This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.
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Author: Isabella Altoe, PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies Program, Queen's University, Ontario
In a world facing an ecological crisis, creating a new relationship with nature has become essential.
For contemporary artists, this challenge involves not only responding to the climate crisis through esthetic expression, but also collaborating with other species to generate new connections between humans and non-human life forms.
The works of artists such as Hong Kong-based Zheng Bo and Dan Lie, a Brazilian artist based in Berlin, rely on plants, soil, bacteria and other species as collaborators. These artists invite viewers to think about the interconnectedness of culture and the environment.
Such practices are commonly known as environmental art or eco-art — but I particularly like to call it multispecies art. This form of art, which brings living beings into gallery and museum spaces, isn’t new in the history of contemporary art.
In 1974, the South Korean artist Nam June Paik, more commonly known as the “father of video art,” created the pioneering multimedia installation TV Garden. Fifty years after its creation, as the circuit of contemporary art flourishes with collaborations across species, it’s a good moment to look back at Paik’s seminal work.
Relationship between nature and technology
Paik’s pioneering contributions proposed new ways to understand the relationship between nature and technology at a time when these divisions were strongly reinforced. In TV Garden, plants are placed alongside dozens of TV monitors showing Paik’s video Global Groove (1973). The video is a visual mix combining performers from all around the world dancing in front of a green screen.
The blend of plants, television and moving images creates a unique garden that has been shown in various galleries and museums over the years. TV Garden is currently exhibited as a permanent installation at the Nam June Paik Art Center, just outside of Seoul.
Engaging with electronic communications
Throughout his career, Paik played with electronic images, offering the public new ways to understand technology through prepared TV sets, global broadcasts, video installations and live performances.
In his most famous works, Paik encouraged the public to actively engage with electronic communications systems. The installation Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995), on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., recreates a TV map of the United States with neon lights and a 51-channel video installation. A closed-circuit camera allows viewers to see themselves in real-time in the piece.
In the live broadcast Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1985), Paik aired a live show featuring music videos, performances, video art and more on public television. In both works, the artist challenged the separation of local and global.
As Paik acknowledged, his view on technology is indebted to the work of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Paik was influenced by McLuhan’s notion of global village: the promise that new media technologies would be able to connect people all over the world, diminishing barriers between countries.
This idea of global interconnectedness is expanded in TV Garden. Here, not only are people from different countries coming together in a singular community; multiple species are added to the equation, creating an environment populated by human and non-human forms of expression. The plants rooted in the soil are inhabited by other living organisms, such as bacteria and fungi. Visitors are invited to engage in an art piece that is fully alive.
Paik’s more traditional video and sculptural work gave us a glimpse of a future in which communication technologies would dissolve barriers between people.
TV Garden went further, embracing different forms of life to demonstrate how art can also break the barriers that separate (a certain idea of) nature from (a certain idea of) humans.
Technology as part of nature
TV Garden is considered the first and most relevant of Paik’s works to combine technological devices with natural beings, a bold attempt for a time when these elements were seen as completely separate.
But Paik’s unique approach to technology never excluded ecological interests, meaning the study of how organisms and their environment interact. Quite the opposite. Underscoring the living, ever-changing qualities of electronic media, he famously stated:
“My experimental TV is not always interesting but not always uninteresting. Like nature, which is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes.”
By creating a garden that brings together natural and artificial elements, Paik attempted to show how these two apparently opposing forces can in fact be part of the same world — where technological development is as organic to human life as plants.
Embracing dichotomies
A first glance at TV Garden gives us the impression the TVs have been misplaced amid the plants. The colourful videos, flickering on the glowing screens, stand in stark contrast to the apparent stillness of the plants. But to Paik, this clear esthetic disjunction between natural and artificial elements serves to communicate how technology becomes part of the ecology of the garden through difference.
TV Garden embraces these apparent dichotomies, urging us to accept that, while there are clear distinctions between organic and electronic components, it does not mean they cannot coexist.
As a pocket ecosystem that is not purely natural, but also not entirely fabricated, TV Garden reveals how nature is never “untouched.” Our understanding of nature, or our interaction with many living forms in our environments, is always shaped by a particular interpretive lens.
Paik is renowned for his visionary take on new technologies, but there’s so much more we can learn from his work.
The world Paik lived in half a century ago is very different from the one we’re experiencing now. But TV Garden anticipated pressing environmental discussions. Paik’s work gestures towards an environment built from collaboration across species. Today, philosophers like Donna Haraway highlight the importance of looking at at other beings as our companions.
What is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial?’
Paik’s work also challenged the boundaries between nature and culture. The strict divide between what is natural and what is artificial in western societies has long contributed to a dissociation from nature.
After Paik, many artists have questioned this divide and invited the public to acknowledge how human existence is intrinsically connected to the living environment. This appears, for instance, in the work of Brazilian artist Maurício Chades, who collaborates with humans, earthworms and soil to create sculptures that are also composting mechanisms.
TV Garden is more than a multimedia installation that nods to a future where communication connects all cultures. It’s a multispecies installation, which, for 50 years, has signalled that connected cultures can only exist through the connection of all kinds of beings.
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Isabella Altoe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article: https://theconversation.com/a-tv-garden-how-video-artist-nam-june-paik-anticipated-pressing-environmental-questions-242104
Isabella Altoe, PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies Program, Queen's University, Ontario, The Conversation
