Big Brother Blockchain

Artist: Chang Seo Young, Hong Minki, HWI, Jo Seungho, Kwon HeeSue, Lee Yanghee, SANGHEE, Hito Steyerl, Samson Young

Curators: Lee Soo Young, Lim Chae Eun

“Big Brother is watching you.” In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell foresaw Big Brother overlooking society while keeping itself hidden through technological developments, describing a dystopian near future stained with surveillance and control. Thirty-five years later, Paik saw the New Year's Day of 1984 as an excellent opportunity to tell Orwell, “You were only half right.” That Orwell was only “half right” was demonstrated by Paik's merging of avant-garde and pop art by connecting New York and Paris and swinging between warnings of the future and glamorous shows.

Forty years have passed since, and in 2024, we should follow Paik in answering the question of what kind of future we can read from the landscape of contemporary technology. Big Brother Blockchain thus imagines the coming future symbolized by blockchains. Blockchain connects the information supplier with the consumer through a distributed ledger system without a central server or mediator. Whereas Big Brother symbolized an indeterminate fear of technology suppressing individual freedom, blockchain seeks to record and share all information transparently, based on trust built within communities.

The artists participating in Big Brother Blockchain-Chang Seo Young, Hong Minki, HWI, Jo Seungho, Kwon HeeSue, Lee Yanghee, SANGHEE, Hito Steyerl, Samson Young-are future embodiments of those whom Paik invited in Good Morning Mr. Orwell, such as the hosts of New York and Paris and artists such as Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, John Cage, Oingo Boingo, and Merce Cunningham. For this reason, their work engenders the dizziness of a deja vu effect regarding the future and depicts an outlook for dance, song, sound, media, technology, games, and labor. The participants form a genesis block that stores future data, and the block is sent to another block on the network, for blockchain is an algorithm that links file blocks containing information in an infinite chain. Peer-to-peer participants, in this case, the members of audiences who experience and share the exhibition with others, become new blocks that exchange data. They share and disperse data in the genesis block, and anyone in the community can participate.

What Paik sought to present in Good Morning Mr. Orwell was the upcoming internet era of compressed time and space by the satellite and, further, the hope that the purposes of technology can change. We should reflect on the fact that Paik used satellites as a tool for festivals and art, stepping out of the established path and imagining a different course for the future of technology. What we need in the search for a wise answer to the future is the power of art, which enables the imagination of another world and is still relevant today.