NJP Reader #1: Contributions to an Artistic Anthropology (2010) [English, Korean]

“The Nam June Paik Center is dedicated to the artistic and intellectual legacy of Nam June Paik, the renowned Korean-born artist who transformed visual art worldwide. In addition to its function as an exhibition space, the Nam June Paik Art Center developed a new publication, NJP Reader. The aim of the NJP Reader is to recontextualize Nam June Paik’s artistic thought and his ‘random access’ strategies in a topical discursive practice. Leading questions are: What is the meaning of Nam June Paik’s multi-medial experiments, performances, and sculpture for our current artistic practice and discourse? What new dimensions for re-imagining notions of technology, ubiquity, and human experience do Nam June Paik’s thinking and practice suggest? How does his practice potentiate paradigm shifts in broader understandings of the potentialities and characteristics of alternative processes of participation afforded by the introduction of media technology into artistic practice?

Obviously, Nam June Paik’s work requires a conceptual framework that goes beyond an art historical narrative. Therefore, for Issue #1, NJP Reader conducts an inquiry into the novel concept of artistic anthropology in art discourse as an invitation to produce new conceptual systems. The NJP Reader intends to be an open platform for generating novel ideas, connections and concepts (this intention is also reflected in choosing to use Nam June Paik’s initials for its title, rather than his full name). To this aim, the first edition of the NJP Reader is based on a questionnaire that as many artists and intellectuals as possible were invited to contribute responses to. Through this conceptual inquiry the NJP Reader hopes to help in creating novel lines of thought and conceptual schemes. For the questionnaire three questions were formulated:

1. Artistic anthropology intends to produce novel models of relationality and connectivity. Could – Nam June Paik’s legacy as a form of – artistic anthropology contribute to an artistic discourse going beyond the framework of relational aesthetics? Who are the artists in our day developing relevant examples of rethinking and recontextualizing an artistic anthropology?

2. What could artistic anthropology mean for a current artistic practice? How could it relate to medium-specific qualities? Is it a form of artistic communication defined by a post-medium condition? Or is it a practice that demands the concept of medium-specificity to change?

3. What could artistic anthropology – as a form of knowledge production – mean for the current classification system? Will it challenge the dominant paradigms of the established humanities and sciences? What type of new models might this trigger? How can artistic anthropology contribute to a better and more political understanding of the human condition? And what could artistic anthropology mean for the concept of art in general?”

Contributors: Ricardo Basbaum, Jean-Paul Fargier, Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania, Jeongwhan Jo, Clara Kim, Lev Manovich, Arjen Mulder, Simon O’Sullivan, Wongil Park, John Rajchman, Susanne Rennert, Szabolcs KissPál, Peter Weibel, Haegue Yang, Hiroshi Yoshioka, David Zerbib.

Editors: Youngchul Lee, Henk Slager
Final Editor: Annette W. Balkema
Publisher: Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea, 2010
ISSN 2092-9315
68 pages

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Fibreculture Journal 17: Unnatural Ecologies (2011)

Media ecology has always resonated with discussions of digital and networked media. Perhaps this is because the discipline of media ecology has always been so open to transdisciplinary work. The pioneers of media ecology set off very early on the road to transdiscplinary critique that is a key focus for the Fibreculture Journal. Indeed, media ecological critique is often critique in the best sense: the exploration of the limits, not just the errors of thinking, the immersion of thought in real events and practices, and the creation of new ideas appropriate to the present and future of media. All in all, from Innis and McLuhan on, media ecology has provided a generative engine within media thinking and practice. Indeed it has been exemplary thinking as practice.

Yet the leading scholars writing for the Unnatural Ecologies issue do not perform media ecology as we have known it. At times the articles argue with more “traditional” media ecology. Sometimes, they arrive at a new media ecology, having travelled other trajectories that those of traditional media ecology. They are rewriting media ecology, exploring its limits from inside and outside. In the process the Fibreculture Journal believes this issue makes a crucial contribution to thinking about all media from the perspective of digital and networked media. In thinking through the unnatural ecologies that contemporary media make increasingly obvious, the issue challenges us to rethink not only what media are, or what they do, but what they might have been, and what they have done.

Articles:
Michael Goddard: Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios
Olga Goriunova: Autocreativity and Organisational Aesthetics in Art Platforms
Jussi Parikka: Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Matteo Pasquinelli: Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matthew Fuller: Faulty Theory
Phoebe Moore: Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production

Issue edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, April 2011
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Geert Lovink, Rachel Somers Miles (eds.): Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube (2011)

“Video Vortex Reader II is the Institute of Network Cultures’ second collection of texts that critically explore the rapidly changing landscape of online video and its use. With the success of YouTube (’2 billion views per day’) and the rise of other online video sharing platforms, the moving image has become expansively more popular on the Web, significantly contributing to the culture and ecology of the internet and our everyday lives. In response, the Video Vortex project continues to examine critical issues that are emerging around the production and distribution of online video content.

Following the success of the mailing list, the website and first Video Vortex Reader in 2008, recent Video Vortex conferences in Ankara (October 2008), Split (May 2009) and Brussels (November 2009) have sparked a number of new insights, debates and conversations regarding the politics, aesthetics, and artistic possibilities of online video. Through contributions from scholars, artists, activists and many more, Video Vortex Reader II asks what is occurring within and beyond the bounds of Google’s YouTube? How are the possibilities of online video, from the accessibility of reusable content to the internet as a distribution channel, being distinctly shaped by the increasing diversity of users taking part in creating and sharing moving images over the web?”

Contributors: Perry Bard, Natalie Bookchin, Vito Campanelli, Andrew Clay, Alexandra Crosby, Alejandro Duque, Sandra Fauconnier, Albert Figurt, Sam Gregory, Cecilia Guida, Stefan Heidenreich, Larissa Hjorth, Mél Hogan, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sarah Késenne, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Rosa Menkman, Gabriel Menotti, Rachel Somers Miles, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Teague Schneiter, Jan Simons, Evelin Stermitz, Blake Stimson, David Teh, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Andreas Treske, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Linda Wallace, Brian Willems, Matthew Williamson, Tara Zepel.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2011
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License
ISBN 9789078146124
378 pages

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