Exhibition explores how artists used machines and algorithms before the internet

An exhibition at London’s Tate Modern examines how artists used machines and algorithms to create work in the pre-internet age. Spanning the period from the postwar boom of the 1950s to the 1990s, with the World Wide Web about to enter millions of homes, Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet is full of “coursing, pulsing, propulsive, seductive energies,” The New York Times wrote.

From mathematically generated psychedelic landscapes to radical artists using early home computers to imagine the future, the exhibition gestures both to possible utopias as well as tech’s dark underbelly, The Times wrote, citing an early media theorist’s caution that “we look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backward into the future.”