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Moon is the Oldest AR (A Response to Nam June Paik)

Hannah B Higgins & Craig Saper

University of Illinois Chicago (IDEAS) & University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Language Literacy and Culture)

“Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965) is the name of an early video installation by Korean Fluxus artist Nam June Paik. For this benchmark video installation, Paik formed a circle of TV screens each showing one part of the lunar cycle. Standing in the middle, the rotation of the viewer animates the cycle. Paik was clearly interested in provoking disruptions to normally passive spectator behavior. This panel invites artists and scholars to address Paik’s moon, or any other work by the artist, from a variety of undertheorized perspectives including, but not limited to, the perspective of augmented reality technologies that predate or postdate TV, of intellectual challenges to the Enlightenment's artificial clarity, of his idea of a University of Avant-Garde Hinduism, or shifting definitions of the augmented real. Paik would not want his work to sit still in the confines of its historic moment, rather this panel instantiates how some media experiments cycle eternally like the moon. "Moon is the Oldest AR" seeks papers, performances and presentations in any format.