Panel Statement

Panel: Ecology, Cybernetics and Open Systems in Art and Technology

Keywords: Nam June Paik, Cybernetics, Systems, Art, Machine, Machinic Assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari, Norbert Wiener, Jack Burnham

Nam June Paik’s playful, imperfect and often ambiguous use of cybernetics has left an important legacy for contemporary media art. Paik’s works demonstrate that it is essential to temper aesthetics with ethics in order to question the utopian dreams of the very materials electronic artists work with. Paik’s works also suggest a new way to think about the machine in art. This paper focuses on the impacts of communication and control in the machine (and subsequently the network) in Paik’s Robot K-456 and suggests a reconceptualization of Paik’s cybernetic machine as a machinic process enmeshed in communication systems.

• Dr. Susan Ballard, Faculty of Law, Humanities and The Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

Full text (PDF) p. 337-340