CK: Has Paik's dream of an
electronic artist network been realized with the internet?
JH:
There's a dynamic dialogue between artists and technology and artists are
challenged by new media developments. A historical look back over the 20th
century, from the moving image and invention of cinema to the development
of the electronic image and interactive art shows a fundamental
transformation of our visual culture. The history of the arts will be
rewritten through the moving image. Paik predicted we'd become a media
culture. This springs from ideas articulated with Paik's first show at the
Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963. Here he is with Global
Groove 2004 in Berlin, returning to Germany with a new work and
celebrating the medium he first took on. Back then, there was no
Porta-Pack, there was just television - Paik broke into it and transformed
it.
CK: As video art becomes established, has it become
complacent?
JH: Video art was a radical transformation of an
institution: television. The Porta-Pack recorder was seized upon by Paik
and other artists as a new instrument and tool. Video became an accepted
and accessible medium; it fused digitally with film. But video also bears
a relation to new media and installation, developments Caitlin has been
involved with in points of radical departure. Within that history, there's
a continuing challenge and transformation.
John Hanhardt and Caitlin Jones
CJ:
Video artists are often working as installation artists, the moving image has
become another tool and an important part of the language. There are also
fragility issues inherent in video and its presentation. At the Guggenheim
a group called the Variable Media Network is looking to artists to guide
us in terms of how they want their work created in the 70s to change over
time to set parameters for exhibition.
CK: Caitlin, you
wrote about Paik's proposal of a
"Video Common Market" where, as Paik said, the goal was to
"strip the hieratic monism of TV culture and promote the free flow of
video information through an inexpensive barter system or convenient free
market." In what way does the internet deliver this promise and in what
way is it failing?
CJ: It opens more channels for
distribution, but as we see in the music, peer to peer file sharing, we
won't see that kind of free flow of information.
CK: As
you've said, we're in a "post-
Napster world."
CJ: It's a hot issue. One of the
most interesting things is this concept of copy-left or
Creative Commons, which is a copyright-licensing group started in 2001.
Housed now at Stanford Law School
, they've come up with a concept for artists, musicians and software
developers
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to register a legally binding agreement that states to
varying degrees, "my work is to be shared forever, it is free for whomever
wants to use it, it is never to be copyrighted, you can take this piece
and do with it whatever you want." It's opening up, in a positive way,
sharing information.
Global Groove 2004 at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin: setting up the
exhibition.
CK:
That's the true use of "public domain." Global Groove is
described as providing "a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow." The
concept of "tomorrow" is forever linked to the modernist dream of the 20th
century, yet all those "tomorrows" have arrived, while the psychological
and emotional transformation Paik hoped for is still to come.
JH:
Paik thinks about tomorrow through his art. It's his fundamental humanism and
playfulness in engaging an audience. He brought a new kind of electronic
canvas to the moving image. Looking into the future, Paik sees all the
parts reanimated by new ways of working with the moving image as it
becomes part of our domestic environment. It's a utopian impulse.
CK: Caitlin, you've written about the elimination of the middleman and
Paik's Video Common Market.
CJ: A very contemporary example
of this not needing a middle man, can be seen with
DJ Danger Mouse and the Grey Album, where he took the
Beatles' White Album and
Jay-Z's Black Album and remixed them to be the Grey Album
. He didn't release it as a CD, but free over the internet, and within a
week EMI , who owns the rights to
The White Album, ordered a cease-and-desist letter. The internet community
banded behind him and had Grey Tuesday, where sites all over the internet
offered the Grey Album for download. The middleman is definitely
out there, but people are working at getting around it.
JH:
There was a real sense in Nam June's community of sharing - it was very
much a part of his generous spirit as a new generation finds ways to
collaborate and expand.
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