Talbot Rice Gallery
Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds
9 August – 19 October 2013
Still images from Nam June Paik's various videos, courtesy the Nam June Paik Art Centre © Nam June Paik Estate
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.
Featuring in the Edinburgh International Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival, 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.
Part of the Edinburgh International Festival, supported by GyeongGi Cultural Foundation, Global Inspiration GyeongGi-Do, The University of Edinburgh, Creative Scotland and The Henry Moore Foundation.
Mon–Sun, 10am–5pm
From September: Tues–Sat, 10am–5pm
Free admission
Talbot Rice Gallery
University of Edinburgh
Old College, South Bridge, EH8 9YL
0131 650 2210
Events
10 August 2013
Curators Talk: Nam June Paik
12 noon
Free admission, booking essential.
16 August 2013
Festival Detours: GOL at Talbot Rice Gallery
6–6.40pm
£4. Book tickets.