CAMP After Media Promises

Artist: CAMP, the winner of Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2020
Curator: Kim Seong Eun

Nam June Paik Art Center presents the exhibition of CAMP, who are the seventh Nam June Paik Art Center Prize winner, from November 25, 2021 to February 27, 2022. CAMP is a Mumbai-based collaborative studio, and works with film, video, electronic media and public art forms, exploring various media technologies through research, infrastructural interventions, presentation, and documentation. The exhibition’s title, CAMP After Media Promises, is one of the more than 100,000 backronyms for CAMP, produced by a computer script, on their first website in 2007. Their methods are about taking technology of all kinds in unfamiliar and often utopian directions with sharp gestures, drawing energy from their understandings.

The contextually rich, environment-shifting media work of CAMP relocates and redefines the categories of observer, subject, network, database, image and sequence, by stealing power, time and access from existing megastructures. CAMP’s work goes to the heart of what is at stake when such systems overlap our living systems, and our value systems. Their after-proposals are responses to a change in conditions and horizons, immediate or longer-term, and a non-acceptance of the current, limited use of any technology. After–cable TV, after-electrification, after-internet, after-CCTV are not post- or going past, rather they are ideas and actions that breed in these intersecting environments, disturb their promises, and encrust them with possibilities. We are asked to remember many “promises of media,” and the politics and geography of both those words.

For this exhibition, CAMP presents an essay through their practice in a large-format, eight-screen sync-video environment. By not merely presenting a series of works, by making it a journey through the inside and outside of artworks, this format is their response to the question of the “exhibition” today. They explore a series of interventions, from a TV station inside a market in 2004, to a new film being shot on CCTV in Mumbai in 2021. For CAMP “media” is just another word for environments that surround and sustain us. Their images and arrangements are thus shifts in the environment, at certain crossings of time, space and opportunity, and now as another wave of digital technology passes through us. This exhibition includes a new commission by Nam June Paik Art Center drawing on the cinematography of CCTV in Seoul (with artists Seoul Express and Taeyoon Choi) at cctv.camp, and their proposal of an open-access application for Nam June Paik Art Center Video Archive (with 0x2620) at njp.ma. In parallel, a microsite at njpcamp.kr is open as a web portal of the exhibition bringing a new experiential dimension to it.

At the exhibition’s opening on November 25, artists Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran from CAMP give a lecture “Panorama-rama” and then have a conversation with collaborating artists Taeyoon Choi, and Youjin Jeon and Minki Hong from Seoul Express on “Choreographed Camera TV” In addition to this exhibition, Nam June Paik Art Center presents the symposium “Video Digital Commons” from November 17 to 27. This symposium not only introduces variations of the digital archive, but also addresses the possibility of Paik’s Video Study, a new online streaming system of Nam June Paik Art Center Video Archive. Speakers are CAMP, Wolfgang Ernst, Hanna B. Hölling, Hyun Seewon, Alexandra Juhasz, Sera Jung, Ma Jung Yeon, and Park Sang Ae. A roundtable discussion where CAMP takes part is broadcast live at 3pm on Saturday, November 27.