Speeding Down the Electronic Super Highway

There was once a time in the (art) world, not so long ago, when geographical distance still mattered, and when countries, people and cultures still appeared “foreign.” There was a time when you couldn’t easily see artworks from around the globe, randomly agglomerated on your morning Instagram feed.

Looking back on Nam June Paik’s exhibition in the Germany Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, one becomes melancholic for that pre-globalized art world, when much of what was to come in the electronic super-future was still a topic of speculation. Paik’s exhibition was important as much for what it showed—a huge global, multimedia spectacle—as it was for the fact that a “non-German” artist represented Germany in a historically charged building. The commissioner for the 1993 pavilion, Klaus Bussmann, called Paik an Ehren-Gast-Arbeiter, an “honorable foreign worker” of the Federal Republic of Germany. Paik titled the exhibition “Electronic Super Highway ‘Venice → Ulan Bator,’” and what an intense digital experience it was.

But before arriving on this highway into the future of art and technology, one had to