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“Good morning Mr. Orwell” is a piece which uses the satellite technology to create interactive performances, linking different stages in different parts of the world. Combination of broadcast footage of live programs in New York and Paris involves video interventions using the Paik-Video Synthesizer which allowed the artist to alter and manipulate existing video images.

 

(watch 6:30 , 39:00 , 51:20)

Paik-Video Synthesizer

                

This program was done to demonstrate the benign and positive effects of technology on our lives as opposed to George Orwell’s dystopian view of technological advances on the future society as described in his novel 1984 where television is seen as a negative medium, useful for dictators or politicians for one-way communication.

The 1 hr long cross-country broadcast on New Year’s Day symbolises how television can cross borders and provide liberating information-communication service. It also showcases the spontaneity and immediacy of live social broadcasting with the intersection of experimental art where the hitches, glitches, delays, and improvisations (inevitable technical difficulties) play a part in the live broadcasting.

 

Merce Cunningham dance: 

 

Delayed footage of the dance was underlaid, creating an illusion of him dancing with himself in two ‘time frames’ in real time.

Charlotte Moorman playing the TV cello: 

The re-enactment of TV Cello by Charlotte Moorman also distorts space when we see the host George Plimpton appearing in both our television screens and in the TV Cello at the same time, forming a new composite image.

Idea of a third space?

The idea of a third space is formed where different performance segments with asynchronous elements are put together and displayed as an output. Back then in 1984, it allowed people all over the world to see satellite broadcast as more than just a tool to disseminate live/important news, it became a medium for collaborative artwork to take place.

The collective narrative presented will be heavily dependent on the responses of both the participants in the first space (host, artists, and musicians, dancers etc) and third space (live stream viewers). The constantly changing aesthetic can potentially change viewers’ perceptions of a normal television and begin to view it as an artistic medium. More importantly, he showed that we can overcome time difference and spatial limitations with technology.

 

References:

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-paik-nam-june- artworks.htm

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/goog-morning/

https://www.eai.org/titles/good-morning-mr-orwell.html

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell: Nam June Paik’s Avant-Garde New Year’s Celebration with Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Peter Gabriel & More

http://nightflight.com/revisiting-good-morning-mr-orwell-nam-june-paiks-rebuttal-to-orwells-dystopian-vision-on-the-first-day-of-1984/

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/paik-abe-synthesizer/

https://www.n3krozoft.com/_xxbcf67373.TMP/tv/paik_abe_synthesizer.html  (Read this to know how the synthesizer works)

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How might the open source system of sharing and collective narrative be a creative inspiration and useful approach for your work as an artist or designer?

 

Open source has the power of inclusivity that eliminates distance, which is a barrier for communication between people worldwide.[1] It provides a platform for users to collaborate more easily through the ability to share content.[2] The huge open sources available online can allow us to freely appropriate and modify a work, be it to integrate it into a larger project or create a new artwork using the original as an inspiration. This serves as a convenient platform between artists, designers and creators to exchange countless new ideas within the society that push the boundaries of technological advancement while building on the foundation of the old. To some extent, we can also somewhat preserve our artwork online due to the massive amount of storage made available.[3]

Available sharing platforms such as Flickr and Pinterest allows one to gain some inspiration from the relevant images shared online. This is particularly useful for artists where different perception can be derived from the same picture featured and can hence trigger a different reaction to it and even inspire us in many ways.

The spirit of sharing can be reflected in the art shown below.

Douglas Davis: The World’s First Collaborative Sentence. Launched 1994, Restored 2013.

Retrieved from http://artport.whitney.org/collection/DouglasDavis/live/Sentence/sentence104.html & https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/Artport/DouglasDavis  (Whitney Museum of American Art)

The above image features my own attempt at the world longest collaborative sentence where I managed to share and contribute to the ongoing artwork that is available anytime and anywhere to anyone in the world. This is a good representation of a collective narrative where all the sharing can be seen and read by people from all walks of life.

 

 

[1] Open Source Studio (2015) The Studio of Now.

[2] Open Source Studio (2015) The Way of Open Source.

[3] Open Source Studio (2015) The Open Source Artist.