Internet Dream belongs to the late work of the influential avant-garde artist Nam June Paik. From the end of the 1980s on, Paik created a series of “videowalls” of increasingly bombastic dimensions, including Fin de Siècle (1989), a video installation consisting of 201 monitors. As a forerunner of video art, Paik saw the television medium as offering the possibility of viewer participation, as well as the possibility of fostering intercultural understanding. Therefore, after his early experiments with music and happenings as part of the Fluxus group, from the mid-1960s on Paik increasingly turned to television. His first electro-magnetic experiments focused on the television set itself; thereafter he turned to video technology (together with the engineer Shuya Abe, Paik developed one of the first video synthesizers) and, from the mid-1980s on, to satellite transmission. The title of this work points to Paik’s interest in the Internet.
As early as 1974, Paik had spoken in favor of the development of an “electronic superhighway, a broadband communication network”, foreshadowing the Internet in its present form. By the early 1990s, Paik had his first website, Fluxus Online.
Photo: ONUK
Digital Art Conservation, http://www.digitalartconservation.org/index.php/en/exhibitions/zkm-exhibition/nnnnnnam-june-paik.html