One of Tate Modern’s most exciting exhibitions of 2024 isn’t focussed on a single artist.
It is in fact a show all about how machines began to transform art in the 20th century just like they transformed every other aspect of life.
Electric Dreams — which will open to the public in November 2024 — will explore how artists have used machines and algorithms to create mesmerising and mind-bending art between the 1950s and 1980s.
In a hugely bold promise, Tate says it'll be one of their most ambitious exhibitions to date.
It'll also be Tate Modern’s final art exhibition of the year. It'll celebrate the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works.
It’ll bring together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Visitors will be able to experience the psychedelic environments these artists created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes.
And there’ll be work showing how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.
It’ll be chance to go back to the future — a look back at how artists imagined the visual language of the future. A future many of us are now living.
So far, that’s all we know about the show. No details on specific artworks or artists have been revealed. And we don’t yet know how much tickets will be, or when they will go on sale.
But for now it’s worth marking your diaries to know that in autumn 2024, Tate are promising a blockbuster show combining art, technology and the radical way life has been transformed in such a short period.
Electric Dreams opens at Tate Modern on 28 November 2024 and runs until 1 June 2025. Tate Members will get in free.