Logging On

In 1994, Korean-American artist Nam June Paik had a dream. Sourcing 52 bulky Sony television monitors, he assembled the objects into a wall-like structure and set the screens to play electronically generated images and video clips. Like cells, these screens appear to respond to one another; some feature the same faces or objects, while others link up to create phantasmagoric bursts of colour. The effect is entirely overwhelming—and echoes the dense infotainment of YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and other apps and websites widely used today.

This is Paik’s Internet Dream, a work which prophesised our current hyper-connected world. The artist also predicted the phenomenon of an “electronic superhighway” in a 1974 essay, written 15 years before the World Wide Web was invented. Tellingly, he spoke not just of the practicality of such technological advancements, but also of the cultural renaissance that would inevitably occur, stating that this electronic network “will become our springboard for new and surprising human endeavours”.

Although Paik never fully interacted with the internet as we know it today—he passed away in 2006 due to complications from a stroke he suffered in 1996—he is widely considered one of the first practitioners of internet-based art, building on top of the intermedia experimentations of the experimental Fluxus movement. Immediately