Val Ravaglia (curator) — Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet

2024

Artists: Val Ravaglia (curator), Catherine Wood (curator) · Year: 2024 · Medium: Major historical exhibition — approximately 70 artists from the 1950s–1990s computer and electronic art periods · Substrate: Large-scale survey exhibition including Molnár, Mohr, Nees, Nake, Noll, Cohen, Hiller, Ihnatowicz, Paik, Sonia Sheridan, Waldemar Cordeiro, Colette Bangert, and dozens of others · Place: London, UK · Institution: Tate Modern Tate Modern's Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, which opened in November 2024 and ran through June 2025, was the most substantial major-museum survey of pre-internet computer and electronic art ever mounted in the UK. Curated by Val Ravaglia and Catherine Wood, the exhibition spanned the 1950s through the 1990s and included works by approximately seventy artists — the Stuttgart school, the Bell Labs group, Cohen's AARON, Molnár's plotter series, Mohr's hypercubes, Cordeiro's Brazilian work, Paik's video, and many other canonical figures alongside under-recognized practitioners like Sonia Sheridan and Samia Halaby. The exhibition was significant for several reasons. It was the first Tate survey to treat computer art as a mainstream modern-art subject rather than as a specialized new-media footnote. It reached a general contemporary-art audience — Tate Modern attendance is among the highest of any museum globally — and introduced first-generation figures to hundreds of thousands of visitors who had not previously encountered them. Its catalog, edited by Ravaglia, is one of the most substantial recent scholarly publications on pre-internet electronic art. Critical reception was broadly positive. The Guardian, Financial Times, Frieze, and Artforum all ran substantial coverage. The exhibition's decision to include non-Western figures (Cordeiro, Kawano, Sheridan) and women pioneers (Molnár, Bangert, Sheridan, Leavitt) was widely noted as a corrective to the standard male-dominated Anglo-American canon. Electric Dreams, along with the Centre Pompidou Molnár retrospective of 2023, marked the institutional consolidation of first-generation computer art into mainstream twentieth-century art history. Lore The Tate's acquisition of new works for the exhibition (partly in preparation, partly coincident) expanded its holdings in the field substantially. The exhibition's opening coincided with the continued consolidation of computer art as a collectible category in the wake of the 2021 NFT boom; some critics noted that the NFT market had created the pricing context within which Tate's institutional acquisitions became financially viable. Ravaglia and Wood's curatorial notes have been widely reproduced in subsequent scholarship. Sources • Tate Modern — Electric Dreams exhibition catalog (2024) • Ravaglia, Val — curatorial essays • The Guardian, Artforum — exhibition coverage