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Val Ravaglia on Electric Dreams

Tate curator Val Ravaglia spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about their major exhibition, Electric Dreams. They explore how artists historically used technology to test its creative potential and challenge its entanglement with unsavory powers while drawing subtle parallels to contemporary culture.
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Peter Bauman: Something you wished to discuss was that some artists in Electric Dreams have a more critical understanding of on-chain culture. Looking at this space critically can highlight overlooked elements; I’m thinking of Trevor Paglen’s work on AI’s biases. Can you expand on the diversity of the artists' views of on-chain culture that you’ve chosen to exhibit at Electric Dreams?‍

‍Val Ravaglia: I can't say that the artists included in the exhibition have an overt position on on-chain art because it's a historical exhibition. The period stops before the widespread adoption of the Internet so the foundations for that technology had not been laid by the time that the exhibition ends. The majority of the artists that I've included are represented with works from before that time.

I was wary of how certain artists in the exhibition approached working with technology, mass production and automation applied to art as a way to counter the idea of scarcity that underpinned art and its market at that time. For example, New Tendencies artists were putting an emphasis on making art that was reproducible, democratic and accessible to everyone. To do that, they went down a path of applying sometimes quite rigid mathematical and scientific principles. But their primary idea was to make works that spoke to people on a perceptual level.

Artists in the earlier parts of the exhibition, especially, were engaging with the model of the multiple as a way to do the opposite of creating artificial scarcity. They were creating artworks that could have multiple copies in order for the price to be brought down, in order for the sheer concept of the unique work of art to be questioned.

There's aspects of on-chain art that put an emphasis on creating a type of artificial scarcity for digital art. That is something that goes against some of what some artists wanted to do with it. This doesn't necessarily apply to all artists that have an interest in on-chain practices.

The counterpart of my caution in allowing the exhibition to be put in a narrative that legitimizes current practices is that many of these artists probably would have been very interested in how the blockchain enables things like decentralized autonomous organizations and other, more critical aspects of the on-chain space. It's more of a question of not wanting the work of certain artists to be instrumentalized because of what I know about their declarations.
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One thing that often comes to mind, for example, is Gustav Metzger's commitment to the environmental impact of technology. I would love to be able to ask Gustav how he feels about this particular moment, because I bet that he would have an incredibly insightful perspective on the blockchain space for what it offers in terms of decentralization and distribution.

At the same time, I suspect that he would also resist the decadent amount of computational power that the blockchain requires on the grounds of his interest in the environmental impact of technology. I imagine that he would have conflicted and profound things to say about it.

‍Electric Dreams sets precedents more for the generative aspects of current digital art practices. That is definitely something that has its historical foundations in the works included in the exhibition. I can't quite say the same for on-chain practices.

‍Peter Bauman: I personally wouldn’t necessarily ascribe additional value to an artwork being on chain unless it is work that specifically engages with relevant ideas like Sarah Friend or Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. Otherwise, the on-chain element can be largely perfunctory. However, I do think it enables digital ownership, which can serve the purpose of expanding those that appreciate art.‍

‍You brought up how emerging technologies throughout history have been entangled with unsavory elements like environmental concerns and the military-industrial complex. Max Bense and Gustav Metzger attempted to position computers in art away from their military and government roots. Electric Dreams and Le Random celebrate traditions of early digital technology adoption by artists. What questions is the show posing about technology in art’s relationship with unsavory elements throughout its history?‍

‍Val Ravaglia: This is something that comes across throughout the exhibition in different ways and from different points of view. The exhibition opens with a glass display case with materials that tell a concentrated story about the relationship between art and automation.

One of the documents that I've included is an issue of PAGE, the Computer Arts Society’s newsletter, when it was edited by Gustav Metzger. He inserted as many moments of awareness as he could about the uneasy relationship between art and technology and between computation and the military-industrial complex. Whenever he had an opportunity—a little bit of blank space—he would include a cautionary text or some found illustration. One image counted the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles fired by NATO and the Soviets to that point. I wanted to dot the exhibition with these reminders of artists’ critical positions.
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It's really part of the history of the uses of technology in art that new investments in computing were only possible because of the funds of the military. Artists were painfully aware of that.

The texts and conference proceedings of the New Tendencies artists constantly bring this up. How are we going to deal with the fact that we want to oppose military power, warmongering and the use of the technologies that we're interested in for continuing war efforts?

The interesting thing in these conversations is they often theorize that it was important for artists to engage with technologies precisely because of this uncomfortable entanglement, because it was only by getting their hands dirty with that material that they were going to be able to have a say in those spaces, whereas not touching it because of the compromise would have meant leaving all conversations about technology and culture in the hands of oppressive, governmental and capitalistic powers.

This is something that I think Metzger theorized quite overtly—that artists needed to get involved. The “Zagreb Manifesto," which was co-authored by Metzger, Jonathan Benthall and Gordon Hyde, especially touches on this, saying: “There are creative people in science who feel that the man-machine problem lies at the heart of making the computer the servant of man and nature. Such people welcome the insight of the artist in this context, lest we lose sight of humanity and beauty.”
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They were calling for artists to collaborate with people from the other side of the so-called divide between the two cultures, specifically so that artists could have a seat at that table.

There's also a fairly strong Japanese presence in the exhibition. One of the first artists that we come across in Electric Dreams is Atsuko Tanaka, who was certainly very conscious of what the applications of high tech and warfare were capable of achieving in terms of destructive power. ZERO artists like Jean Tinguely or Takis were engaging directly with the materials left over from military activities. In a very practical and literal sense, they were reusing spare military parts—debris and surplus of the military-industrial complex—to make their work.
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They were commenting on the destructive uses of technology by putting it to creative uses. It was a way to offer counter-examples of creative, peaceful uses for technologies. But the tension definitely continued and different artists ended up approaching the ideas of compromise and instrumentalization in different ways. This was also the rise of the “artist-in-residence” model, with some artists eager to work with corporations in order to obtain funds and access to expensive tools. The mission of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) was precisely about expanding this model. The exhibition includes a spectrum of approaches because history—and art histories—are complex and hard to summarize.

‍Peter Bauman: What Metzger was saying about artists needing to be involved with this new technology in order to reclaim it reminds me of artists who engaged with the blockchain even before NFTs were around, like Rhea Myers and Harm van den Dorpel. Those artists, I think, would have echoed Metzger’s sentiments. You mentioned Tanaka. Is Electric Dreams in any way a reference to her iconic Electric Dress? What other insights into the show does the title reveal?‍

‍Val Ravaglia: Sadly, I can’t say that the exhibition was titled after Electric Dress. There’s ambiguity in the title.
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I keep thinking that nightmares are also dreams so a subset of Electric Dreams must be electric nightmares.

I’m also asked a lot if it's related to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is not not related to that sci-fi tradition. But really, the first thing that comes to mind is the Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder song “Together in Electric Dreams”—part of the soundtrack for the 1984 film, Electric Dreams.

The exhibition is not meant as a homage to the film nor to the song but they're both products of this time. I'm interested in using what the title suggests in a critical way, partly because the general understanding of the relationship between art and technology in these decades was absolutely techno-optimistic. There was a sense that the conversation at the time was approximately, “Technology is awesome! We're going to embrace it as a solution to humanity’s every problem and create flying cars powered by artists’ creativity.”

In reality, it was always an ambivalent relationship and—more often than not—an inherently critical one. The difference then was that the potentialities of certain technologies were still only potentialities. They had not been applied to people's everyday lives to the extent they are now. Now we have to be critical of technologies while already living in this symbiotic relationship with them.
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Often the historical distance is framed as this binary opposition of the optimism of artists at that time versus the cautionary tone of art today. I see a certain continuity. It's everyone's relationship to technology that has changed, and therefore, the way that we interpret those artworks has changed. The critical commentaries of that time are less present as cultural memories than the works themselves, with the consequence that the works are more easily misunderstood as blindly celebratory because of their shiny, techy looks.

‍Peter Bauman: How technology is viewed at a particular time can profoundly impact its relationship with art. Those artists in the '60s—like Metzger and New Tendencies—were still traumatized by World War II, nuclear scares and the beginnings of the Cold War. There was a sense that technology was an existential threat to humanity’s continuation. Today, with our relationship to technology so different, what lessons does Metzger’s view reveal?‍

‍Val Ravaglia: Metzger was speaking from the position of not just a witness to the horrors of the Second World War but literally a refugee—a Jewish child who escaped Nazi Germany and fled to the UK. With his analytical mind, he quickly connected the industrial way of thinking with the infrastructures of genocide as a consequence of industrialization mixed with intolerance and scientific racism. If there was one person in the art world that had deeply-seated reasons to be wary of the epistemological shifts brought into the twentieth century by the application of scientific and technological principles, it was Gustav Metzger.

He was a keen observer of what was happening around him in his present and what had happened in the recent past. He was very aware there needed to be critical discussion and that it was going to be a tough fight. Wasn't he 100% correct? The inherent problems are still clearly here. Warfare is still dominated by technological progress, which is still dictated by the interest of the military to develop certain tools to kill and control people.
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The fact that he still advocated for artists to engage with technology, however, in order for them to be able to have a say in that conversation was particularly prescient.

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He did also have these moments of calling for the destruction of art. So withdrawal from artistic production was one of his answers. But he kept on coming back to art and he kept coming back specifically to the intersection of technology and art.
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The most important lesson to take from Metzger’s approach is to neither fear nor revere technology—just to engage with it as a part of the human condition.

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‍Peter Bauman: That’s a wonderful takeaway. I’d love to go back to Electric Dreams. It showcases artists engaging with emerging technologies between the 1950s and the dawn of the Internet age. Why was it important to highlight the genealogy of that particular time period today?
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Val Ravaglia: Unlike an exhibition like 2016’s Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery, which looked into that genealogy but connected it to the present, I made the decision to focus on a certain historical period. The initial brief for this exhibition was to assemble an exhibition on optical and kinetic art. It was based on a touring exhibition I was also involved with called the Dynamic Eye, which looked at the historical period of the rise of kinetic art on the one hand and the engagement with optical effects and perception on the other—how the two met somewhere in the middle. It was rooted in Tate’s collection and provided an art historical framing for that period and those formal tendencies that expanded them geographically, as much as the Tate collection made possible.
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When I was given the opportunity to bring the exhibition to Tate Modern, I thought it was precisely the right time to show how that same genealogy [of opto-kinetic art] directly connects with our current understanding of generative art.

Of course, I didn't want to tell the whole story up to generative artificial intelligence the way that we have it now. There's so much language used around generative art to which I think it's important to give a historical perspective, to give art historical points of origin.
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Generative art is rooted in systems art and practices preceding the adoption of digital technologies, like Russian constructivism. It’s rooted in thinking beyond traditional media towards art forms that speak to functional technologies and object-making as well as industrial and mass production. 

There was also this interest in mathematical principles and algorithmic thinking, which was a reaction against the emphasis on the individual's artistic gesture. It was a reaction to the dominance of abstract expressionism and comparable forms that had dominated art markets in that period of time. This is partly why so many artists in the '50s and '60s were engaging with the aesthetics of machine-made objects. It’s why they were making works based on scientific principles and emerging technologies, including adopting computers as tools for art-making. The aspects of interactivity and leaving the artwork open to be completed by the audience are related to this principle too. This is a classic avant-garde mechanism: needing to find something that counters what came before as clearly as possible.
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To tell this story in the style of a Tate Modern group exhibition is a big deal.

The entire time, I was thinking that this is an exhibition that has to speak about these subjects to the widest possible public. It's not an exhibition for specialists, although I do hope that even those who have specialist knowledge of the subject will find moments of originality in the way that the story is being told. That includes the Tate Modern approach to expanding the art-historical canon as much as possible in geographic terms.

Although with this subject it's always a bit difficult because the digital divide exists. There are only so many regions that can be connected to this discourse. The rest of the world was being literally mined for materials to make the technologies that the global north was using for taking advantage of that technological progress. Although there were artists thinking through scientific principles in the countries that were extracted from, in this exhibition I only had space for a selection of connected narratives. I’d love to have a chance to look at these other stories too one day—a historical exhibition on cosmotechnics. I’m a huge fan of Yuk Hui’s writings.

But this story stops short of just before the rise of Net Art as a chapter that in many ways is much closer to today's understanding of digital art spaces because we're still in the age of the Internet. Not to say that it's the same now as it was in the '90s, of course. I couldn't do it justice by including only a few early Net Art works but not expanding on what that meant or what shift that generated. I needed to put the end bracket for the exhibition somewhere in the twentieth century and reckoned it should be before the widespread adoption of the Internet.

I thought it would be most useful for the exhibition to focus on the relationship between art and offline technology—to keep the emphasis on automation and computing before the social dimension of the Internet added a different layer to the way in which people understood the role of digital devices as a cultural force. I was more interested in remaining within a timeframe where computers were still seen as these somewhat alien advanced technologies, where interacting with machines still required a radical mental or epistemological shift. You knew that you were shifting from real life to machine life. It was a time before computers and portable devices were so seamlessly integrated with our everyday lives.

That's partly because the current wave of artificial intelligence and the discourse around it have brought back a certain feeling of alienation from digital technologies.

‍Peter Bauman: That choice to include the historical gap reverberates what LACMA did recently with Coded, which ended in 1982, and MoMA did with Thinking Machines, ending in 1989. What is the challenge for institutions to explicitly link these historical exhibitions to the present?‍

‍Val Ravaglia: I can’t speak for other institutions but I chose to limit the period covered by the show also to give the narrative more focus and a more manageable scope. Besides the reasons I’ve just discussed—the specific relevance of the pre-Internet era to the anxieties of the present—this was also to do with practical considerations.

All institutional exhibitions are exercises in finding your limits and working within them. You only have so much space, let alone budget. You need to be able to lay out an argument over a certain amount of rooms or areas where you get a certain type of concentrated attention on the part of the public. There are only so many steps in an argument one can cover in an exhibition this size. After a while, attention spans wane. I'm already concerned because there is so much in Electric Dreams, even though it stops in the early '90s. If I were to go on, I think people would just get exhausted and not compute anymore.

I chose to say a bit more about certain moments and points of connection between artists rather than keep skipping ahead in time. The art of curating an institutional historical show like this is to find the middle ground between conveying a certain amount of information and making it digestible for a general public.

There's also the curatorial responsibility of being transparent about the choices that went into telling a story in a certain way. This is not meant to be an encyclopedic survey about art and technology. No exhibition can ever be. Everyone should be wary of any institution, museum or narrative in general that purports to do that because there's always going to be a certain amount of arbitrary selection.

We offer with Electric Dreams a whistle-stop tour through certain examples that give a general sense of how much was happening and ignite people's curiosity to go and learn more; there is so much more to discover. It also gives glimpses of how internationally minded and connected all of the movements that we discussed in the exhibition were.
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We wanted the narrative in this exhibition to serve as a corrective to the usually American-centric or Euro-centric narrative as well. The majority of the institutional exhibitions around this subject tend to have that bias. There have been attempts to do that differently. I have to declare my indebtedness to the ZKM’s Bit international exhibition in 2008. That was an eye opener about how much of a role a space like Zagreb—a city in a non-aligned country—was for those conversations. It geographically framed Zagreb as the unofficial capital of the New Tendencies. It also revealed how optical and kinetic art forms, analog systems art, Arte Programmata in Italy, and GRAV [Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel] were directly connected to the early adoption of computers as tools for making art.

The conjunction were those conversations happening in Zagreb around the New Tendencies. Inspired by that show, I conceived of the narrative for Electric Dreams as a network of relationships between artists, to show how the conversations that they were having with one another connect together almost as a pre-Internet social network.

‍Peter Bauman: It’s wonderful to see this show expand on the superb scholarship at ZKM by curators like Margit Rosen and Darko Fritz. We are entirely aligned in how the historical traditions of systems thinking and New Tendencies relate to digital art’s origins. But what are the challenges in your view of connecting Electric Dreams to blockchain-based systems of artists and thinkers like Jennifer and Kevin McCoy?‍

‍Val Ravaglia: The challenge in connecting Electric Dreams to blockchain-based systems is that the narrative is too remote to even begin to introduce it—to make sense of the jump between early digital algorithmic art in the way that we present it in the exhibition and the premises for on-chain art. Although the exhibition does discuss forms of participation, including Umberto Eco's ideas of the “open work” in connection to Arte Programmata, it doesn’t venture into how this carried over into the Internet age, so there would be a few too many steps in between.

The closest aspect that's featured in Electric Dreams to the decentralizing aspects of on-chain practices are the moments proposing the use of reclaimed technical knowledge to enable alternative social and economic systems, for instance in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog, which I include in one of the exhibition’s documentation vitrines. It's telling, however, that the history of the California techno-hippy communities connects directly with the formation of the oligopolies of Silicon Valley. There's a sociologically direct connection there, too. They ended up straying so far from their ideals as to become responsible for some key aspects of the concentration of power that certain ways of thinking about the use of blockchain technologies are now attempting to counter.

The techno-libertarian side has managed to take over to the point of becoming a dominant form against which these propositions of decentralized organizations struggle to emerge. That's something that would have been interesting to somehow try and unfold but the exhibition didn’t have quite enough space and scope to do that.



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We will release the second—entirely new—part of our conversation on YouTube and as a podcast (Apple and Spotify) soon.



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‍Val Ravaglia is a curator at Tate Modern specializing in the intersection of art, technology and cultural history. Their work explores how artists engage with emerging technologies to democratize art and challenge societal structures. They have curated several exhibitions that highlight the historical and contemporary implications of digital and generative art practices.

Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.