A Video Art Retrospective At MoMA Reveals The Utopian Hopes Behind Tech We Now Dread
On January 1, 1984, George Orwell was greeted by PBS Unparalleled. Orwell's death in 1950 was an uncomfortable one. As the author of 1984, he was Orwell's greatest hope in the mid-1980s. In Good Morning Mr. Orwell, video artist Nam June Paik attempted to bring a bad future back into the present.
In Orwell's science fiction, television was supposed to be the primary tool of political control, a propaganda transmission mechanism secretly combined with a surveillance system where the police were believed to be able to spy on individuals 24/7. Pike believed that television, on the contrary, could become a tool for cultural freedom.
"I want to show [television's] potential for communication, its potential as a tool for global peace and understanding," Paik said. "It can spread, it can cross international borders, it can provide negating information, it can even punch a hole in the Iron Curtain."
Good morning, Mr. Orwell showed that Pike is not alone. Broadcast live using an intercontinental satellite link allowing everyone from John Cage to Allen Ginsberg to Peter Gabriel and Oingo Boingo to participate simultaneously, the free programming is pre-broadcast by media from MTV to YouTube. The live audience of 25 million has surpassed the number of copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four that have been printed since it was first published in 1949.
Silenced for decades , Mr. Orwell recently returned to the public domain as part of a massive media retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Nearly forty years after the show went on the air, this rerun is not just a gift to art history. It also has a broad cultural interest questioning the utopian techno-dream of the 1980s in the way Pike questions Orwell's dystopian rhetoric.
Like visual literature, visual media art is interesting not only for what it expresses, but also for what it omits. The latter may be more important in retrospect because it may also reflect our blind spots.
Good morning, Mr. Orwell, we are witnessing a celebration of technological emancipation. At the height of the Cold War, when political boundaries seemed impenetrable and the gulf between East and West threatened a nuclear global apocalypse, live satellite broadcasts challenged geographic division and showed that nothing could stop people from uniting and finding a common purpose. Technology seemed to provide a solution to the problem at the time (while the real Orwellian state was hidden behind an Iron Curtain). The irony is that Bayek looked back and predicted the future. In response to Orwell's portrayal of television as a weapon to the enemy, Pike changed his attitude from friend to foe to foe.
As seen in the Good Morning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Orwell belongs to the whole genre of optimistic media art. This genre also includes the Stan Vanderbeek film Drum and a Hole in Space from 1964 to 1965, created in 1980 by Keith Galloway and Sherry Rabinowitz.
The first was the theatre, where people en masse immersed themselves in moving pictures from around the world. Considered the first node in a global network for the exchange of visual information, the goal of VanDerBeek's invention was to "present yourself to a world audience", and he considered it "an important step in achieving peaceful collaboration". Under VanDerBeek's direction, only one Drum Cinema was built. The Internet has made shared media ubiquitous - an immersive experience that takes place not in a physical location, but in the form of a media bubble.
The hole in space was conceptually, if not technically, simpler than the Kinodrom , with two television cameras and large screens on opposite sides of the road that drew people from 2,700 miles away for a virtual reunion. Passers-by were amazed, never suspecting that a hole in space would make time porous, forcing future hummingbirds to live in all time zones at the same time.
Neither Orwell nor Nam June Paik had any discernible influence on the creation of Movie-Drome or Hole-in-Space . These three works, which span twenty years and represent technological progress in the transition from local projection to satellite communication, are united by a tendency to see the present as extraordinary, defying history and moving forward. The past is necessarily invoked as the basis for substantiating innovations, but the scope of the problematic of the past narrows precisely at the moment when it should be widely reconsidered.
This blind spot applies not only to visionary media art, but also to innovative technologies in the commercial sector. The difference is that the latter, as a rule, are doomed to oblivion in landfills, while the former are kept in museums.
In a cultural archive such as the Museum of Modern Art, perspectives from the past still influence the future. They can influence the future forever by checking the data on tech bailout claims. Knowledge of history deepens problem space, providing a critical balance to unexpected consequences.
Good morning, Mr. Pike. Mr. Orwell is watching you.