Art review Dream on: the future ain't what it used to be

There's a popular meme of two lovers embracing against a digital field of sunflowers. Their pursed lips would be locked were it not for their bumping VR headsets. "What if we kissed at the intersection of art and technology?" the text reads.

- Evan Moffitt

The meme is making fun of a route heavily trafficked by museums with declining attendance figures, keen to lure viewers away from at-home streaming with digital art displays.

On a darker level, it pokes fun at the more antisocial aspects of our hyper-connected age. If this kind of cynicism feels familiar, it's because we've drifted far from digital technology's optimistic early days.

Walking through Electric Dreams, a showcase of artists who used or incorporated machines in their work from the 1950s to the 1990s, it's possible to imagine how things might have turned out differently.

Although working against the backdrop of the cold war, these innovators saw computer programming as a way to test the limits of human perception. The exhibition is a sensory overload of whirring motors and flashing lights, as experiments in early kinetic op-art give way to abstract compositions produced by rudimentary algorithms.