2022, single channel video, 35 min, color, sound.

Waypoint is a military term used in the 1980s when ‘Global Positioning System (GPS)’ was first introduced to refer to a specific point a pilot must mark and pass through during a flight. Having been applied to games, its meaning expanded to imply a coordinate that players can mark to automatically process commands without having to control their characters. With the waypoint function, players can freely share and communicate their opinions with each other while planning their route. Starting from Wuppertal in Germany, where Paik’s first solo exhibition (1963) was held, Heo Daechan creates a route to land in Exposition of Music, Do It Together! (2022) at Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin passing through Memories of Wuppertal (2007) held at MMCA in Gwacheon, derived from Paik’s first solo exhibition. Through a game called ‘Flight Simulator 2020,’ Heo takes the audience on a virtual flight through temporal and spatial axes along these locations as waypoints. Within the game scenes as backgrounds, Heo talks to the audience while interpreting and connecting the technological, cultural and social layers at each point.

2022, single channel video, 4min, color, sound.

Park Seungsoon imagines a virtual world of future composed of sound as an alternative to the current technology of virtual reality that relies on a single sense of ‘vision.’ In homage to Paik’s Exposition of Music that exhibited music in a physical space to encourage free participation and performance by the audience, Park designs a space for the exhibition of ‘virtual music.’ In this space, the audience can assume their own location or the size of the space only through the sounds around them without being able to see anything. In fact, the unclear auditory information gives a flexible reconstruction of the space depending on one’s backgrounds and imagination. For example, in the world of virtual music, the sound created by a vacuum cleaner can be imagined as the sound of an airplane, creating an illusion of floating in the sky. The audience can change and cross the space freely as a composer and architect, using music as a material. It even suggests the world of ‘Web 3.0’ in which personalized information can be selected amid the overflowing data as if assembling blocks.

2022, single channel video, 6min, 16:9(FHD), stereo sound.

Moojin Brothers focuses on various beings that have eternal life with technicalized images. The plants and TV screens in Paik’s TV Garden (1974) maintain their current images without dying, rotting, or breaking down through the behind-the-scene maintenance and technological replacement. The chickens, virtually released in TV Garden by artists, are also isolated from other living species or external changes, and live forever free from evolution, reproduction, creation and decomposition. It seems to symbolize a future utopia in which the ecosystem is won over and maintained by technology. The chickens may be real like the plants in TV Garden or virtual images as the images on the TV screens. The only clear thing is that they are easily replaced by cloning technology or safely preserved with mechanical equipment. In this kind of world, humans remain as “good people” who do not need to consume chickens or cage them for breeding. By borrowing the voice of artificial intelligence in the video, the artists ask humans who accept a technicalized life without any resistance if such an immortal life is what they really want to manifest with technology.

2022, single channel video, 6min, color, sound.

Ro Kyung Ae, in collaboration with Kim Myoung Shin and Cheon Young Jae, explores the act of ‘seeing’ while experiencing a Virtual Reality (VR) app, and she expresses it through the movement of body. In a virtual world, all experiences are mediated through the vision. We can touch any object as if it exists in the reality, but it is a mere phenomenon of your body ‘visually’ touching the boundary of object irrelevant to the actual tactile sensation. In addition, in a virtual world, we can touch something and find whether our body really exists or not, only through virtual hands that have replaced a controller. VR experiences seem to evoke all kinds of senses vividly, but they disappear once we close our eyes. They are visible, but non-existent. Ro reverses these senses again, making us think about things that are invisible to us but do exist too. She reveals those to us through other senses hidden behind the VR headset and through body movements previously controlled by VR.

Nam June Paik Art Center developed an educational app for Paik’s Exposition of Music—Electronic Television held in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963 with Virtual Reality (VR) technology. It was the exhibition that brought televisions and exhibited music in the space of an art gallery. One of the featured works, Random Access, was made up of recording tapes loosely unraveled and attached to the wall. The audiences could scrape the tapes themselves to hear the sound at a desired point. With Experimental Televisions, Paik manipulated and disturbed the images on a television screen unilaterally provided by broadcasting stations. He conducted various experiments to go against the law of time that flows in one direction.
To travel back in time once again and revive the exhibition of the past, Nam June Paik Art Center in collaboration with Dankook University developed a VR app. VR is a technology that simulates experiences similar to a real world in the space constructed by a computer. Since it is mainly developed through a 3D game engine, it makes the users feel as if they are playing a game with their entire body. With the app, audience not only see the work from the past, but also interact with the work using a variety of senses, such as playing with the Klavier Intégral and scraping the tapes of Random Access to make sound.