'Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet' featuring Tatsuo Miyajima at Tate Modern, London, UK

16 January 2025

Until 1 June 2025, Tate Modern presents Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet featuring Tatsuo Miyajima. Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works.

This exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.

Tatsuo Miyajima exhibits Lattice B (1990) and Opposite Circle (1991), employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers. Miyajima’s supremely technological works have centered on his use of digital light-emitting diode (LED) counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them, since the late 1980s. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious—though not necessarily sequential—cycles from 1 to 9, represent the journey from life to death, the finality of which is symbolized by ‘0’ or the void, which consequently never appears in his work.

Find out more via Tate Modern.

Shown here: Tatsuo Miyajima, Opposite Circle, 1991, 30 light emitting diodes units, 3 transformers and aluminum panel, displayed: 35 × 3500 × 8850 mm. © Tatsuo Miyajima