麻豆传媒

THE legacy of Nam June Paik is impressive. He is the man who predicted the internet, YouTube, remote education courses and many other icons of our information age. He died in 2006, living long enough to see some of his ideas start to become the drivers of today.

He was an artist who spent much time engineering, dismantling, reusing and swapping out components. He often replaced old tech with better tech, delivering what he could of his vision with the components available: cathode ray tube TVs, neon, copper, FORTRAN punch cards. A video synthesiser he designed with Tokyo artist-engineer Shuya Abe in 1969 created the psychedelic video effects to music programme Top of the Pops in the UK and the MTV channel.

A fascinating retrospective at London鈥檚 Tate Modern celebrates all this 鈥� and his involvement with that loose confederacy of artist-anarchists known as Fluxus. Paik, born in what is now Seoul in 1932 during the Japanese occupation of Korea, was educated in Germany, where he met Fluxus composer John Cage and also the legendary Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. (Yoko Ono was a patron of Fluxus; David Bowie and Laurie Anderson were hangers-on.)

Beneath Paik鈥檚 celebrated, and celebrity-stuffed, concerts, openings and 鈥渉appenings鈥�, there is what amounts, in the absence of Paik鈥檚 controlling intelligence, to a pile of junk. More than 660 televisions, some broken. A black box the size of a double refrigerator, containing the hardware to drive one of Paik鈥檚 massive 鈥渕atrices鈥�, Megatron/Matrix, an eight-channel, 215-screen video wall. It is in pieces now, a nightmare to catalogue, never mind reconstruct, stored in innumerable tea chests at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

鈥淧aik鈥檚 utopia saw telecommunications become a springboard for new and surprising human endeavours鈥�

The trick for Saisha Grayson and Lynn Putney at the Smithsonian was to distinguish the raw material of Paik鈥檚 work from the work itself. Then curators like Sook-Kyung Lee at Tate Modern had to interpret it for a new generation, using new tech. This is because what Paik used to make his art is likely to end up in the bin. Consumer electronics aren鈥檛 like painters鈥� pigments, which can be analysed and copied, or sculptors鈥� marble, which may be repairable.

鈥淭hrough Paik鈥檚 estate, we are getting advice and guidance about what the artist really intended,鈥� says Lee, 鈥渢hen we are simulating those things with new technology.鈥�

Paik鈥檚 video walls (the works for which he is best remembered) are monstrously heavy and absurdly delicate. But the Tate has managed to recreate his Sistine Chapel for this show. Video projectors fill a room with a blizzard of cultural and pop-cultural imagery, a visual melting pot reflective of Paik鈥檚 vision of a tech utopia, in which 鈥渢elecommunication will become our springboard for new and surprising human endeavors鈥�. The projectors are new, but the feel of this recreated piece isn鈥檛 so very different to that of the original.

To stand here, bombarded by images of Bowie, President Nixon, Mongolian throat singers and other flitting, flickering icons of Paik鈥檚 madcap vision, is to recall our (mostly broken) dreams for the information age: 鈥淰ideo-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television鈥� and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an 鈥榚xpanded-media鈥� phone system with thousands of novel uses,鈥� in 1974, 鈥渘ot only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself.鈥�