International symposium: “Gift of Nam June Paik 8 Reanimating NJP: Nam June Paik’s Interfaces”

Organizer: Nam June Paik Art Center

The Symposium “Gift of Nam June Paik 8 Reanimating NJP: Nam June Paik’s Interfaces” will be held in the auditorium of Gyeonggi Provincial Museum on Friday, September 9. In a short essay written in 1972 and 1973, Nam June Paik summarized a key underlying idea of his cross-disciplinary, intermedia projects as follows: “Research into the boundary regions between various fields, and complex problems of interfacing these different media and elements, such as music and visual art, hardware and software, electronics and humanities in the classical sense… this had been my major task since 1958.”

This symposium will illuminate a range of possible “interfaces” implied in Paik’s works and writings, while also seeking possible connections between the “interfaces” and the historical and contemporary trajectories of the media art and culture. Presenters will shed new light on Paik’s works and their underlying thoughts either in terms of rewriting the varying yet interrelated histories of the expansion of the moving image in the 1960s and ’70s, or in terms of articulating his influences on the aesthetics and politics of contemporary digital art and culture, which include the shifting ideas of information, archiving, transmission, and media. These two lines of investigation ultimately aim to reanimate Paik, giving his works and ideas new images and movements of thought (Gilles Deleuze).

Program

10:30–11am
Registration

11–11:30am
Opening address: Jinsuk Suh (Director, Nam June Paik Art Center)
Introduction: Jihoon Kim (Symposium Organizer & Assistant Professor, Chung-ang University)

Session I
Moderator: Kyunghwa Ahn (Chief Curator, Nam June Paik Art Center)

11:30am–12pm
Fluid Animation: Paik and the Postwar Kinetic Imaginary
Andrew V. Uroskie (Associate Professor, Stony Brook University, New York)

12–12:30pm
Global Groove: Nam June Paik’s Electronic Fluxus Objects
Im Sue Lee (Visiting Professor, Korean National University of Arts)

12:30–1pm
Nam June Paik’s “Sloppy Machine”: The Development of the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer
Chris Meigh-Andrews (Emeritus Professor, University of Central Lancashire)

1–2:30pm
Lunch break

Session II
Moderator: Yeon Shim Chung (Associate Professor, Hongik University)

2:30–3pm
Precious Error: Nam June Paik’s Computational Imaginary
Zabet Patterson (Associate Professor, Stony Brook University, New York)

3–3:30pm
Electric Now Indigo Blue: Synthetic Color and Video Synthesis, circa 1969
Carolyn L. Kane (Assistant Professor, Ryerson University)

3:30–4pm
Electronic Superhighway: Nam June Paik and the Infrastructure of Circulation
Maeve Connolly (Lecturer, Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology)

4–4:30pm
Mediating States of Media: Nam June Paik’s Art of (Im)Mediation
Yung Bin Kwak (art critic)

4:30–4:50pm
Coffee break

4:50–5:50pm
Roundtable and floor discussion
Jihoon Kim, Hee-Young Kim (Associate Professor, Kookmin University) Gyung Eun Oh (Visiting Prefessor, Ewha Womans University), all speakers

5:50–6pm
Closing remarks

For press inquiries, contact:
press [​at​] njpartcenter.kr / T +82 31 201 8559 / F +82 31 201 8531

Nam June Paik Art Center
10 Paiknamjune-ro, Giheung-gu
Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do
17068
Korea