The World's Complicity: Nam June Paik's Whole Earth Politics

This paper aims to rethink and recast Nam June Paik's concept of participatory art--by his readers, viewers, collaborators--as a whole world system central to both his theorization and invention of new media forms, and its historical tethering to the politics of communication, transmission, and the televisual in the increasingly networked culture of the 1960s-70s. More specifically, I compare his investigation of the utopian promise of satellite technology encircling the globe in his collaborative project at Documenta 6 (1977) where in he remixed imagery from the first international elite broadcast, Our World (first aired June 25, 1967). Unpacking this work next to, and against, the near-contemporaneity of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog (1966-1968), I examine both efforts as promoting didactic conceptions of community building via an exploration of new counter-cultural frontiers, with Paik's idea of a "total work" a more rigorously open and programmatic approach that seeks to shorten the distance between practioners, tinkers, world-savers and their imagined audiences.

I am open to presenting this topic in a number of different formats, including PechaKucha.