Wake Up! It’s 2024 : 40th Anniversary of Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell

Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman shooting Joseph Beuys’s Homogeneous Infiltration for Cello on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, 1976.
Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman shooting Joseph Beuys’s Homogeneous Infiltration for Cello on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, 1976.

Wake Up! It’s 2024
40th Anniversary of Good Morning Mr. Orwell
Mar 21, 2024— Feb 23, 2025
Nam June Paik Art Center
Gyeonggi-do, Korea

Artist: Nam June Paik, Balming Tiger x Sungsil Ryu
Curator: Kim Yoonseo

“We want to have at least as much technic that we can hate the technic…
We want to have at least as much welfare, that we can despise the welfare.
We want to have at least as much peace that we can be bored with peace.”
—Nam June Paik, “Pensées 1965,” 1965

The special exhibition Wake Up! It’s 2024, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Good Morning Mr. Orwell, confronts the present through scenes of the past that correspond to emerging technologies. The exhibition title resets the US band Oingo Boingo’s song title Wake Up (It’s 1984) to 2024, released as part of CAVS Fellow Nam June Paik’s satellite project Good Morning Mr. Orwell in 1984. The message from forty years ago that commands us to wake up and counter Big Brother in a society of technological surveillance remains relevant today. This time of global crisis caused by the war arouses a sense of a déjà vu. The world is still at war.

In the year made famous by Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which envisioned a future society with incessant media surveillance and war, Paik presented the satellite broadcast as his response to the late Orwell and his novel. Good Morning Mr. Orwell, a live satellite television broadcast that linked New York and Paris in real time, transformed the technology of control that Orwell feared into a pleasant communication technology with the participation of 25 million viewers worldwide. Planned by Paik, the entertaining mix of the dance, song, poetry, and comedy of various cultures by artists around the world conveyed hope for a bright future instead of Orwell’s dystopia. Whereas technological networks like the telescreen in Orwell’s novel embody totalitarian surveillance that suppresses individuals, for Paik, it was a technology that helped to engage with people from other parts of the globe and enjoy diverse cultures. A satellite in the 1980s was the product of the Cold War and the crystallization of high technology built with a substantial amount of national funds that could only be accessed by a few broadcasters and NASA. Nevertheless, Paik constructed a satellite broadcast system as a technology bridging cultures across continents and realized it by communicating with many colleagues through art.

Today, the surveillance society forewarned by Orwell and Paik’s visions of global connection has all become our everyday lives. The exhibition defines today as the era of satellites and rediscovers the ultimate value of world peace that Paik’s satellite art Good Morning Mr. Orwell sought forty years ago. Today, when various satellites orbit around the earth, looking like stars in the sky, we should ask ourselves whether we genuinely use emerging technologies as the drivers of communication and peace before praising the satellite network’s utility in delivering the devastation of war in real-time.

Nam June Paik was a Fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1982. His practice included video, television, and sculpture.

Related Programming

Big Brother Blockchain
Mar 21— Aug 18, 2024
Nam June Paik Art Center

Today’s rapid technological advancements—represented by virtual environments of the metaverse and artificial intelligence—face varied views between fear and enthusiasm. 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.

Samson Young, Altar Music(Liturgy for an indecisive Belliever), 2022, sound installation, Dimensions variable Image courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain and the artist. Photo: Simon Vogel, Cologne. Courtesy of the Nam June Paik Art Center.

Related