Samson Young, Altar Music(Liturgy for an indecisive Belliever), 2022, sound installation, Dimensions variable. ©Galerie Gisela Capitain and the artist. Photo: Simon Vogel, Cologne.
Nam June Paik Art Center presents “Big Brother Blockchain”, through August 18. “Big Brother Blockchain” reexamines contemporary art’s response to the drastic changes in the digital landscape in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Nam June Paik’s satellite project, Good Morning Mr. Orwell.
In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell foresaw Big Brother overlooking society while keeping itself hidden through technological developments, describing a dystopian near future stained with surveillance and control. Thirty-five years later, Paik saw the New Year’s Day of 1984 as an excellent opportunity to tell Orwell, “You were only half right.” That Orwell was only “half right” was demonstrated by Paik’s merging of avant-garde and pop art by connecting New York and Paris and swinging between warnings of the future and glamorous shows.
Forty years have passed since, and in 2024, we should follow Paik in answering the question of what kind of future we can read from the landscape of contemporary technology. It is unclear whether blockchain technology will be fully realized, yet it is still evolving. Whereas Big Brother symbolized an indeterminate fear toward technology as suppressing individual freedom, blockchain seeks to record and share all information transparently, based on trust built within communities.
If blockchains become the technology of the future that defies Big Brother, nodes involved in blockchains may take the place of centralized servers. Therefore, Big Brother Blockchain imagines the artists and artwork of the exhibition as blocks and audiences experiencing and sharing the exhibition as individual nodes. Most importantly, the nodes take crucial responsibility for sharing and distributing information in the blocks, a role that anyone can take part in.
The participating artists of “Big Brother Blockchain”—Chang Seo Young, Hong Minki, HWI, Jo Seungho, Kwon HeeSue, Lee Yanghee, SANGHEE, Hito Steyerl, Samson Young—embody the future of the contributors of Good Morning Mr. Orwell invited by Paik, such as the moderators of New York and Paris, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, John Cage, Oingo Boingo, and Merce Cunningham, among others. For this reason, their work engenders the dizziness of a déjà vu of the future and depicts an outlook for dance, songs, sound, media, technology, games, and labor.
The artists form a block that stores data of the future, which is then sent to all the nodes within the network. Nodes determine the validity of the future and, at the same time, record/remember everything. “Big Brother Blockchain” aims to discuss the future of technology, though yet to be realized entirely, symbolized by the blockchain. Just as Paik had attempted to transform the satellite’s purpose from control to communication, let us predict the possibility of altering the path of technology to a democratic one through the discussion of blockchains.
