Kyungso Min

This dissertation project offers a region-specific account of how transnational new media art created after Korean-American artist Nam June Paik’s first satellite project, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), gestures toward the shaping of global sites of intimacy not reliant on a shared language. A hypnotic array of synthesized images, electronic sound, human bodies, and nonverbal actions presented an entirely new form of interactive experience in Paik’s satellite trilogy in the mid-1980s. I demonstrate that Paik’s three operational strategies in this series—transnational experiment, transprofessional collaboration, and collective spectatorship—are tactically employed by the later generation of East Asian new media artists. By embracing the idea of the post-translational and the practice of the transnational as methodological strategies, this dissertation prompts a necessary rethinking of the hegemony of language-based communication.

Opened with Paik’s performance bidding farewell to George Orwell’s dystopian vision of technology, the year 1984 in my study marks the shaping moment for transnational new media arts and theories that materialize a desire for new modes of global communication. I first investigate the ways in which Paik’s satellite events developed new media art space as a dynamic site of community building beyond the geopolitical hierarchies of languages. The second part then turns to case studies on how six contemporary artists—Fujihata Masaki, Xu Bing, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, dumb type, Manabe Daito, and MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho—present scenarios of the act of language translation, where the existing criteria, hierarchies, and prejudices embedded in conventional language systems are destabilized or even deactivated. Three main directions for such an endeavor include the sensorial reformulation of the technologies of reading, the extension of bodily surfaces as communicative interfaces, and the reconception of collectivity through technological rhetoric of the imaginary future. I call this utopian striving “the languages of the future” and argue that this positing of a post-translational horizon is essential to understanding contemporary new media art’s worldmaking aims under digital globalization.