incandescent bulb. LEDs, then, proved ideal for numerical displays such as on digital clocks.

Tatsuo Miyajima came from a performance background to make his first LED counter in 1988, and that has formed the basis for most of his subsequent work, which might be described as metaphysically-infected performative sculpture. His ‘counter gadgets’ embody constant movement and change through colourful ever-changing numeric progressions from 1 through to 9 and back again – Miyajima avoids ‘0’: instead, a pause appears, signalling the space of death before life restarts at ‘1’. His colour choices have reflected the development of LED technology, as materials were discovered that have the right qualities and produce different wavelengths of photons. Only red and green were available commercially when he began, but blue followed in 1995, soon followed by white – achieved through a combination of red, green and blue electroluminescence – and each colour has its cultural meanings, allowing those to be brought into the work.

For Miyajima’s work, Opposite Circle, 1991, the LED gadgets form a three-metre ring that appears to hover a few centimetres above the floor. This work is one of five circles originally envisaged as representing the continents. In Miyajima’s own words: ‘People of different races and different languages live there. However, from a bird's eye view, the differences between them form a harmony like a beautiful symphony.’ Even within the one circle, the 20 units contain an internal conversation, as two sets of ten ‘gadgets’ are connected only to each other. Moreover, expanding even further outwards, Opposite Circle is part of the ‘133651’ series: that number refers to the possible combinations of LED gadgets and speeds in such a set-up, so that – says Miyajima – they symbolise ‘the structure of the entire universe, where the parts become a set and that set is related to other sets, creating a whole’. He has also pointed out that ‘In the same way that there are billions of stars in the solar system, one person is made up of billions of cells’. The series will not end until all of 133,651 options have been created: that is in line with the Buddhist-inspired guiding principles to which Miyajima adheres: ‘keep changing’, ‘connect with everything’ and ‘continue forever’. He uses the LED technology not for itself, but as the best means of visually representing his ideas and visions, saying that ‘It is not about creating a beautiful image or system, it is more about creating an inner spiritual quality in the world. My idea of the future is not a pictorial image but a spiritual concept’.

Robert Mallary: Quad III, 1969 – Plywood, metal and resin on a plywood base, 213 × 37 × 34 cm. Shown courtesy the artist © Robert Mallary.

Seeing that Quad III, 1969, by Robert Mallary is computer-generated, one might take it to be an early example of 3D printing. That uses computer-aided design to create three-dimensional objects through an additive layering method: just as the ink in printed text sits marginally proud of the page, the computer design stage of 3D printing turns a whole object into thousands of tiny little slices, then makes it from the bottom-up, slice by slice. 3D printing, however, wasn’t formulated until the 1980’s – and didn’t become widespread until this century. Ahead of that, Robert Mallary made some of the first computer-assisted sculptural forms. He used the TRAN2 programme that he himself wrote in FORTRAN to generate a vertical sequence of 48 forms, which he then printed and used as patterns to cut the plywood slices that make up the sculpture. The sections were layered upon each other over a metal rod, glued together, sanded to form a smooth surface and laminated. Thus, the same principles as 3D printing were more laboriously applied.

Mallary, while Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst 1967-96, concentrated on the computer’s potential as an artistic tool, exploiting the availability of an IBM 1130 on campus. His ‘Quad’ series from 1968-9 was fabricated from plastic, plywood, and marble in turn, each with a different shape determined by the programme used to create it. As a whole, then, the series explores material properties, as well as the way in which seemingly minor modifications to computer algorithms can yield differences in contour and form. Quad III itself has a monumental vorticity, especially as dramatised by shadows in the Tate’s presentation.

For fifty years – in a career which is becoming increasingly recognised – Rebecca Allen has been exploring computers as the potential means of inventing a new art form. She has made virtual and augmented reality installations, experimental video, and large-scale performances – bringing together the worlds of fine art, performing arts, pop culture and technological research. As she put it in 1982, ‘computers are too important to be left solely to scientists – you need to have people from psychology and education and art and music to be able to work on these machines and help define the machine’s personality’. That list included women, of course, but at a time when you had to be a professional to access computer tools, computing itself was seen as a male profession. In her words: ‘The feminine had to be really strong for me because I knew it was so rare and missing. I was into sensuality and boldness because so often the female body was the subject of male-created art but with a very different purpose from the female side. Right away, the female body was important to me in my animation work because it wasn't so much the form of the body – it was the movement. I was studying human motion, non-verbal communication and how our emotions define our behaviours.’

In her 1982 work, STEPS, Allen animates a dancer, presented with various levels of abstraction, and then turns the movement into an illusion of dancing abstract forms – a transition inspired by the geometrically extravagant costumes designed by Oskar Schlemmer for the Bauhaus Theatre in the 1930’s. Allen is credited as one of the co-inventors of modern motion capture, but this film was made ten years ahead of that. Rather, in a process closer to the old style of ‘puppet animation’, she positioned each joint of the body into key-frame positions in a virtual 3-dimensional space, and the computer would help create the 3-dimensional transitions between keyframes. The second part, as Allen explains, ‘uses 3D platonic geometric forms that, when in motion, appear as abstractions of human dancing forms. Using virtual geometric forms, I could make them move to appear as dancing forms in a way that was fundamentally human’.

Her aim, working with some of the top inventors and developers of computer graphics and animation software, was ‘to figure out how to animate the virtual female form in three-dimensions and bring her to life, beginning with her taking a first step. I also wanted to insert a human presence, a human body, and particularly a female presence metaphorically and literally into the computer. The title, STEPS, refers to dance steps and the many steps required to finally make these forms dance.’ Allen was among the first to use computers for human motion simulation and motion capture. The technology was relatively crude at the time. For example, she has explained, ‘at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab in New York we were working on a tool to create 3D software. We had this interface with a joystick, which was somewhat innovative. But joysticks are big devices and not very precise. My work, capturing human motion, was considered one of the hardest technical problems back then. Just getting figures to move and rotate the right way was extremely challenging. I went to a military supply place for airplanes where they had these small, high-precision joysticks. You could move them with subtle little touches. This difference between a big joystick, where you couldn't be very subtle, and this little thing meant I could be much more precise.’

The ability to digitally capture of the movement of an object or person emerged from a combination of animation techniques and computer technology: the rotoscoping process of tracing over live-action footage to create animation (the basis of much 1930’s Disney footage); the invention in 1959 of the first bodysuit with potentiometers – adjustable resistors – to record actors' movements; and motion capture, using cameras and markers to track movement. Such markers might be mechanical (the performer wears an exoskeleton that tracks their movement – rather cumbersome), magnetic (the performer wears sensors that measure signals from a low-frequency magnetic source), optical (the performer wears a suit with ball-shaped markers or LED lights marking different points of the body) or inertial (special sensors on the performer take measurements to record their own movement, which can be combined to show overall movement). It wasn’t until the early 1990’s that computerisation enabled those options to arrive at the modern manner of motion capture.

US-based Samia Halaby was 12 when her family were among the 750,000 Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. That experience lies behind this example of what she called ‘abstract paintings in motion with sound’. In Tate’s words: ‘Geometric and angular shapes fill the screen from side to side. Sonic elements emphasise their movement as they expand and contract. Halaby said she made this work in honour of her commitment to the land of Palestine. The shifting geometric shapes resemble changing geographical territories, evoking the themes of land occupation and fragmentation that mark her personal history.’

So there is content behind the language of geometric abstraction. And behind that language lie inspirations such as Islamic architecture and Arabic calligraphy – plus mid-1980’s computing. Believing that a contemporary painter should use contemporary technology, Halaby bought an Amiga 1000, choosing that for the 12-bit colour palette that enabled it to display 4,096 colours at a time when PC’s were restricted to 16. It’s an illustration of IT development since the mid-80’s that 16.4 million colours is now standard. Similarly, the Amiga had 256k of the Random Access Memory (RAM) that temporarily stores the data that the Central Processing Unit (CPU) needs to access quickly. Everyday laptops now have 8 billion bytes (or 8GB) – and serious gamers tend to employ 32GB, professional users up to 64GB (1GB of RAM can contain, for example, about 700,000 pages of text).

Installation view of Samia Halaby *Tottenham Court Road* 2024 at Outernet London, 14 November 2024 – 2 February 2025 © Samia Halaby. Photo © Tate. All rights reserved.

Halaby learnt how to code in BASIC and C languages, first exhibiting her computer works in 1988. She has carried on painting in the more traditional manner, seeing the activities as similar: ‘when I make a mark, I am using a brush … When I do it through the computer, I allow the command I am using to make the mark. It’s just different kinds of brushes … When painting with a brush … I always put a mark or two and then back up to check the results’. Similarly, when using the computer, ‘I add a few commands, I compile and link the program, I run it, and I see if I like it. If not, I go back and change it.’

The computer brought new elements to Halaby’s painting, in particular ‘the digital surface has a memory … so that things can move and come back, shapes can expand and contract’ and ‘it is luminous, a source of light, and I was saying “Wow, my paintings are dull compared to the screen!” … so it just put me in a whole different framework … instead of trying to capture a single moment in the process, I'm allowing the painting to experience the process and stop it at the moment where I thought it was beautiful – and then maybe the process could combine it with something else.’

Vladimir Bonačić: *GF.E 16 – NS*, 1969. Custom-made hardware (Galois field generator), aluminium, analogue and digital electronics, 256 glow lamps — object: 36 x 36 x 12 cm. © Vladimir Bonačić. Photo © Paul Carey-Kent. All rights reserved.

While working in Zagreb as a cybernetics researcher in the late 1960’s, Vladimir Bonačić started to make art giving visual form to Galois fields. Evariste Galois (1811-32) was only 20 years when he was killed in a duel, probably linked to a broken love affair. By then, he had already determined a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby dealing with a problem that had been open for 350 years; and been imprisoned for his republican actions after the crowning of Louis Philippe as king following the French Revolution of 1830. The night before his death, fearing the duel’s outcome, he documented his mathematical findings, including the outline of what became group theory. At the core of that the concept of a Galois Field – not infinite, like the field of real numbers, but a finite field, meaning that the way it behaves depends on how we formulate it. The elements of such a field form a set on which arithmetical operations satisfy rules such that the result of any operation performed within the set will also be an element of the set. Such fields have many uses beyond abstract algebra, for example in cryptography, error correction and quantum mechanics. Indeed, the computer-driving Binary System, of 0 and 1, is also the simplest Galois field.

So that’s the ‘GF’ in Bonačić’s GF.E 16 – NS. What you actually see are 256 glowlamps turning on and off through the action of a computer programme. Bonačić didn’t want that to be random – and, therefore meaningless – so he used the Galois Field to generate what he termed ‘pseudo-random structures’. That allowed the viewer to visualise – even if they didn’t understand – otherwise imperceptible mathematical laws. Rather, perhaps, as we see the world without fully understanding the laws that drive it. In Bonačić’s own words: ‘The exploration of dematerialized transcendental processes, determined by their own hidden variables, has timeless and spaceless qualities. This exploration is the focal point of interest as far as cybernetic art is concerned.’ He considered the result to be a 'dynamic object', a term referring to ‘the impregnable unity that is established between the computer system and the work of art’.

Perhaps that’s what electric dreams should be about: an impregnable unity between technology and art.

Electric Dreams runs to 1 June 2025 at Tate Modern, London. It includes works by: Rebecca Allen, Marina Apollonio, Manuel Barbadillo, Alberto Biasi, Vladimir Bonačić, Davide Boriani, Martha Boto, Pol Bury, Harold Cohen, Analivia Cordeiro, Waldemar Cordeiro, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Charles Csuri, Computer Technique Group, Dadamaino, Atul Desai, Lucia Di Luciano, Ivan Dryer and Elsa Garmire, E.A.T., Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Herbert W. Franke, Brion Gysin, Samia Halaby, Desmond Paul Henry, Hervé Huitric and Monique Nahas, Edward Ihnatowicz, Eduardo Kac, Hiroshi Kawano, Ben Laposky, Julio Le Parc, Ruth Leavitt, Liliane Lijn, Heinz Mack, Robert Mallary, Mary Martin, Almir Mavignier, Gustav Metzger, David Medalla, Tatsuo Miyajima, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, François Morellet, Tomislav Mikulić, Fujiko Nakaya, FriederNake, Georg Nees, Akbar Padamsee, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, Ivan Picelj, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, Paolo Scheggi, Lillian F. Schwartz, Sonia Landy Sheridan, Aleksandar Srnec, Jesús Rafael Soto, Vera Spencer, Takis, Atsuko Tanaka, Jean Tinguely, Franciszka Themerson, Suzanne Treister, Wen-Ying Tsai, Grazia Varisco, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, Miguel Ángel Vidal, Nanda Vigo, Stephen Willats, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Edward Zajec.

SEISMA AT TATE MODERN: ELECTRIC DREAMS