This publication presents two special exhibitions, Wake Up! It’s 2024 and Big Brother Blockchain, held at the Nam June Paik Art Center on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Good Morning Mr Orwell in 2024. Nam June Paik's satellite art project Good Morning Mr Orwell (1984), a live television broadcast from the New York studios of WNET and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, featuring artists and pop musicians, was Paik's response to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which predicted a dystopian surveillance society. In the new year of 1984, Nam June Paik demonstrated the possibilities of positive use and technological transformation by transforming a television broadcast dominated by the forces of capital into a joyful live performance show with 25 million viewers around the world through art. Forty years later, in 2024, the special exhibitions ask how George Orwell's gaze and Paik's response are working in the present day and what values we should still pay attention to.
The book begins with a foreword by Park Namhee, Director of the Nam June Paik Art Center, and includes curatorial essays by Kim Yoonseo, Lee Sooyoung, and Lim Chae Eun, as well as an essay by Paik himself. It includes photographs and introductions to the works in the two special exhibitions, Wake Up! It’s 2024 and Big Brother Blockchain as well as exhibition overviews, related programmes, and bios of participating artists. English text is included.