Utopia, dystopia and protopia: how does art represent energy?

Cover image: William Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844 (National Gallery, London)

Every time a new technology comes into use, it generates a new way of seeing reality. We asked Francesco Maria Spampinato, professor of History of Contemporary Art at the Department of the Arts - DAR of the University of Bologna, how the idea of energy in art has changed. What emerged was a complex scenario, from the first Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to today, structured in three main phases: utopia, meaning trust in progress and its possibilities; dystopia, focusing on its darkest sides; protopia, geared towards accepting critical issues while simultaneously seeking concrete solutions through innovation and cooperation.

Energy is not merely a material resource, but also a powerful set of collective images and ideas. When did a decisive paradigm shift occur in the representation of reality?

During the nineteenth century, phenomena such as the speed of trains and cars, electric light and new scientific theories burst onto the scene, showing us a world in constant flux. To this we can add photography, cinema and X-rays, which make it possible to see what the human eye cannot perceive. All this freed artists from the obligation to offer a fixed representation of reality. As early as the beginning of the century, William Turner painted speeding trains and thunderstorms, focusing on atmospheric effects and perception. With Impressionism, artists no longer looked at a landscape or an urban scene as something clearly defined, but portrayed it as something that existed in that moment, in constant flux, in continuous transformation. This marked the overcoming of the Renaissance model, in which the invention of perspective responded to the human desire to measure and give the world a precise order. In the nineteenth century, this stability gave way to atmosphere, fumes, electricity and movements so rapid that they lay beyond the limits of human perception and physiology.

How did this trend develop in the twentieth century?

This phenomenon clearly emerged in some historical avant-gardes, first and foremost Futurism. A fitting example is the work of Giacomo Balla, perhaps the most extreme among the Futurist artists who choose painting as their expressive medium. At a certain point in his career, Balla abandoned the recognisable, figurative world altogether in favour of abstract patterns, which he called "Compenetrazioni iridescenti" (Iridescent Interpenetrations). These works are nothing more than the geometric analysis of beams of light that transform into something different from ordinary light. Besides, the human eye does not perceive light itself, but only its effects on objects. Balla’s aim was therefore to explore a new reality, one that lay beyond the limits of human vision.

What was the “value” of energy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

The era of the Second Industrial Revolution was undoubtedly dominated by utopia. Artists looked at energy with overwhelming enthusiasm. When William Turner painted a steam train hurtling through the landscape at breakneck speed, he was celebrating England’s technological triumphs and the materialisation of the geopolitical power of a profoundly Eurocentric system. This blind and ruthless faith in the future reached its peak with the Italian Futurists, in their exaltation of the machine, speed and industry. However, between the 1910s and 1920s, dissenting voices began to emerge, exploring the darker side of this acceleration.

Who were these dissenting voices?

An extraordinary example is the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. In 1917 the artist created a series of paintings dedicated to the atom, exploring not only its geometric and abstract fascination, but also trying to understand a reality that was becoming increasingly fast, violent and ruthless, in an era tragically marked by the First World War. This growing awareness ushered in a dystopian phase that emerged under the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and came into full force in the aftermath of the Second World War, revealing energy’s darkest face: the atomic bomb. One of the strongest responses came from a Japanese artist, Atsuko Tanaka, profoundly marked by the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1956 Tanaka created Electric Dress, a garment made up of a tangle of cables and coloured light bulbs of different voltages. Wearing it during his performances, the artist denounced the brutality of an energy that was now out of control. A few years later, in 1960, the French artist Jean Tinguely brought the concept of self-destructive energy to the MoMA in New York with the work Homage to New York, a gigantic, precarious mechanical contraption made of pipes and wheels, designed entirely to slowly self-destruct in front of the audience. 

And in Italy?

Against this backdrop came Superstudio, a collective of architects and designers working in Florence in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of designing buildings, they created photomontages, films and installations. They conceived the “Continuous Monument”, a striking architectural model: a black-and-white grid stretching across and engulfing the entire planet, from Manhattan to deserts, mountain ranges and forests. This grid foreshadowed the advent of the global media network and the web. Superstudio foresaw a future dominated by hyperconnectivity, a world in which individuals would paradoxically become ever more isolated and alienated. This is reflected in the occasional appearance of small communities on its stark platforms, seemingly reduced to a tribal existence.

When we talk about energy today, we cannot fail to mention the climate crisis. How does art relate to the challenge of sustainability?

Today, artists are no longer content to simply expose problems or indulge in utopian and dystopian visions. Instead, they are embracing protopia, working with scientists and communities to develop practical solutions. Olafur Eliasson, for example, created the Little Sun project in 2012, producing small solar lamps distributed through humanitarian networks in areas of the world without an electricity grid. In Nairobi, the young collective Kairos Futura works with young people from the city’s slums and landfill sites, using sci-fi imagery to create protective suits that make it possible to recover and recycle materials safely. In this way, the artist is no longer a mere storyteller and becomes a real engine of change.

How is art responding to digital technology and the complexity of Big Data?

The advent of digital technology has presented artists with entirely new challenges: how to represent energy and Big Data, vast quantities of information that lie beyond human comprehension except through isolated fragments. To respond to this dematerialisation, Ryoji Ikeda, a visual artist and Japanese musician involved in the creative programmes of CERN in Geneva, creates monumental site-specific installations with panoramic LED screens measuring more than ten metres in length. Drawing on complex data from particle physics and the Human Genome Project, the artist projects vast sequences of codes, pictograms and abstract geometries, accompanied by his own sound compositions. Ikeda’s aim is not to translate the data didactically, which is an impossible operation for our mind, but to offer a sensory experience of “overloading”, to bring human beings closer again to these flows, or perhaps to make them more aware of their increasingly subordinate role. This rigorous exploration extends seamlessly to his music albums and their cover designs, which feature sequences of abstract black-and-white geometric forms that visually echo the graphics and scrolling codes found in his artworks.

What about music? How does it make energy visible through images?

Since the 1970s, music and record design have increasingly reflected the evolution of the imagery associated with energy, machines and technology. Kraftwerk are an emblematic example: in 1974, the cover of Autobahn turns the pictogram of the German motorway into a symbol of mobility and momentum towards the future; with Radio-Activity (1975), instead, the vintage radio becomes an ambiguous image, suspended between communication and the nuclear threat. In Trans Europe Express (1977) the train represents a new idea of connection; while in The Man-Machine (1978) the band calls into question the boundary between the human body and the machine;  Computer World (1981) foreshadows the computer’s entry into everyday life.A few years later, the imagery changes: the machine is no longer only a symbol of progress, but also of alienation and industrial decline. A telling example is Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979). Designed by Peter Saville and based on a visualisation of radio waves emitted by a pulsar, its iconic cover captures the mood of a Manchester scarred by deindustrialisation and unemployment. The same shift can be found in various subgenres of electronic music such as Electronic Body Music and Detroit techno, where rigid, mechanical rhythms evoke the repetitive gestures of the assembly line. This brings the story full circle, back to the Futurist Luigi Russolo. If, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the sound of pistons was celebrated as the music of progress, over the course of the century these same sounds also became a means of exploring its contradictions, through audiovisual allegories exposing the darker side of energy or imagining new ways of understanding it.