Nam June Paik: Internet Dream

»Passage« and »Buddha«, two installations by the video artist Nam June Paik (born 1932), are already on show in the exhibition entitled »Masterpieces of Media Art from the ZKM Collection«. Now another video sculpture has found its place in the SubRoom of the ZKM Cube. The video wall »Internet Dream« was originally commissioned for the foyer at RTL Television in Cologne and presented to the ZKM as a gift when RTL moved. We should like to thank RTL for this generous gesture.
The wall consists of 52 monitors that show different individual pictures as well as one giant overall picture. In video walls the screen is only included in the artistic composition as a surface. Hence the image fields pulsate to the rapid rhythm of the editing and a video montage runs in parallel on several different channels. This rhythm is only interrupted for one short moment and a pattern allowed to form. Paik developed his concept of an »electronic superhighway« back in the 1970s and implemented his vision of global zapping through TV channels in the form of videos such as Global Groove (1973). In the early 1990s, in line with the development of the Internet, he began to pay closer attention again to video walls, which led to the creation of »Electronic Superhighway - From Venice to Ulan Bator« (Venice Biennale, 1993) and Internet Dream. His installation thus tallies with the current image of our data networks, which provide us with information, on the one hand, and a great deal of noise, on the other.