With warmhearted technologies like Paik’s
Nam June Paik Art Center’s motto this year, celebrating Paik’s 89th birthday, is “with warmhearted technologies like Paik’s.” In an era where essential questions about art and society are needed more than ever, it seems necessary for a media art museum to set a clear path in the rapidly changing ecosystem of art and technology. It was not just for artistic experiments that Paik explored new technologies of the time, such as video, satellite and laser. He had a firm belief that that technology could change art, and that art could change the world. And this led to his artistic practices of actively reaching out to the world, and of finding the most relevant use of technology in this respect. So Paik did not hesitate to reveal his ambition of “art for world peace,” saying that he wanted to have had enough of peace.
Paik’s art and technology that looked to the whole earth in this way, was also very cheerful. While he was extremely meticulous and sophisticated when it came to applying the scientific workings of technology to art, he was full of hilarious energy when he spoke to people with his art and technology. Nam June Paik Art Center, which aims to be a place that nurtures a sense of joy derived from being together, a sense of commonality cultivated from sharing and enjoying together, and thus, the value of “symbiotic conviviality,” strives to find a way to think of and deal with present-day technologies as Paik did. Paying careful attention to the technologies that are causing huge waves of change, such as metaverse and non-fungible tokens, we would like to get close to our neighbors with small drops of change that can only be created when these technologies meet art. Next year, which marks Paik’s 90th anniversary, the neighborhood of Nam June Paik Art Center will be found to become wider and more diverse.
