Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review - an exhaustive and exhausting show

Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial intelligence can produce paintings worth as much as those made by human hands.

Depending on your view of AI, this can either be a very exciting or deeply depressing idea; whichever way you lean, it makes Tate Modern’s exhibition of work by the pioneers of machine art extremely timely.

This exhaustive (and exhausting) show starts in the 1950s with Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka. In response to the neon signs brightening up Osaka’s streets in the aftermath of World War II, she created a heavyweight dress made of neon tubes and industrial light bulbs. In a series of charming drawings (pictured below) showing heat spots and electric circuitry, she then reflected on the experience of wearing this potentially lethal garment.Next comes a room devoted to the Signals Gallery that opened in London in 1964 as a space "dedicated to the adventures of the modern spirit". On show is one of Takis’s sound machines; it emits gentle, tinkling sounds as an electro magnetic field switches on and off prompting a metal needle to tremble against taut strings. David Medalla’s Sand Machine weaves similarly magical poetry. As it revolves, a motor-driven string of beads leaves a circular trail in a bed of white sand. Whereas Takis’s sculpture is neatly efficient, Medalla’s assemblage is a deliberately wonky contraption consisting of a silver birch branch, bamboo rods and lengths of tangled wire. In each case, though, the machine is harnessed to project delicacy or vulnerability rather than strength and optimism; and therein lies their charm.

The machines made by Swiss artist Jean Tinguely test the idea of vulnerability to its limits. Many were designed to self-destruct and on display is one too fragile to function. If it were to crank into action, numerous spindly wheels would make a series of little cardboard sails flutter like butterfly wings. Convoluted mechanics produces piffling results. Funny, ridiculous and deeply moving, his wobbly DIY constructions are like metaphors for life. They exemplify the inevitability of failure along with the absurdity (and necessity) of striving against the odds.

Some 25 years later, the painter Harold Cohen developed AARON, a computer programme that could generate drawings which he enlarged, painted onto canvas and filled with colour (main picture). But AARON got a tad too clever, so Cohen modified it to produce shapes that looked less precise and more like hand drawn images. As with the sculptures described above, the imperfection (or apparent humanity) makes the results disarming and apparently meaningful, because we relate to them. As Cohen discovered, when a machine takes control or the programming gets too clever, the results become less interesting.

A whole room is devoted to Environnement Chromointerférent, 1974 (pictured below), an installation by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Projected onto walls, floor and the spheres and cubes, which are dotted around the space, interference patterns alter the appearance of everything in their path. To me this is nothing more than a demo of optical effects, useful for the study of human perception but little else. Like airport art, it is devoid of thought or emotion. Cruz-Diez outlines the limitations perfectly when he says: “In my works, nothing is left to chance; everything is intended, planned, and programmed. Liberty and emotions are only present when choosing colours, a task with only one self-imposed restriction: to be efficient.” Yet he has been heralded as “one of the greatest artistic innovators of the 20th century”.

The crux of the matter is whether or not you believe art should be an expression of what it means to be human – to think, feel, strive, suffer, hope, achieve and inevitably fail. If so, the art made by machines and people trying to behave like them will inevitably seem facile because it has none of these qualities.

At the ICA in 1968 Jasia Reichardt curated Cybernetic Serendipity, a show of art generated by or with the help of machines. In an excerpt from the BBC programme, Late Night Line Up she explains how using a computer “enables anybody who can’t draw to create a pretty picture.” If you can’t make it, fake it!

Hiroshi Kawano has created an algorithm that produces computer generated versions of Mondrian paintings. Whereas the originals are encrusted with thick paint (a result of the artist’s efforts to achieve the right balance of lines and colours) KD 29 - Artificial Mondrian, 1969 (pictured above left) is a smoothly anonymous surface bereft of nuance, subtlety, originality or effort – a completely pointless exercise revealing only the difference between art and decor.Optimism – the belief that machines could solve all our problems – probably prompted Reichardt’s and Kawano’s enthusiastic embrace of technology. I remember, in the 1990s, picking my way round an installation by Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. Filling the floor were tiny clusters of LED numbers that clicked as they inexorably counted the seconds. I was transfixed; I felt as if my life were ticking away, as if these little machines were counting down the time I had left on earth. “It is not about creating a beautiful image,” Miyajima has said of his installations, “but a spiritual concept.” Yet encountering the two works on display at Tate Modern – a circle and radiating lines of LED numbers – I saw images, but no concepts.

Maybe my responses were numbed by sensory overload, by too many flashing lights, beeps and buzzes that may be diverting, but quickly pall. Or maybe the optimism once felt by me and others has been replaced by fear and cynicism. AI now seems as much a threat as a boon. I don’t welcome the replacement of artists, writers, actors and musicians by robots, since we learn and grow by sharing actual experiences rather than their facsimile. If we are only fed algorithm-induced simulations, our ability to recognise and empathise with raw feelings and thoughts is bound to atrophy.

I left the exhibition feeling profoundly depressed.

• Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern until June 1 2025
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk