Wake Up! It’s 2024

Artist: Nam June Paik, Balming Tiger x Sungsil Ryu
Curator: Kim Yoonseo

"We want to have at least as much technic that we can hate the technic…
We want to have at least as much welfare, that we can despise the welfare.
We want to have at least as much peace that we can be bored with peace."
—Nam June Paik, “Pensées 1965,” 1965

The special exhibition Wake Up! It’s 2024, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Good Morning Mr. Orwell, confronts the present through scenes of the past that correspond to emerging technologies. The exhibition title resets the US band Oingo Boingo’s song title Wake Up (It’s 1984) to 2024, released as part of Nam June Paik’s satellite project Good Morning Mr. Orwell in 1984. The message from forty years ago that commands us to wake up and counter Big Brother in a society of technological surveillance remains relevant today. This time of global crisis caused by the war arouses a sense of a déjà vu. The world is still at war.

In the year made famous by Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which envisioned a future society with incessant media surveillance and war, Paik presented the satellite broadcast as his response to the late Orwell and his novel. Good Morning Mr. Orwell, a live satellite television broadcast that linked New York and Paris in real time, transformed the technology of control that Orwell feared into a pleasant communication technology with the participation of 25 million viewers worldwide. Planned by Paik, the entertaining mix of the dance, song, poetry, and comedy of various cultures by artists around the world conveyed hope for a bright future instead of Orwell’s dystopia. Whereas technological networks like the telescreen in Orwell’s novel embody totalitarian surveillance that suppresses individuals, for Paik, it was a technology that helped to engage with people from other parts of the globe and enjoy diverse cultures. A satellite in the 1980s was the product of the Cold War and the crystallization of high technology built with a substantial amount of national funds that could only be accessed by a few broadcasters and NASA. Nevertheless, Paik constructed a satellite broadcast system as a technology bridging cultures across continents and realized it by communicating with many colleagues through art.

Today, the surveillance society forewarned by Orwell and Paik’s visions of global connection has all become our everyday lives. The exhibition defines today as the era of satellites and rediscovers the ultimate value of world peace that Paik’s satellite art Good Morning Mr. Orwell sought forty years ago. Today, when various satellites orbit around the earth, looking like stars in the sky, we should ask ourselves whether we genuinely use emerging technologies as the drivers of communication and peace before praising the satellite network’s utility in delivering the devastation of war in real-time.