SPACE April 2024 (No. 677)
Exhibition view of ‘Wake up! It’s 2024’
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984, hereinafter GMMO), the special exhibitions ‘Wake up! It’s 2024’ and ‘Big Brother Blockchain’ were on display. GMMO is Paik’s reply to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and the satellite project was broadcast to various countries around the world. While Orwell portrayed media technologies as enabling a surveillance network in a totalitarian dystopia, for Paik, the satellite technology is a power source of joyous peace through which the world can communicate. In 2024, the international connection that Paik had previously hoped for has become a part of everyday life, yet the ultimate peace he had hoped for is still underway. ‘Wake up! It’s 2024’ looks back on Paik’s projects with the focus on the values of world peace that he pursued. A total of eight works by Paik, including GMMO, Guadalcanal Requiem (1977, 1979), and the hommage video work of GMMO from contemporary perspectives of Balming Tiger and Ryu Sungsil are exhibited as part of this exhibition. ‘Big Brother Blockchain’ depicts an alternative future symbolised by blockchain, which distributes and stores information equally, unlike the centralised technology represented by Big Brother. Nine contemporary artists showcase a variety of art media pieces imagining what kind of activities the artists who participated in GMMO would conceive of rapidly changing digital environment. One good example of this is Chang Seo Young’s Turbulance, which is a virtual 3 channel in-flight video inspired by the plane crash episode of GMMO. The individual experiences on the plane, in line with the fact we are within a fateful community that holds breath together in times of turbulence, suggest a hyper-individualized society where disconnection is strengthened by algorithms, even though we live in one time and space. The exhibitions are on at the Nam June Paik Art Center until Feb. 23, 2025, and Aug. 18, 2024, respectively.
