Now, Here, What Does It Mean for Us to Experience Performance Art?

Nam June Paik’s piece of satellite art Good Morning, Mr. Orwell was a real-time interactive communication project inspired by George Orwell’s near-future novel, 1984. This project was aired by satellite worldwide on New Year’s Day in 1984. Various artists appeared in the live events staged simultaneously in New York and Paris and Joined Paik’s idea of ‘satellite art’ to ‘link images and sounds of performances from different places in the world and transmit them in real time around the world,’ which was a kind of magnificent opera. This was followed up by Bye Bye Kipling (1986), another satellite installation linking New York, Seoul, and Tokyo and then, by the last piece of Paik’s satellite art trilogy, Wrap Around the World (1988) created for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. He said “the power of artists crosses national boundaries,” anticipating the subsequent gradual process of collapse of the Eastern Bloc as early as that time.

The trilogy was a miraculous project to shroud the world with the network of art in the moments of great historical turns such as the last phase of East-West Cold War, the advent of the internet world, and the rise of economical and cultural globalization.

Now, this kind of projects, which previously required a tremendous cost, can be executed simply using the internet. Performances are no longer watched by those present on the spot, but cross the borders and reach a lot of people as easily as the broadcasting of the World Cup games. We think this is a very important idea left us by Paik. So, Nam June Paik Art center planned a new project and is pleased to introduce it here : five artists’ teams will have performances every weekend in Nam June Paik Art Center, which will be transmitted all over the world. Needless to say, Paik is known as a pioneer as well as representative artist in video art, but as a musician and performer, he also occupied quite a significant position and had a huge influence on later artists.

– Ozawa Yasuo(Out of Time, Out of Place, Out of Performance Commissioner, Japan / Art / Performance Institute Producer)

Performance Schedule

• 1st Week : October 9 and 10 Ei Wada
• 2nd Week : October 15 and 16 : Contact Gonzo
• 3rd Week : October 22 and 23 : Tetsuya Umeda
• 4th Week : October 29 and 30 : Aki Onda
• 5th Week : November 5 and 6 : Daito Manabe

Ei Wada 2010.10.8-2010.10.9

Born in 1987. He is a leader of Open Reel Ensemble, a project team using an old-fashioned open reel magnetic tape recorder as musical instruments, and presents live concerts by combining various musical instruments and the computer. He received the Excellence Prize of the Art Division in the 13th Media Art Festival sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan, and had a live performance with 12 used TV monitors he collected on the spot, in Istanbul, Turkey, in September, 2010. For this performance in Nam June Paik Art Center, he will play an improvisation not only by combining used TV monitors he gathered in Korea, but also by employing the equipments on the stage as much as possible.
http://crabfeet.blogspot.com

Contact Gonzo 2010.10.15-10.16

In 2006, Masaru Kakio and Yuya Tsukahara started a solemn scuffle,
Contact Gonzo in Ogimachi park, Osaka, Japan, with some resolute conviction. There was a mountain behind the park.
The term Contact Gonzo is not only the name of this group but also designates a methodology, or a lo-fi intuition necessary to give a name to an event. After realizing ‘philosophy of pain, technique of contact’ in a half-conscious state, without knowing why, they could establish the ‘theory of pastoral sublimity’ as the foundation of their performances. Be developing The First Man Narrative, a way of getting close to their own body, breaking up cameras in the wood, they take a multitude of photographs. You may get a shock if you touch the broken instant cameras. They have performed and photographed in such places as
an underground nuclear shelter in Helsinki, a tent in a forest in the Arctic Circle, students’ cafeteria
in Nanjing, China, Seoul Station in Seoul, Korea, a gigantic pier in Okinawa, Japan and among others.
http://contactgonzo.blogspot.com

Tetsuya Umeda 2010.10.22-2010.10.23

He has given a kind of one-time, momentary performances of creating light, sound, or movement by waste articles and daily commodities, or incorporating the on-the-spot situation in his work.
His experimental installations or performances are marked by fluidity, which feature the flow of water, phenomena caused by changes of air pressure or gravity, rotary motions of waste materials, daily necessities and electronic home appliances, and so on. He has actively participated in both Japanese and international music festivals and art exhibitions in many Asian and European cities,
having a lot of live events such as Waitool Sounds which piled up drums on the beach and represented the ritual to practice divination through the sound echoed from a caldron. His exhibition titled Moon(Gate) 2008 was open during night time only—from the sunset to the dawn— in an abandoned school building. Some of his works are now on display in the Aichi Triennale.
http://www.siranami.com

Aki Onda 2010.10.29-2010.10.30

Musician, photographer, and video artist. Born in 1967 in Japan, and
lives and works in New York. The group Audio Sports formed by him with Yamatsuka Eye and Nobukazu Takemura in 1992 released three albums. In the 1990s, he worked as a producer, participating in producing various albums. Since he moved to the U.S. in 2000, Onda has been continuing Cassette Memories, a project playing field recording which he has kept as a sound diary with his Walkman cassette player. His works cover a variety of media, such as Cinemage, a slideshow of the photographs taken by him, a joint collaboration with avant- garde film artist Ken Jacobs, and so on. Recently, Onda is playing and screening with Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, and Noel Akchote, invited by many festivals and art centers in Europe.
www.akionda.net

Daito Manabe 2010.11.5-2010.11.6

Manabe has been preoccupied with carefully observing familiar phenomena or objects to find a momentary happening in them, or a wide range of interests peculiar to the human body, programming, the computer, and etc. He performed a joint collaboration piece with Yes Yes No led by Zachary Lieberman in the opening event of Ars Electronica Center, in January 2009. He also gives performance using audio frequency generators or electronic sensors attached to the muscles, and plays DJing. His Electric Stimulus to Face using the human face as a means of musical became quite a sensation in YouTube, getting 1 million clicks in a month. He has been invited to hold a workshop in various international festivals.
http://www.daito.ws