Internet Dream /// 1995 /// Video Installation
/// Nam June Paik

The video wall Internet Dream was originally commissioned by RTL Television, Cologne for the foyer of the television broadcasting company, before then being given as a present by RTL to the ZKM | Karlsruhe due to relocation. Comprising a total of 52 monitors, the video sculpture shows both different single pictures and a large complete picture. The pictorial fields flicker at rapid walking pace and a video montage runs parallel on many different channels. The sequence is only briefly interrupted and a pattern forms itself. Paik had the idea of a design for an “electronic superhighway” already in 1974 and realized the idea of a worldwide zapping through television channels in videos such as Global Groove (1973). At the beginning of the 1990s and in the course of internet development, he returned to this theme which he then realized in Internet Dream. The installation refers to the popular picture of our data network which, on the one hand supplies us with information while, on the other, also produces a big noise.
(Text: Sebastian Steinert)

Nam June Paik (*1932 Seoul, South Korea, † 2006 New York) immigrated to Japan with his family in 1950, going on to complete his studies in music, art history and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, in 1956. Studies in the history of music at the University of Munich from 1956 to 1957 and, from 1957 to 1958, composition under Wolfgang Fortner at the University of Music, Freiburg. Paik taught at the State Academy of Art, Düsseldorf from 1979 to 1996. He was member of the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin from 1987. His work was awarded with numerous prizes and was internationally exhibited in solo-exhibitions, among others, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, in the Hayward Gallery, London, in the Musée d‘Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in the Kunsthalle Basel, in the Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna, as well as the Art Museum, Wolfsburg.

Photo: Sónia Alves 

Nam June Paik, Internet Dream, 1995, Video Installation, 52 television monitors, ZKM_Collection