Electric Op
Musée d’art de Nantes
Nantes, FR
Curated by Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan
Apr 4–Aug 31, 2025
With a rich collection of modern and contemporary art where abstraction plays a major role, the Musée d'arts de Nantes and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (United States) are offering a unique exhibition presenting the historical, theoretical and formal links between optical art and video and computer art, from the 1960s to the present day.
With a rich collection of modern and contemporary art where abstraction plays a major role, the Musée d'arts de Nantes and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (United States) are offering a unique exhibition presenting the historical, theoretical and formal links between optical art and video and computer art, from the 1960s to the present day.
The frenetic patterns in Laura Splan’s Embodied Objects weavings are formed from electromyography (EMG) data collected while performing tasks and expressions with my own body such as squinting, blinking and even unraveling a finished tapestry. The numerical EMG data was visualized in a custom program that was written to repeat, rotate, and randomly colorize the EMG waveforms with a grayscale palette. The series of digitally woven tapestries examines notions of labor and craft as they relate to material and technology. By combining hand and digital processes with traditional textiles and new media technologies, the series destabilizes and interrogates how each is categorized and valued. The narrative implications of these categories are mined for their potential to explore how technology, data, and cultural artifacts mediate our understanding of the human body. I often co-opt disciplines (textiles, medical diagnostics) steeped in exclusionary rules and traditions precisely to have a set of rules to break. By considering rules as “media", I attempt to challenge the historical systems that perpetuate these rules under the guise of expertise. Embodied Objects questions both the veracity of the meaning of the data driving the patterns well as the meaning of the values imbued in traditions of craft.
In the mid-1960s, a new movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) art took the world by storm. These dizzying, dazzling artworks embodied the energy of the emerging Space Age: Op painters used electric colors and machine-like precision to make geometric patterns that seem to vibrate or move, while Op sculptors utilized new, futuristic materials such as Plexiglas and aluminum. Some created mechanical and electronic sculptures that actually domove, including many that use kinetic light. As art critic John Canaday wrote in 1965, Op artworks are “the only objects being created today, as art, that can compete with launching pads and industrial machinery as expressions of the character unique to our civilization.”
Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era. At the very moment that Op artists began making works that short-circuit our optical systems, new video and digital technologies began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Could it be more than coincidental that the undulating lines of Op art resemble electronic video signals, or that its grids suggest the pixilated structure of digital screens? In fact, many Op artists would turn to using these technologies, some as early as the late 1960s, while at the same time, many of the first video and digital artists openly turned to Op art for inspiration. In this way, Op art became more than just the final chapter of modernist geometric abstraction; it was also the first artistic movement of the global Information Age, heralding the transformation of vision from a mode of embodied perception to an algorithmic process executed by the computer systems that produce and process images today.
Drawing on the Buffalo AKG’s leading collection of Op art—established with the museum’s ground-breaking 1965 exhibition Art Today: Kinetic and Optic—Electric Op brings together over 100 artworks by nearly ninety artists to trace the six-decade history of the enduring relationship between Op art and electronic art and culture. Dynamic paintings, sculptures, and prints by international Op artists working in the 1960s and 1970s are placed into dialogue with analog videos and computer-generated prints and films of the same period, demonstrating how Op became “Electric.” The exhibition also includes more recent contemporary artworks from the 1980s onward that embody the sensibility of “Electric Op,” including paintings, sculptures of programmed lights, and even an interactive digital game. The exhibition concludes with a presentation of vintage ephemera and other cultural artifacts; together, these show how Op art even shaped what electronic technology looks like in our popular imagination.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a large-format, bilingual (English/French) catalog published by Giles, featuring full-page illustrations of nearly a hundred sensational works, including many that are rarely seen or reproduced. It also includes a major overview essay by the exhibition’s curator; three newly commissioned essays on Op art, the relationship between art and science, and computer graphics by leading scholars of these topics; and an anthology of writings by artists in the exhibition that address the relationship between abstraction and technology.
Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan has been a curator with the AKG since 2017. Before joining the AKG, she was a Curatorial ResClose up of the face of a woman with long platinum blonde hairearch Assistant in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She is a recognized expert in the field of media art, including video, digital, and internet art, and holds five degrees in art history, including a BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia. Her exhibitions at the AKG include (with Paul Vanouse) 2021’s Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, which received a 2022 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators, and 2022’s Peer to Peer, which was named to Hyperallergic’s list of the Top 50 Exhibitions of 2022. Her next major exhibition, Electric Op, will open at the AKG in the fall of 2024. Outside the museum, she regularly writes for Artforum and other magazines, as well as for exhibition catalogs from museums like Dia and the Walker Art Center. Her current research projects address the Web3 rhetoric of decentralization—for which she received the prestigious Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation—and the relationship between technology and the body, informed by her experience of disability.
"...Electric Op suggests we recognise patterns of interference in the material as well as social conditions of bodies, software and hardware. Laura Splan's Squint (2016) is a greyscale Jacquard-loom tapestry of abstract wave forms that are based on her own facial expressions, recorded via facial electrodes. The data appeared as wave patterns that she then used as the basis for her weaving process. The loom's historic relevance to computing gets woven into a narrative of developments linking body and technology....The performativity of such works, reactivating our generally pacified interactions with media, calls for an awareness of the myriad forces that impact how we see, think and move. Electric Op presents a genealogy for digital art distinct from the art, design or new-media lineages that are now well established. The show’s cybernetic phenomenology challenges a Newtonian cause-and-effect worldview, proposing a more complex system of relations and perspectives increasingly relevant to the tangled ecological, political and technological situations we face globally..."
