Opened January 29, 2008

Public Space Exhibition
"Good Morning Mr. Orwell" by Nam June Paik

Cyberspace Exhibition
Art and Pop Culture in a Modern Mix for the Electronic Superhighway

A 45-minute exhibition of contemporary art that is relevant to some of the predictions, ideas and creative influence of pioneer video artist Nam June Paik. It features visual and performing artists ...Graciela Taquini and Anabel Vanoni (Ar), Mark Amerika, Robert Wilson, davidjr.com, Andrea Ackerman (US), Jeremy Gardiner (UK), Marcia Grostein (Br), John Bruneau and James Morgan (US), Semi Ryu (Kr), Marty St. James (UK), Kurt Ralske, Roy Volkmann, Elisa Monte Dance Company, Joe Bergen (US), Isabelle O'Connell (Ir), Jacob Ter Veldhuis (Nl), Joan La Barbara, Bret Mosley (US), Iannis Xenakis (Gr)… and an entertaining mix of fashion and celebrity pop culture.

Cyberspace Exhibition schedule: January 29 - April 24, presented on StreamingMuseum.org and Second Life Ars Virtua New Media Center. Also on view in the public space at Federation Square, January 29 - April 24.

The exhibition opens with Sisifa by Graciela Taquini, one of South America’s leading new media curators and an award winning video artist, who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In a humorous performance, Argentine performance artist Anabel Vanoni, breaks the glass screen between the real and virtual world of TV into which she falls. Sisifa was presented at the 2007 FemLink video festival in Paris.

Nam June Paik:
“I used the term “information superhighway” in a study I wrote for the Rockefeller foundation in 1974. I thought: if you create a highway, then people are going to invent cars. That’s dialectics. If you create electronic highways, something has to happen.”

Mark America, pioneer digital artist and experimental writer created Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix), with fellow members of DJRABBI, a digital art collective - The pHarmanaut (Trace Reddell) who produced the sound mixes, and Rick Silva aka Cuechamp created the visual remixes. SOS is a ten-minute DVD art-loop (3 minutes excerpt in this exhibition) that uses source material from the writing, images, recordings, and other psychogeographical wanderings of arch-Situationist and French philosopher Guy Debord. "[SOS] is a furious collage of black and white images (and sudden flarings of colour) and theory-saturated subtitles that you can only grasp at as they roll by, occasionally recognize, and go with the odd beauty of their flow. It's appropriately playful, pulsing, pop-ish and engrossing-the hypertext crowd stoked on Godard. The rapid editing and churning information flow reflects the struggle to connect with global politics, the impossibility of slowing down, but at the same time conveys a manic playfulness, a creative resistance against considerable odds." RealTime magazine

Kurt Ralske’s Time Square Time Share 2006, the first commissioned work by Streaming Museum, was created with Ralske’s custom software. This video of inverted movements was filmed in Times Square, New York City. Objects of motion (people walking, vehicles in motion) are still, and that which is normally still (buildings and streets) is in motion. The impulse to stop time is connected with sentimentality, nostalgia, and magical thinking. It is a common response to the universally human experience of loss and mortality.

Nam June Paik:
A New Design for TV Chair 1973. How soon TV-chair will be available in most museums? How soon artists will have their own TV channels? How soon wall-to-wall TV for video art will be installed in most homes?

Robert Wilson, considered the world’s foremost vanguard theater artist (John Rockwell, New York Times), crosses into pop culture’s newest frontier – the Internet. Wilson reached millions of viewers and a pop culture demographic in this interview which was uploaded to YouTube. Interviewer/web videomaker, davidjr.com, received “Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine First Annual Web Superstars Award …for Making People Talk”.

Dutch avant pop composer JacobTV created The Body of Your Dreams in 2003 for piano and taped voice. This performance by Irish pianist and new music advocate, Isabelle O'Connell, is interwoven with an on-the-scene video by davidjr.com featuring pop culture fashion and celebrities that underscores the humorous text in this fast paced piece about today’s obsession with looking good. The Body of Your Dreams is available on JacobTV’s Boombox Holland label. O’Connell’s concert performance was produced by Jessica Schmitz PKN Productions at Chelsea Art Museum in December 2007.

Nam June Paik:
“Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.”

Andrea Ackerman’s Rose Breathing, a 3D computer animation of a synthetic rose that rhythmically opens and closes in human-like respiration. The viewer's own breathing becomes entrained with the undulating rose. This animation creates a meditative experience and brings a new subtle slow, deep and complex emotionality to a 3D character. Ackerman’s work is created at the intersection of technology, nature, aesthetics, and ethics. She imbues objects with qualities not ordinarily occurring in nature, creating a synthetic nature.

Paik was influenced by the rituals of the shamans in his native Korea, who communicate with the spirits, bridging between the visible and invisible worlds. TV Garden, The Moon is the Oldest TV, TV Buddha, and many other works emerged in response to this.

Joan La Barbara, new music composer, singer and pioneer of extended vocal techniques, has collaborated with leading contemporary composers including Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, Morton Subotnick, and John Cage. Her composition ShamanSong 1998 (New World Records) for voices, percussion, cello, gender, electronic keyboard, music box, synthesizers and computer is presented in ensemble with Marcia Grostein’s haunting video, Being There 2006. Grostein’s art enters the realm of inner senses and states of consciousness, embodying the fragile balance of nature and the real world. Grostein’s video art together with La Barbara’s music emit shamanistic powers.

Nam June Paik:
“Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet is you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.”

John Bruneau (Joe Languis) and James Morgan (Rubaiyat Shatner), created Looks Very Tidy, which depicts avatar Rubaiyat Shatner engaged in the human housekeeping activity of vacuuming the interior of the Ars Virtua Gallery and New Media Center located in the virtual world, Second Life. A resident robot is also vacuuming haphazardly, and to no effect.

Paik juxtaposed the art and performances of traditional cultures with technology which symbolized his ideas about co-existence and global connectivity.

Koktoo Gaksi 1999 by Korean artist Semi Ryu, is an animated traditional Korean marionette performance. Ryu’s 3D animations and computer interactive performances connect digital technology with eastern philosophy. Her work focuses on the intimate relationship of human and computer by using the forms of traditional puppetry and shamanic ritual.

Paik made artworks in homage to his friends John Cage and Joseph Beuys with whom he collaborated in fluxus works that explored the notions of chance and an anti-art and anti-convention sensibility.

Marty St. James, London-based international artist who works in performance art, video art and drawing, exploring the physical, the electric and the pencil. He is interested in a condition, which he calls “somewhere between the moving and the static.” Homage, 2006, is a fluxus-based performance video by St. James, in homage to all fedora hats, including his own, and those who wear them, including conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. To Beuys, the artist as a shaman is a point of contact with the spiritual roots that nourish human existence. Like a shaman, Beuys wore emblems of his role, most particularly a flat brimmed felt hat that became his most identifiable characteristic. Beuys’ hat met St. James’s on a number of occasions.

Word images for the electronic superhighway by experimental writer and new media artist, Mark Amerika - Open Source. Timeless Time. Vision Links. Body Network. Bio Light. Image Currency. Memory Waves – are underscored with a performance of an excerpt from Iannis Xenakis’ Rebonds (B) 1988 by Joe Bergen.

In Codework, 2005, Mark Amerika’s painterly video style and sounds created with Chad Mossholder, was developed from abstract motion image sequences of footage shot in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hawaii, and the Australian Outback during a tour through Japan and Europe as a VJ in museums, universities, festivals, and techno-clubs. It tells the story of the Digital Thoughtographer, an artificial intelligence living in the digital afterlife. Curators and directors at the museum exhibitions of the work convey the same phenomenon: a rise in the number of visitors who never go to art venues but come from other parts of the youth culture, particularly club, DJ/VJ, and rave culture, and who are then introduced to other aspects of the host's art collection.

Jeremy Gardiner and Anthony Head created Purbeck Light Years, an interactive virtual environment, a mixture of both old and new, hybrid techniques that combine characteristics of drawing, painting, computer animation, immersive virtual reality and ambient sound. Inside this virtual space is re-imagined a whole world, a topographical landscape of Corfe Castle in Dorset. England. Gardiner and Head won the Peterborough Art prize in 2003 for Purbeck Light Years which they created in Imaginalis, the organization they founded to create work that converges technologies.

Paik’s impulse was that the art together with media could contribute to cultural understanding and tolerance.

Robert Wilson talks about the arts as a vehicle of peace. “Politics and religion often divide men, but spirituality can bring men together” and this can be found in a body of music that he feels is highly appropriate and much needed voice for today and needs to be heard at the centers of conflict around the world. The Negro Spiritual.

Bret Mosley performs Amazing Grace (Woodstock Music Works 2007). The song has particular significance because in 1779 John Newton, the captain of a slave ship, heard this melody, which is a West African sorrow chant, and set his words to it. The photographs accompanying this performance are by Roy Volkmann who has captured the amazing grace in the dancers of the Elisa Monte Dance Company, New York.