Living in the Postdigital, Reliving the Museum

The 12th edition of Nam June Paik Art Center’s symposium series Gift of Nam June Paik explores how museums linked to technology are moving forward, under the theme of “Living in the Postdigital, Reliving the Museum.” Paik’s way of thinking and questioning can lead us to face things that we have never seen before and to turn them into imagination and then into new realities. Together with scholars in the fields of technology and culture, and with curators and artists, this symposium imagines a society without museums in the middle of the pandemic, and asks if the online environment and immaterial museums in it are actually accessible to everyone and everywhere. We will reflect on the readiness to encounter others, to share something with others in the end, which is the immanent nature of art, and will discuss different possibilities of bodily experiences in the future museum.

Session 1. Postdigital Museum-Technology-Audience
Friday, November 6 
2pm
Opening Address    
Kim Seong Eun, Director, NJP Art Center

2:05pm
Greetings from Berlin
Siegfried Zielinski, Berlin University of the Arts

2:10pm
Future Museums as the Commons to Cultivate a Convivial Sense via Technology
Lee Kwang-Suk, Seoul National University of Science & Technology

2:50pm
The User-Viewer at Web-based Museums in the Post-media Era
Shim Hyowon, Kookmin University

3:30pm
The Development of Digital Media and the Future of Interactive Museums: Looking beyond Superficiality
Yoo Hyun-Joo, Yonsei University

4:10pm
Conversation with Kim Seong Eun and Q&A  

Session 2. A Willingness towards meeting and sharing
Saturday, November 7
2pm
Introduction
Kim Yoonseo, Curator, NJP Art Center

2:03pm
Fear of an Acoustic Planet
Kim Haeju, Deputy director, Art Sonje Center

2:40pm
Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer, Willy-Nilly Version and Eight Stories
Yangachi, Artist

3:20pm
Apophenia and the Sisyphus Dataset
Unmake Lab, Artist

4pm
Conversation with Kim Yoonseo and Q&A  

Foreign Contributions
Three speakers overseas will contribute to this symposium with writings for a symposium-linked web journal. The full text of their papers will be published after the symposium ends, in NJP Reader #10 accessible at Nam June Paik Art Center’s website in the spring of 2021.

Future Museums as Generators of Surprises
Siegfried Zielinski, Berlin University of the Arts

Lessons from Machine Unlearning in the Context of the Museum
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University

Exhibiting and Sensibilizing
Yuk Hui, City University of Hong Kong

The symposium will be delivered in Korean via the official NJP Art Center YouTube channel.

A full list of speakers’ bios and more information is available on our website.