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Korean-born American artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a pioneer in the fields of experimental music, video art, and new media. Paik is credited with establishing video as an artistic medium; his work transformed the landscape of twentieth-century art, and anticipated a number of developments in the twenty-first. Paik’s work is being reassessed by a new generation of scholars who are rethinking early media art in relation to embodiment, digital culture, politics, and aesthetics. Spurred by the publication of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings By Nam June Paik (The MIT Press, 2019), this panel presents a number of new approaches to Paik and his art.

Marina Isgro (Harvard Art Museums) will present an archival study of Paik’s time at WGBH Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a means of interrogating Paik’s larger project of “participation,” especially with respect to the Vietnam War. Global and personal conflict intersect in Johanna Gosse’s (University of Idaho) exploration of the fraught relationship between Paik and mail-art innovator Ray Johnson, and how a Cold War cultural politics of race and nation inflected their respective approaches to network aesthetics. Gregory Zinman (Georgia Tech) will examine Paik’s method of “me-mix,” by analyzing the ways the artist recycled material from his 1980s satellite works into his single-channel works and large-scale video walls of the 1990s. Hanna Hölling (University College London), who has published extensively on Paik and issues of new media preservation, will serve as the panel discussant.