Open Codes. Networked Commons

Nam June Paik Art Center presents »Open Codes. Networked Commons« in collaboration with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, examining the world we live in as the one formed by digital codes.

From communication to transportation, from design to production, our contemporary society works by codes written in programming languages and executed by computer logics. To navigate the world of codes, together with digital literacy, is an essential ability needed in the age of computation on a planetary scale.

Looking into the world constituted and maintained by digital codes, this exhibition through the works of contemporary artists pays attention to computer languages serving as a medium, and to what exists beyond the flat screen. You are invited to break away from the user experience of staying on the surface while facing the world built with programming languages every day, and to get a new sense of the inherent nature and creative properties of computer codes. In the space intended to bring together art-making, learning and discussion based on codes, the participation of the audience generates a primary network of the exhibition. As a response to the changes in particular, where the pandemic is revealing chronic problems hidden under the carpet such as digital alienation and polarization, and the mode of social distancing is transforming the ways of mediating art and sharing knowledge, Nam June Paik Art Center proposes »Open Codes. Networked Commons«, as an exhibition and educational experiment.

»Open Codes« was initiated by ZKM, and since then its adaptations have been organized in India, Spain, China, and Mexico, evolving and expanding with local artists. Nam June Paik Art Center is pleased to join in these worldwide undertakings, out of the consistent exploration of the commons carried out for the past few years towards a museum as part of the ecology constantly moving in close relation with social changes. »Open Codes. Networked Commons« is a continuation of this effort.