I tried to review an art show like it was 1983. It was a disaster

It’s 1983. Well, for the purposes of writing this article it is. Just imagine it. Journalism without a warm cocoon of online functionality. Without Google Docs and the accompanying pass-agg editor comments. No online research or fact checking. No Grammarly, no autocorrect, no Googling “synonyms for aesthetic”. No inspiration or information beyond physical printed matter sourced from physical locations or direct phone calls.

Why? – you may ask but probably won’t – I’m going to all this effort is because of an art exhibition. It’s at Tate Modern and it’s called ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet’. 1983 is generally considered to be the birth of the Internet, though it didn’t enter wide domestic use until the ‘90s, when the strangled bloop bleep blop blop aeecckk aaarr cquooorrr eiiiiiiigh of dial-up modems got lodged in our pre-millennium bug brains. I wanted to review the show, but without using the internet. I thought it might be a bit of fun, and comforting to reflect on simpler times. As it happens, nothing in 1983 was simpler, it was all much harder and I’m excellent at making things hard for myself.

But what excitement! This is the kind of journalism I’d dreamed about all those years ago when I would steal my dad’s Sony WMD-6C and interview the village cats about territorial in-fighting and the diminishing quality of Sheba. Now look at me, I’m like Lee Miller!

It’s the morning of the press view. For today, and for everything related to the making of this article, my phone has the same functionality as a Motorola DynaTAC8000X (Google it). I could have bought a typewriter, but that felt more 1893 than 1983. More period-appropriate would be a WordStar word processor, but unfortunately I don’t care quite enough, so I bought a yellow, margin-lined pad from Ryman’s. The first hurdle is transport. Does TFL contactless card payment use the Internet? I call my tech-head boyfriend: “Um, no, it’s radio-frequency identification [invented 1983]”, he says, as if that were obvious. Great! Except not really, because it definitely hadn’t been invented for the Tube in 1983. Fuck this, I can’t risk it. I’m walking. The Spotify app won’t exist for another 28 years, so the only accompaniment will be fragmented eavesdropping, the din of traffic and, most horrifyingly, my own thoughts.

Normally, travelling in London has all the charm of a moist Wednesday in Slough. This morning, however, something magical is afoot. I am free, unchained from the stress-vibrations of Slack (love you Plaster team) and micro-dosed dopamine hits from Instagram. Today, even the vape shops have a majestic, futuristic glint, all neon and chromatic. And oh, terrific, a new American Candy Store has opened! More retail competition for Moco Museum.

I arrive at Tate Modern, well oxygenated and in the honeymoon phase of the digitox. I’m handed a physical press release and ignore the fact that the internet was probably involved in the making of this (not my problem). “We can email you the high res imagery,” says a voice from the press desk. Email? High what? Please don’t! I’ll be taking my own pictures and have the roll developed this afternoon.

From the press release, I learn that the show covers the period from World War II to the dawn of personal computing. It involves 70 artists, four continents, and promisingly, lots of female and non-western artists, among them Vera Molná, Hiroshi Kawano, Miguel Ángel Vidal and Lillian Schwartz. I’m introduced to the exhibition curator, Val Ravaglia, who is saving a few precious moments with a coffee between interviews. She asks if I’ll be recording her. “No”, I said. “Well, not sonically. I’m writing this piece without using the internet.” “I admire your dedication”, her voice says. Her eyes wonder if I might require psychiatric intervention.

Meanwhile, my own eyes twitch with dread. Who knew journalism could be such hard work. I did a degree in the thing and must have slept through the unit on shorthand. I should have thought about this, and while I wish I was a different person, I am not.

Like all curators of new media art, Val can smell fear – or at least an amateur. We head into the exhibition. While other journos are busy snapping pics on their iPhones for Insta stories (some people just have no respect for the period!), I’m struggling to keep track of all my equipment: a pen, a notepad and a camera. I manically scrawl on my pad, trying to ask Val some informed questions while simultaneously inventing a garbled shorthand which will be entirely indecipherable the next time I look at it.

Unlike the prognosis for this review, there’s hope in this exhibition – at first glance. Bound through with no context and you might see generations of artists showing off their new toys and tinkering with shiny new tools and materials — a theme park of colours, flickering lights, psychedelic optical illusions, Heath Robinson-esque contraptions and tinny pre-internet noises. Everything looks great through the lens of nostalgia.

Of course there was excitement during these heady decades of rapid technological innovation — the dawn of the Internet promised universal connectivity. But with that came abject fear. “Unbridled optimism was a myth,” says Val. “There was a risk in embracing technology blindly.” She refers to German artist Gustav Metzger, whose influence looms large in the show. From the 1950s onwards, he began to caution against the destructive, oppressive potential of science and machines. “[Computers] are becoming the most totalitarian tools ever used on society,” he said. But instead of burying his head in the sand, Metzger squared up to the threat, engaging with computers, and encouraging other artists to do so, in an effort to underscore its harm for humanity.

Val gets particularly excited about a work by Mary Martin. Generative art, though now synonymous with flashy AI artists like Refik Anadol, is a very old concept. In basic terms, it involves creating a set of rules for which the outcome is uncertain. This, as Val explains, does not mean an artist relinquishes control. “I like to think of it as a collaboration with the systems, which is the basis of cybernetics.” Martin was a key figure in British Constructivism, following in the footsteps of the Russian movement a few decades earlier. Permutation of Six, 1966 is an ink drawing based on a system of half cubes, to which a generative permutative logic has been applied. To me, it’s just beautiful, all triangles and angular lines, like a malfunctioning maze.

Val moves towards a kinetic sculpture by Jean Tinguely called Metamechanical Sculpture with Tripod (1954), which I mistake for an Alexander Calder. It’s formed of eleven cardboard shapes that rotate on seven wire wheels and looks like a delicate piece of farming apparatus. Its movements are “irregular and unpredictable,” which may well be true, but I have no way of knowing because the motor is broken. A few years later, Tinguely would get into ‘self-destroying machines’ (hopeful sounding sculptures like Study for an End of the World No.2, which blew itself up with explosives). Maybe this one was just ahead of its time.

The work in ‘Electric Dreams’, for better or worse, was patient zero in the virus of immersive art exhibitions that saturate art spaces today, mini-lobotomies designed to take us anywhere but reality. But here, the traces of humanity are still evident. There’s a push and pull of man vs machine as artists wrestled with who’s in charge. As Val reminds me, “The people this art was made for weren’t using the internet yet.”

In other rooms, artists are reunited from landmark exhibitions like the 1960s series ‘New Tendencies’, which established Zagreb as a hotbed of kinetic and digital art. There are artists who taught themselves how to use, and reclaim, emerging tech. There are scientists, mathematicians and engineers that sought ways to translate their studies into visual form. There are those, like Harold Cohen, who conceived the tech themselves. Cohen, already an established abstract painter in the 1960s, invented AARON, the first software program capable of using the principles of symbolic AI to generate drawings.

Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromointerferent Environment (1974-2009) gets an entire room to itself. It’s one massive 360° projection, shards of light cast on cubes and bouncing balls. It’s the the precursor to every ‘[Insert famous dead artist]: the Immersive Experience’, and much better. The Venezuelan spent a lifetime experimenting with new materials and technologies and is a counterpoint to the cynicism of looming tech dominion. A year before his death in 2019, I interviewed Cruz-Diez. Of course, I can’t remember what he told me verbatim and I can’t look it up, but it was something to the effect of: “I make light traps. They aren’t traditional paintings where colour remains unchanged – those quickly become a past event, I work in the present.”

On the way out, I pass Mire Lee’s Turbine Hall commission and have a vision of a strange future. A time, some decades from now, when I’m a wizened old prune attending the press preview for ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before AI’. I see some spunky young(ish) journo mincing around writing their review ‘as though it was 2010’, before the invention of ChatGPT. “How decadent”, I would tut, before removing my AR goggles and returning them to my office desk.

Back at Plaster HQ, I start on my review. My handwriting is appalling (all those cursive lessons with my neo-Victorian grandmother proved futile). It becomes a physical issue on paragraph three: my palm aches and my knuckles are immobile. Millennial-Gen Z cuspers like me didn’t evolve well for this – this is what happens when the most you’ve written in 12 years is a birthday card.

The next day, I get the film roll back and it’s a fucking disaster. The images are illegible. My body prickles with heat. The electric dream has been ripped from its socket. I have a vision of Plaster’s creative director, Finn, going through the images (many of which aren’t strictly images. Most are black. The best are vague blurs of artworks mostly obscured by a meaty thumb). He’s howling with laughter, flinging my little Konica Tomato camera across the room, before Slack messaging me my p45.

I clamp my tail firmly between my legs and shuffle down to his office like a child who’s just been caught using mummy’s lipstick as a crayon. “I fucked up, the pics are shit!” I blurt, avoiding eye contact. “Let me see…” He leafs through the sorry selection in silence, and hands me back the pictures. “Kinda cool. Actually quite Plaster.”