00:30Loads of young artists are using the tools of digital media to make their work, but what
00:39we wanted to do as a museum is to tell the back story of that tendency and to really
00:45look at the pioneers who before they had the incredible capacity of contemporary computing
00:51were imagining the look of the world we inhabit now.
01:21And we wanted to look at why those artists wanted to immerse viewers, their democratic
01:31impulses, their idea that there'd be a new future after the upheavals of the Second World
01:38War. So they were trying to make new art with new tools and really think about the human
01:45subject in a radical new way that was sort of looking to this futuristic potential of
01:52technology.
02:15It's just a sliver of that. It's still there.
02:46Here at Tate Modern in the Electric Dreams exhibition, I have three Minitel artworks.
02:52Minitel was a terminal that was introduced by France in the beginning of the 80s when
02:58France was on the cutting edge of what we now call the Internet. So the Minitel is the
03:03Internet before the Internet, the Internet before the web. So working online in the 80s
03:09was a very different experience if compared to what it feels like today with the cell
03:13phone and satellites and all of that. So these works, they move and they change color
03:21and they have a rhythm that is very specific to the Minitel network. And what was interesting
03:28is that instead of the viewer having to go to the museum to see the work because it was
03:33online, the work came to the viewer's home.
03:44And I think what's really unique about the show is that we have had kinetic art shows
04:02before and we have had digital art shows before, but we haven't had a show that tries to tell
04:08the story of art and technology since the 50s as a whole. And this is the first to do it.
04:14Absolutely. It shows you that the anxieties around AI are not new. They were all there
04:42and artists were also thinking in the Cold War period, you know, how do we turn the potential
04:48threat of technology in weapons into something optimistic and utopian and how do we connect
04:55with other people in doing that.
05:42Absolutely.
Comments