Is AI a threat to the arts ? New exhibition shows the decades-long relationship between artists and technology

Artists have used machines and algorithms to create art for decades, so is AI really a threat ?

A new exhibition at the Tate Modern will look into the long standing and often controversial relationship between artists and technology dating back to the 1950s.

Electric Dreams, which opens at the Bankside venue on November 28, will include more than 150 works and feature 70 artists from around the world.

Electric Dreams starts in the 1950s and spans the “pre-internet” age, when artists were already consumed with concerns about technology, how it would be used and by whom.

Artists from across Asia, Europe and the Americas responded to the growing presence of technology by finding new ways to work with machines – often reclaiming them from the military and corporate interests that drove their evolution. 

Gutai group member, Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress from 1957 is one of the oldest pieces in Electric Dreams – a testament to how Japanese artists were prepared to take risks and pioneer new styles.

Photographs documenting the iconic dress will be shown alongside her stunning circuit-like drawings

Never seen in Britain before, German artist Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) fills a dark room with beams of light creating a ‘ballet’ of ‘sculptures’, while Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz Diez’s Chromointerferent Environment 1974-2009 uses moving projections to create a lattice of coloured lines that challenges perceptions of colour and space. 

London’s own groundbreaking ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ exhibition held at the ICA in 1968 will be explored alongside US artist Harold Cohen’s 1979 painting based on drawings generated by his software AARON – an early precursor of today’s art-making AIs. 

Art made on early home computers will include Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s kinetic paintings created after teaching herself how to code on an Amiga 1000.

Many of the artists in Electric Dreams were among the very first to adopt new digital technologies in their radical experiments. 

As with contemporary artists, these early pioneers were accused of engaging with a fad that would not last.

The exhibition paints the relationship between art and technology as something which has always been, and will always be, rather than something to be afraid of.

Pictured top: Kiyoji Otsuji, Tanaka Atsuko, Electric Dress (Picture: Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library/ Courtesy of YOK)