No other artist has had greater influence on the use of technology in art than Nam June Paik; he prophesied changes that would shape the contemporary world, exemplified in his pioneering ideas, ‘Participation TV’, ‘Random Access Information’ and ‘Video Commune’.

Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik’s first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (Wuppertal 1963), when the artist brought television into the realm of art for the first time, presenting it as a tactile and multisensory medium. As part of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, Paik believed that artists should humanise technology, get their ‘fingers in and tear away the walls’ of the establishment. Paik, a trained musician, treated technology as a material part of his repertoire, which later expanded to include video, satellite transmissions, robots and lasers.

For Festival 2013 Talbot Rice Gallery fills with electromagnetic waves and reverberates with the diverse forms of Paik’s broader practice. Drawn primarily from the Nam June Paik Art Center’s collections, the exhibition demonstrates how revolutionary the artist remains for contemporary audiences in encouraging creative engagement with technology. Building on Edinburgh’s philosophical heritage, Transmitted Live embodies a critical engagement with the physical world and Paik’s fluid, kinetic intelligence. The first Nam June Paik exhibition in Scotland, birthplace of electromagnetic theory and television technology, will resound throughout the city and beyond.

Selected by the curators at Nam June Paik Art Center as an integral part of the exhibition, a series of performance art events by international contemporary artists opens the gallery programme. In addition, an accompanying programme of events includes workshops at the gallery, public lectures at Edinburgh College of Art and a conference at the University of Edinburgh in October.

*image (left)
Beethoven, 2001 
photo by Chris Park
© Talbot Rice Gallery 

Courtesy of Edinburgh International Festival and NJP Art Center