1993

and are the robots featured in Paik’s exhibition at the German Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale. is on a bicycle, the back of which is loaded with machines for information transportation, and is riding a car filled with real flowers. At the Pavilion’s garden Paik set up the ‘Scythian Road,’ analogous to the Silk Road, where he positioned cross-cultural nomads connecting the East and the West in history, represented in his robot sculptures. This was to highlight the potentiality of cultural exchanges between different societies.

1980/2012

This work is an electronic version of Leonardo da Vinci’s where the Renaissance artist expressed the principles of order and harmony of the cosmos in the human body’s mathematical proportions. Calling attention to anthropocentrism, Ikam and Fléri fragmented the human body into sixteen parts to be represented in moving images, whose monitors are reassembled into a huge multi-television sculpture. To superimpose humans, screens and the globe over one another via technology could reveal the possibility of spatiotemporally distributed existence of human beings in the man-machine-nature relational network. This is none other than Paik’s cybernetic art in that Paik defines cybernetics as a science of relations, or relationship itself.

2012

This work invites the audience to find his image divided into numerous ones. Using scientific methods and technology, Eliasson sublimates the elements of natural phenomena such as light, water and fog into artworks. By representing the simulated nature of his own construction in a specific space, he gives his audience a unique experience-the encounter of civilization and nature. In Eliasson’s works, the audience participation functions as an important motif. He shares common artistic goals with Paik as he strives toward the combination of nature and science, the interaction between artwork and audience, and the communication between art and society.

1994/2012

1994/2012

안토니 문타다스의 <파일 룸>은 커뮤니케이션의 권력 중 하나인 ‘검열’이라느 주제를 다룬다. 이 작품은 고대부터 현대까지 세계 각국의 예술과 문화 분야의 검열 사례를 수집하여 검색할 수 있게 하는 데이터베이스이다. 웹사이트를 통해 누구나 검열 사례를 추가할 수 있는 열린 구조이며 미국의 국립검열반대연합 등 관련 기관들과의 협력 하에 계속 확장되고 있는 작품이다. 인터네시라는 가상 공간의 데이터베이스는 서류함 캐비닛 수십 개를 사방으로 쌓아 올려 만든 실제 공간의 형태로 설치된다. 어둡고 위압적이며 닫힌 공간 안에서 컴퓨터 검색으로 검열사례를 살펴 보면서 백남준이 지향했던 쌍방향 소통의 의미에 대해 생각해 보기를 권한다.

Nam June Paik’s interest in robots continued through the mid 1980s, resulting in the robot series called video sculpture. These robots were not controlled by men like . Instead, the old fashioned television sets substituted human bodies, and TV monitors showed the videos. Paik revived in these robots diverse historical characters such as Hippocrates, Descartes, Schubert, and Danton. He also revived the actor and film director Charlie Chaplin and the comedian Bob Hope. Furthermore, he made robots of historical Korean people such as Queen Seondeok and Yule Gok. Nam June Paik’s robots reveal their identities in their names, and their bodies constituted of various forms of televisions express human characteristics.

1989

A video camera records a live image of a burning candle on a tripod, which is reproduced by projectors on the wall. The camera has three charge-coupled devices(CCD), detecting red, green and blue light each, and the old-fashioned projector also has three cathode-ray-tubes. Paik used these machines, which are supposed to create an image by converging separate rays of light into a single projection, in the way that deconstructs the image. Instead of merging the candle’s images separated by color inside the machines, Paik chose to project the separate images as layers directly onto the wall. The projected images formed by combinations of the layers on the wall are thus in various composites of color, size and shape. The candle’s image subtly waves since the flame is moved by the flow of air and the viewer’s movement around; it also keeps changing because the candle is being burnt away in the course of time. With equipments and cables deliberately exposed on the floor, in contrast with the swaying images on the wall, viewers can observe the whole space as a kind of closed circuit.

1995

The title “Happy Hoppi” is composed by putting an adjective ‘happy’ before the name of a Native American tribe ‘Hopi’ – Paik seems to have added one more ‘p’ to ‘Hopi’ for a visual likeness to ‘happy’ – so that the two words rhyme with each other. The work presents a figure of the Native American made of twenty monitors, with his head and hands decorated by neon tubes and light bulbs as if wearing a headdress and holding a bow and arrow in both hands. On the screens, a robotic human being strolls in the space that looks like a 3D diagram, and what is also floating in graphic forms are cars, airplanes, satellites, telephones, computers and optical discs. The Hopi figure sits on a scooter whose front is painted like a shield or a mask. In Hopi mythology there were a god of sky on a flying shield and a messenger spirit connecting different worlds, who are often represented in masks. Combining the modern icons of transportation and communication, Paik borrows the cultural subjects of Native Americans who used to be ‘others’ in the Western-centric narratives of human history, thereby raising a question on the meanings of being truly global.

1995

Easy Rider shares its title with a movie directed by Dennis Hopper where two rebellious young men ride motorcycles across the United States in search of an alternative way of life. Released in 1969, the controversial movie depicted the young people of the time that denied the existing social system, became members of the hippie movement and used psychedelic drugs. Nam June Paik wrote in his 1974 essay titled “Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society – The 21st Century is now only 26 years away” that the history of the 1960s witnesses the fact that the problem of communication that is the gap between generations can awaken the society and its value system. Easy Rider suggests a way of communication towards a new society through a broadband communication of an electronic highway. With a body that is consisted of 16 television monitors, a robot is riding on a motorcycle. On its body, license plates are attached as if they were medals that imply its journey. A dazzling decoration made of neon lights is attached to its head, bulbs with various colors on its arms. Laserdisc decorations with their rainbow of hues remind of the free and wild protagonists of the movie.