The Future is Now?

Critique d’art, 2017

Following Nam June Paik’s lead, at times this scholarly analysis takes the form of a letter, intertwining personal voices with an investigation of media technologies. The practices of Nam June Paik are seen as a negotiation between the materiality of media and an articulation of identity. Reproductions of Paik’s letters inform written records about his early interactive video technologies such as the Wobbulator built in 1972, technologies that invite us to mix our voices with his. Paik’s playful approach to identity is reflected not only by his experimental warping and global transmission of familiar cultural forms such as dance, but also through his light-hearted comments reflecting his position as a nomadic artist. The techniques Paik left behind continue these light-hearted cultural negotiations, as demonstrated both by Emile Devereaux’s visual practices and e-mail correspondence surrounding work exhibited at the Fondo Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This paper discusses the problem of the maintenance of identity of multimedia works of art despite their physical change. It puts forward the term of changeability as an intrinsic feature describing their character. Observing the artworks' changing manifestations, this paper poses questions whether and to which degree the concepts derived from musicology and a traditional understanding of the physical object applies to them; further, it investigates the links between the early conceptual art and media art of the 1960s and '70s in terms of the presumptions of dematerialisation and, consequently, the idea of the instruction and delegated labour. The concept of open work serves the open character of multimedia artworks in terms of their repeated realisation and interpretation. Finally, it seeks to explore the interrelation of artworks' manifestations and the archive, which, with its retroactive character has implications for both the understanding of the identity of works of art and the understanding of conservation role in its maintenance.

2017

Over the past half-century, technological advancements have persistently reshaped the realm of art and altered our perception of the world. Nam June Paik, known as the father of video art, revolutionized the television—transforming it from a consumer object into an artistic medium. This innovation not only introduced a novel way of seeing but also established video art as a new aesthetic genre, whose impact on visual culture endures to this day. In Paik’s New York studio, two words—Parnas and Wuppertal—appear on his final, unfinished painting, alluding to his first solo exhibition, "Exposition of Music, Electronic Television," held at Gallery Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963. This seminal exhibition was pivotal for Paik. This essay seeks to delve into Paik’s visionary approach as a trailblazer and examine the curatorial strategies he employed to showcase his art in this groundbreaking exhibition.

College Art Association Annual Conference, 2020

New scholarship on Nam June Paik is a thematic focus of 2020 College Art Association Annual Conference session Feedback and Feedforth: New Approaches to Nam June Paik. Organized by Gregory Zinman of the Georgia Institute of Technology, with contributions by Marina Isgro, Johanna Gosse and Gregory Zinman. Response by Hanna Hölling. Thursday, February 13, 2020, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Hilton Chicago - 8th Floor - Lake Ontario CHAIR Gregory Zinman, Georgia Institute of Technology DISCUSSANT Hanna Barbara Hölling, University College London PRESENTATIONS This Is Participation TV: Nam June Paik at WGBH, Boston: Marina Isgro Ray Johnson and Nam June Paik, Incommunicado: Johanna Gosse, University of Colorado, Boulder Video Art’s Past and Present ‘Future Tense’: The Case of Nam June Paik’s Satellite Works: Gregory Zinman, Georgia Institute of Technology

Nam June Paik is recognized for being known as the father of video art. However, some recent research about Paik focuses on his early interactive art. Since Exposition of Music – Electronic Television Revisited in 2009 represented his first solo show in Wuppertal in 1963, the study of his early interactive art has gained momentum. Nevertheless, regarding Paik a pioneer of interactive art is still a minor opinion in art history. This paper explores Paik’s rich background about his early interactive pieces. When he studied musicology and composition in Germany, he wrote several articles about new music for Korean readers from 1958 to 1959. These still remain unexplored materials for both Korean and Western scholars. Among them, “Chance Music” was written right after meeting John Cage. It reveals significant clues to articulate his fundamental concept about interactive art. Based on the music background, Paik found how to appropriate musical instruments to make interactive art in his own way.

Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 2019

Review of Hanna B. Hölling's 'Paik's Virtual Archive: Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art'

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2013

Nam June Paik visited Japan in 1985, in preparation for Bye Bye Kipling, his second work for satellite, fusing live broadcasts from Seoul, Tokyo and New York. In this same year, German film director Wim Wenders went to Tokyo. Wenders’s trip resulted in his nebulous homage to 1950s film director Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo-Ga.

MODOS: Revista de História da Arte, 2022

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik and Guggenheim’s Japanese survey show, Scream against the sky, to which he contributed an essay but declined to participate with his work. This paper articulates the transcultural (counter-) potential of artists who work(ed) across borders, especially at moments when Western canonization was a double-edged sword.

Nam June Paik is mostly known as the father of video art. At the same time, he can also be regarded as a creative pioneer of interactive art. Unfortunately, most scholars and art historians still neglect Paik's remarkable achievement in interactive art with his musical background. Especially, Paik's experience with Musique Concrète was a core springboard to develop his interactive pieces. However, among Paik's artistic backgrounds Musique Concrète is hidden by well-known influences from John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Fluxus. Based on Musique Concrète, Paik created basic elements of interactive art such as database, non-linearity and sensorial translation at Paik's first solo show, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, in 1963. These are still considered fundamental properties to make interactive pieces. In this regard, Paik as an interactive artist can be a significant contribution to finding an origin of interactive art since art theorists have started to explore its genealogy.