OP TO COMPUTERS

THE LINES ARE DRAWN AS MUSEUMS REASSESS THE CONNECTIONS

Institutional exhibitions about the early days of digital art continue to proliferate. The most recent have drawn parallels between Op Art in the 1950s and 1960s to the birth of the computer in art.

After Electric Op, which originated at AKG in Buffalo, New York last fall, Tate Modern last November opened Electric Dreams. A version of Electric Op is slated to open at the Fine Art Museum in Nantes, France this spring.

Tate Modern’s line of thought seems to be that experiments in kinetic and light art of the 1950s and 1960s paved the way for artists to use the computer to pursue similar avant-garde directions.

It begins with a room of electronic works by the likes of Grazia Varisco and Davide Boriani of Italy’s Gruppo T — the T stands for '“tempo” or time — in which movement is the central theme.

Davide Boriani’s Superficie Magnetica from 1962

Movement is manifested through different methods, such as Varisco’s flashing light or metallic sand dragged via a magnet mechanism through a labyrinth in Boriani’s Superficie Magnetica.