Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) in Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet
November 28, 2024 – June 1, 2025
Tate Modern
London

Enter a dreamscape of machines, movement, and captivating installations that play with your perception

From the birth of op art to the dawn of the internet age, artists found new ways to engage the senses and play with our perception. 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 major 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.

One of Tate Modern’s most ambitious exhibitions to date, Electric Dreams offers visitors a rare chance to experience incredible works of vintage tech art in action – a look back at how artists imagined the visual language of the future.

ROOM 3: OTTO PIENE

I go to darkness itself, I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it, I turn it into a volume of power with the breath of life like my own body. — Otto Piene, 1973

Zero founder Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) is installed in the following room. Five light-emitting sculptures with motors are synchronised to create a theatrical light play or ‘ballet’. The work demonstrates Piene’s life-long interest in using light as a material to stage immersive visual experiences.

Piene experimented with stencils during Zero’s single-night exhibitions, organised by Piene and Heinz Mack in their Düsseldorf studio. He found that he could create dramatic moving projections by shining light through perforated holes with a candle. Piene exhibited his first arrangements of light machines, Light Ballet in 1959. The machines shown here mostly date from the 1960s, when his kinetic installations became increasingly performative. Evolving into mechanised environments, they feature metal screens, discs, motors, timers, and rotating electric lights. Piene brought these sculptures together as one installation in 2007.

In 1968, Piene became the first international fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). CAVS had been founded by artist György Kepes the previous year. Piene was instrumental in bringing other artists to MIT, making CAVS an innovative and influential platform for experiments bringing together art and technology.

As Amanda Gluibizzi reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail, “Out of everything included in this wonderful exhibition, I was particularly pleased to sit again in Otto Piene’s transfixing Light Room (Jena) (2007), which brings together several rotating, pierced metal lanterns that beam speckles throughout a darkened room. These sculptures were built and exhibited in the late 1950s and ’60s under titles such as Archaic Light Ballet (1959) and throw out dapples of light that make you feel not as if you’re hurtling through the Milky Way, but rather that the universe has taken you as its dancing partner. “I go to darkness itself, I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it, I turn it into a volume of power with the breath of life like my own body,” Piene observed in 1973. It’s the light I feel I might need right now.”