Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet

Notes

The catalogue for Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern's survey of artists working with machines and algorithms between the 1950s and the 1990s — optical, kinetic, programmed and digital work from Asia, Europe and the Americas, from collaged punch cards through to early virtual reality. Edited by Val Ravaglia, published by Tate in 2024. Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-84976-923-5. The Harold Cohen pages are the ones worth opening it to: a diagram of his hardware — a Digital Equipment Corporation MicroVAX II driving the plotter (turtle) printer that ran AARON — printed beside Becky Cohen's photograph of him at the Tate Gallery in 1983 with his mural behind him, and several of the untitled AARON drawings from 1981 and 1982. I went to this show and picked the book up at the museum. Really enjoyed it. They had an amazing Cohen turtle drawing there.