Dreaming of art and technology at Tate Modern

Tate Modern is opening an exhibition focusing on the visionary artists whose innovative experiments laid the foundations of digital art. Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet explores how artists used machines and algorithms to create mesmerising art between the 1950s and the early 1990s.

Many of the 150 works that will be on display in Electric Dreams will be appearing for the first time in the UK. From psychedelic installations to primitive visual experiments conducted on home computers and video synthesizers, each piece will provide insight into how visual artists played with new technologies to push the envelope of cultural horizons and conjure up the world of tomorrow that we live in today.

A standout piece that greets visitors is Atsuko Tanaka's Electric Dress (1956), made of light bulbs, transistors and cathode-ray tubes. Intended as a wearable work of art, Electric Dress embodies the inherent dangers and boundless potential that postwar technologies contained. The piece can also be seen as an early forerunner of digital fashion. The moving projections of Carlos Cruz-Diez's Chromointerferent Environment enmesh us in a gossamer lattice of threads, challenging our notion of color and space. Brion Gysin's Dreamachine projects kaleidoscopic patterns that pull viewers into an oneiric trance.

Installations are interspersed with a series of rooms that bring together artists from key historic exhibitions, emphasizing the common thread of abstraction, kineticism, perception, information theory and cybernetics that binds them. The exhibition is completed by some of the earliest artistic forays into virtual reality, including Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss's Liquid Views (1992), a touchscreen that reflects images like a pool of digital water.

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet opens on November 28. For more about this and other upcoming events at Tate Modern, visit their site.