"Good Morning, Mr. Orwell" was the first international satellite "installation" by Nam June Paik, a South Korean-born American artist often credited with inventing video art. It occurred on New Year's Day, 1984.
The event, which Paik saw as a rebuttal to George Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984, linked WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris live via satellite, as well as hooking up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea. It aired nationwide in the US on public television, and reached an audience of over 25 million viewers worldwide.[ citation needed ]
George Plimpton hosted the show, which combined live and taped segments with TV graphics designed by Paik. John Cage, in New York, produced music by stroking the needles of dried cactus plants with a feather, [1] accompanied by video images from Paris. Charlotte Moorman recreated Paik's TV Cello. Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel performed a new composition, "Excellent Birds" (later released on Anderson's album Mister Heartbreak and Gabriel's So , retitled "This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)" on the latter). The broadcast also featured the television premiere of the video Act III, with music by Philip Glass. [2] The Thompson Twins performed their song "Hold Me Now." [3] Oingo Boingo played its song "Wake Up (It's 1984)" to an audience that presumably had recently woken up on the first day of 1984. Others contributing to the project included poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and artist Joseph Beuys.
The program was conceived and coordinated by Nam June Paik. Executive producers was Carol Brandenburg, while the producer was Samuel J. Paul. The director was Emile Ardolino.
Technical problems plagued the show from the beginning. Different versions of the show were seen in the U.S. and France because the satellite connection between the two countries kept cutting out, leaving each side to improvise to fill the gaps. At one point, a performer in New York attempted a "space yodel"; the host explained that his voice would be bounced back and forth over the satellite link to produce an echo, but no echoes were actually heard. [4] Paik said that the technical problems only enhanced the "live" mood. [5]
An edited 30-minute version of "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell" has appeared in a number of exhibitions, including In Memoriam: Nam June Paik at the Museum of Modern Art. [6] A New York Times art critic described this work: "Figures turn into bold outlines or silhouettes, surrounded by shifting geometric shapes. Edges become soft, then hard. Images overlap. Some take on new configurations. Seven screens repeat the same pictures simultaneously. Although the viewer doesn't know what to expect, the celebrities are real, the film lends credibility and therefore all seems plausible." [3]
Paik followed up the piece in 1986 with "Bye Bye Kipling", a satellite installation linking New York, Seoul, and Tokyo. The title alluded to a famous quotation by Rudyard Kipling: "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." [7]
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying live or recorded images and sounds.
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, writer, inventor, and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
Madeline Charlotte Moorman was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York and a frequent collaborator with Korean American artist Nam June Paik.
Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has increased in popularity as digital video production technology has become more readily accessible. Today, video installation is ubiquitous and visible in a range of environments—from galleries and museums to an expanded field that includes site-specific work in urban or industrial landscapes. Popular formats include monitor work, projection, and performance. The only requirements are electricity and darkness.
Mister Heartbreak is the second studio album by American avant-garde artist, singer and composer Laurie Anderson, released on February 14, 1984, by Warner Bros. Records.
Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970, likening it to a "new paintbrush." Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. She was closely associated with George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, Joe Jones, Nam June Paik, and Ay-O, among other members of Fluxus. Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.
Alannah Joy Currie is a New Zealand artist based in London. She is a musician and activist, best known as a former member of the pop band Thompson Twins.
Sang Won Park is a Korean-born musician. He plays the kayagum and ajaeng, and sings in both traditional Korean and free improvisational styles.
Paul Garrin is an interdisciplinary artist and social entrepreneur whose work explores the social impact of technology and issues of media access, free speech, public/private space, and the digital divide. Starting as his assistant in 1981, Garrin eventually emerged as one of the most important collaborators of video art superstar Nam June Paik, working closely together from 1982 to 1996.
Sharon Grace is an American artist, currently a Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, who is known for initiating the use of many forms of electronic media based in audiovisual technology. Since 1970, Grace has worked with telecommunications as art, embedding interactive video and speech recognition in her work including video installation, electronic synthesis, interactive digital systems, and sculpture in stone and steel.
The Art Center Nabi (Korean: 아트센터나비) is an art museum in Seorin-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea. It was relocated to the 4th floor of SK building of SK Group in 2000 and reborn as digital art museum.
A video sculpture is a type of video installation that integrates video into an object, environment, site or performance. The nature of video sculpture is that it utilizes the material of video in an innovative way in space and time, different from the standard traditional narrative screening where the video has a beginning and end.
Douglas Matthew Davis, Jr. was an American artist, critic, teacher, and writer for among other publications Newsweek.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a resource for video and media art. An advocate of media art and artists since 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. EAI has supported the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.
TV Lab was a program founded at Thirteen/WNET public television station in 1972 by David Loxton with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts. The program provided artists with advanced video making equipment through an artist-in-residence program. Between 1975 and 1977, the Video Tape Review series was established and broadcast through TV Lab. David Loxton created TV Lab's Independent Documentary Fund in 1977, aiming to provide funding for the creation of independent documentaries. Unable to match funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the IDF and TV Lab lost support, eventually ending in 1984.
John G. Hanhardt is an American author, art historian, and curator of film and media arts. Hanhardt was the Consulting Senior Curator for Media Arts at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where he developed exhibitions, collections, and archives in film and the media arts. He is considered to be one of the leading scholars on video artist Nam June Paik.
Roh Soh-yeong is a South Korean art museum director. She is the founder and director of Art Center Nabi.
John Sanborn is a key member of the second wave of American video artists that includes Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Dara Birnbaum and Tony Oursler. Sanborn's body of work spans the early days of experimental video art in the 1970s through the heyday of MTV music/videos and interactive art to digital media art of today.
The More, the Better, alternatively referred to as Dadaikseon (Korean: 다다익선), is a video sculpture created by Nam June Paik for the purpose of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art during the 1988 Summer Olympics. The sculpture consists of a tower measuring 8.5 meters in height and 11 meters in diameter, adorned entirely with an impressive arrangement of 1,003 cathode ray tube (CRT) television monitors. The work still stands in the rotunda of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.