Two exhibitions have just opened that look at art and tech: in London, Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet celebrates the pioneers of kinetic, programmed and digital art, and offers a kind of origin story of contemporary immersive installation. Ben Luke speaks to Val Ravaglia, the co-curator of the show, amid the blinking lights and bleeping sound.
Suzanne Treister, Fictional Videogame Stills/Are You Dreaming? (1991-2). Photographs from original Amiga computer screen. On view at Electric Dreams at Tate Modern
Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
In California, meanwhile, Digital Witness at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) looks at how new software and hardware shaped the worlds of design, photography, and film between the 1980s and now. We speak to the exhibition’s curators, Britt Salvesen, the department head and curator of prints and drawings at Lacma, and Staci Steinberger, the curator of decorative arts and design at the museum.
Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Growing Up Bites, p64 from Indigenous Woman (2018), on view at Digital Witness at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
© Martine Gutierrez, courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Galler
And this episode’s Work of the Week is the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1661) by Andreas Cellarius, a celestial atlas made in the Netherlands. Rebecca Feakes, the librarian at the Blickling Estate, a 17-century mansion in Norfolk, UK, run by the National Trust, tells our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, about the book.
A plate from the Harmonia Macrocosmica star atlas by Andreas Cellarius Photo: National Trust Images / Paul Bailey
- Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern, London, until 1 June 2025
- Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until 13 July
- The Harmonia Macrocosmica is the centrepiece of Journey Through the Stars, Blickling Estate, UK, until 5 January
