Suddenly, museums are in a rush to canonize the beginnings of digital art.

This has resulted in a welcome fleet of survey shows and hefty catalogs; each expounds on aspects of highly experimental practices that took place at the very margins of an art world that was, at that time, much more interested in abstraction or conceptualism. Among these is “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern in London, currently on view through June 1, 2025. It focuses on the decades between the 1950s and the dawn of the internet in the 1990s.

Plenty of the earliest pioneers of this then-unfashionable new media have recalled how their efforts were once met with ridicule or hostility. Hungarian-French artist Vera Molnár became one of the inventors of generative art in the late 1960s when she began making algorithmic, geometric compositions using a mainframe computer and mechanical plotter held at the Sorbonne. In 2022, when she was 98, the now-late artist spoke of how these works left her peers “scandalized” and that she “had dehumanized art.”

Two decades later, Palestinian-American painter Samia Halaby also struggled to find much of a willing audience for her first forays into computer-generated, animated compositions, this time made on an Amiga, one of the earliest personal computers. The pieces were considered to be something of a fun novelty.

“I showed them to a friend and we both giggled at them,” she said earlier this year. “I still giggle sometimes. It was so surprising then to see this computer suddenly show us a whole world of color and shapes that were dinging and zinging about and then close [the window] and [it] go back to its dull existence.”

“Electric Dreams” is one of the most important shows to re-evaluate the significance of works like Molnar’s and Halaby’s. While much mainstream art during this period remained inward-looking and self-referential, early digital artists realized instead that the fast-paced electronic and digital advancements being embraced by wider society were, far from being irrelevant, a highly fertile ground for artistic innovation.

Differing considerably from the organic world, these new systems had innate characteristics that provided previously unexplored avenues for creativity. As “Electric Dreams” shows, this led to very wide-ranging discoveries.

Here are our picks for the five most important breakthroughs, organized according to the technology that enabled them.

Lighting

Photograph by Kiyoji Otsuji of artist Atsuko Tanaka wearing her Electric Dress at the 2nd Gutai Exhibition in 1956. Photo: © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, courtesy of YOK.

One of the most basic technological advancements to be adopted by artists is that of artificial lighting, and “Electric Dreams” both begins and ends by focusing on seminal light pieces by Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka and American artist Liliane Lijn, respectively. At the entrance, visitors are shown archival photographs that document Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1956), a wearable costume made of colorfully painted Edison and tubular incandescent bulbs that could flash on cue thanks to a switching device invented by the artist. She had been inspired by the captivating dazzle of city lights in Osaka, Japan, and, being an amateur electrician, willingly took on considerable risks to recreate these effects on her own body. That the dress is both menacing and mesmerizing seems to reflect an uneasy relationship with the rapidly modernizing effects of postwar globalization.

Kineticism

David Medalla, Sand Machine Bahag-Hari Trance 1 (1963-2015). Photo: © David Medalla, © Tate.

Though Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely is rightly the name that springs to mind when thinking of kinetic art, a charming piece by Filipino, London-based artist David Medalla steals the show at “Electric Dreams.” The rather janky-looking contraption from 1964 uses a central rotating post to drag a beaded wire around the sandpit at its base, creating endless circular patterns. Its makeshift quality means the dangling beads create imperfect and unpredictable rings each time, inviting an element of randomness that allows the work to take on a life of its own, separate from the predetermined wishes of its creator.

Randomness

Hiroshi Kawano, KD 29 – Artificial Mondrian (1969). Photo: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, © Hiroshi Kawano.

The use of randomness became a staple element of creative programming, allowing artists to create systems from a mix of rules and planned randomness that would generate endless variations on their chosen composition. Some of the best-known practitioners are Molnar, A. Michael Noll, Frieder Nake, and Georg Nees, but “Electric Dreams” also spotlights contributions to the field of computer art made by Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kawano. Like many of his peers, he worked with “pseudo-random” number generators to create abstract designs from geometric shapes. Their characteristics and arrangement were decided according to parameters specifying a range of possible numbers, dimensions, or orientations, but the rest was left to chance. In 1964, some of these works were published in the Japanese IBM Review.

Telecommunication

Eduardo Kac, Horny (1985). Photo: © Eduardo Kac, lent by the Tate Americas Foundation.

The Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac is best known for his work with biotechnology, but in the 1980s he experimented with interactive holography, robotics, and telecommunications. Three works from this latter category are included in “Electric Dreams.” They make use of the Minitel system, a precursor to the internet, that allowed users to communicate and share information via phone lines that could be accessed by remote terminals. Kac used them to create animated poems and these works play with moving compositions and shifting typographies to reveal new meaning in the words. They are displayed at Tate Modern on restored vintage hardware and software.

“This network existed before the web and does not exist any longer,” Kac said in 2022. “And that idea alone is interesting: the idea of the birth and death of networks. And what it means to artworks that are made in and for these networks that no longer exist.”

Interactivity

Installation view of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Liquid Views (1992) in “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern. Photo: Lucy Green, © Tate, © Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss.

Though V.R. headsets are not a surprising sight in galleries these days, that was certainly not the case in the early 1990s when German artist Monika Fleischmann began working with architect Wolfgang Strauss and computer scientist Christian-A. Bohn to produce some impressively advanced works using nascent technologies. These include the virtual reality installation Home of the Brain (1989-90), which was staggeringly ahead of its time, and Liquid Views – Narcissus’ Digital Reflections (1992), a touch screen interactive game included in “Electric Dreams.” Visitors hovering over the screen can see their reflection distorted by a digital pool of water that responds to their touch by rippling.

“It depicts the encounter of the self with a shadowy virtual doppelganger as a metaphor for the internet and predicts the emergence of the second self as a selfie data body,” the artists explained in the exhibition catalog.

“Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” is at Tate Modern in London until June 1, 2025.