Electric Dreams

28 Nov 2024-1 Jun 2025

Overview

Discover how artists used machines and algorithms to create mesmerising and mind-bending art between the 1950s and 1980s

From the birth of op art to the dawn of cybernetics, artists found new ways to engage the senses and play with our perception. Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works.

This major exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.

One of Tate Modern’s most ambitious exhibitions to date, Electric Dreams offers visitors a rare chance to experience incredible works of vintage tech art in action – a look back at how artists imagined the visual language of the future.