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Hi Jon Perhaps I do let Tate off too easy by expecting not to be able to touch - probably because I am also taking for granted that I work at FACT, only a few blocks down the road from Tate, where you can see artists tinkering with technologies in ways that would make Nam June Paik smile almost every day here. The exhibition is in two parts - Tate approached FACT as an exhibition partner for this specific reason, that we show artists and artworks that are the living legacy of his work and are set up for presenting work that is interactive and participatory. There are far fewer works here but you can crawl under Laser Cone, flick through his video catalog and a group of young people have made an installation in response that lets you magnetize some TVs and play TV instruments. It was in a sense a 'dual strategy approach' then, albeit in a different way than presenting two versions of a single work. On the flipside, I suspect it would be difficult (or at least prohibitively expensive) for us at FACT to present many of these 'originals' (however many versions of them) because we aren't climate controlled and we don't normally have the extremely high level of rigidity that institutions like Tate do for protecting the works. In that way I appreciate that Tate shows things that institutions like FACT can't. And call me a sucker but when NJP's nephew Ken introduced the exhibition and all of a sudden it dawned on me that Nam June Paik, someone whose personality seemed so vibrant, is really gone (otherwise he'd perhaps have been introducing the show himself), it made me want to see some of the things he'd built with his two hands all the more (or with his technician's hands or assistant's hands, somehow I don't mind even this). If I had to choose for one or the other to exist in the world, I'd without a doubt choose the participatory over the object. But luckily I don't have to because I can participate elsewhere. (I saw a small show last year where a student artist had created a Random Access installation seemingly without even realizing it was near identical to an existing work, so I had a great play around with that!). I will not let them off so easy for including Zen for Film running off a DVD loop and data projector though. If they were going to transfer an 'original' to another format anyway, why not just run a new blank film print? That seemed particularly strange to me, as it is so much about the materiality of the film in the space... I am assuming the estate made this choice, therefore it was Paik's wish? Or perhaps a condition of the sale of the original print? Strange in any case. It would be interesting to compare the Guggenheim and Tate shows, as they are under two different scenarios - one when the artist was alive, and could talk to the curators and staff; and one where he isn't, and the estate is left to represent his wishes (which I am sure they talked at length to him about before his death). I wonder if he was alive, if the show would have looked any different. Best, Heather On 19/01/2011 11:24, Jon Ippolito wrote: > I was happy to read in Sarah's account of the Paik show at the Tate the lingering after-effects of Paik's wacky and winning persona, especially the fact that "everyone thought they were his best friend." Her anecdote about staff removing dead fish from the Video Fish tank reminded me of one of my favorite Paik performances, where he handed out dried fish bought in Chinatown at the 7th New York Avant-Garde Festival with instructions to "return the fish" to the water by throwing it in the Hudson. > > Caroline Langill mentioned Sarah Resnick's DOCAM presentation on conserving a Paik modified TV. The "TV Repair Man" she referred to (love that Pythonesque phrase) is "CT Lui," a Chinese immigrant with an equipment supply store on Murray Street and a keen eye for ancient electronics. When I last visited Lui's place, it was a small shop chock full of electronic junk, so I was surprised to learn from Google that Lui has a Web site; evidently he's quite proud of his Chinese military lineage: > > http://www.ctlny.com/about/about.html > > I was also glad to learn that the Tate exhibited Random Access, which is perhaps my favorite work of media art: > > On Jan 5, 2011, Sarah wrote: > >> At Tate the show is, of course, geared towards the museum object - none >> of his interactive works are recreated, so it is the original objects we >> have on display to look at and not touch. I wished that I could have >> played with the magnets on a recreated Magnet TV or run a tape head >> across Random Access to hear a sound, but I expected this and do feel >> delight in seeing 'the original'. >> > To create Random Access, Paik ripped a playback head out of a reel-to-reel audio player, affixed it to a wand, and wired the wand to speakers. He then cut the audio tape into segments and stuck them on a nearby wall. Visitors could run the wand across the various segments in whatever direction or speed they liked. The work's participatory aesthetic and web-like installation anticipated countless new media tropes, including audio remix, random-access memory, DIY media, and hypermedia. Manfred Montwe took some nice photos of the original 1963 installation: > > http://telematic.walkerart.org/overview/overview_ippolito.html > > Resnick quoted Paik's studio lead, Jon Huffman, as saying the appearance of the television set for Untitled (1968) was less important than its construction--something I would think is self-evident for Random Access as well. In fact, for The Worlds of Nam June Paik in 2000, Jon Huffman and CT Lui worked with the Guggenheim's John Hanhardt, Paul Kuranko, and me to build *two* versions of Random Access for the exhibition. The idea was that if one died while visitors were using it, we could swap out it out for the second while the first was being repaired. (We left the same tape on the wall for convenience.) > > It's not unheard of to create a copy of a work for exhibition, but what may surprise some people in the context of Sarah's remarks above is the fact that the two versions of the Random Access apparatus on the pedastal looked completely different. If memory serves, they were different sizes, and one had a black and brown finish, the other a gray or white exterior. (They were basically whatever Lui could dig out of his shelves from the period of reel-to-reel decks with a certain type of playback head--and that still worked!) In other words, for the artist and the curators of this exhibition, the operation of the work was more important than its looks--and to judge from their reaction, the audience concurred. > > So I'm sorry to hear that we now "expect" not to be able to touch works that were originally all about participation, and that indeed we still think in terms of "the original" when it comes to media art. I'll bet dollars to donuts that the "original" at the Tate isn't one we showed at the Guggenheim or the one in Montwe's photos, but a "new" original. > > Sure, there will eventually come a sad day when CT Lui shutters his shop, and voltage differences or equipment degradation prevent anyone from reinstalling Random Access using reel-to-reel audio with a detachable playback head. But I don't think we're there yet, and even when we are, we can choose to augment our display of inert vintage hardware with creative approaches like reinterpretation. > > A couple years after the Worlds of Nam June Paik, Dawn Steeves and Justin Tayler, two undergrads in my New Media department, asked if they could reinterpret Random Access using contempory hardware--a CD boombox. I knew that solid-state components can't be wrangled like analog decks, but I didn't want to discourage them. So I said, sure, give it a try. They came back a week later to tell me that they never managed to recover function of the laser diode after prying it out of the box, but they did accidentally discover an unexpected effect: when one of them received a call from the other with two mobile phones near the device, the signal briefly activated the drive motor and spun the disk a turn or two. So for their final project, they outfitted the CD drive with a hammer and bell, and repeatedly triggered orbits of the disk by calling each other on speed dial according to a certain "score." The result was chamber music for two cell phones and a ruined boombox. > > I knew somewhere Nam June was smiling. > > jon -- Heather Corcoran Curator FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) 88 Wood Street Liverpool, UK L1 4DQ w: http://www.fact.co.uk e: [log in to unmask] t: +44 (0)151 707 4425 m: +44 (0)798 336 4707 f: +44 (0)151 707 4445