The moving image expansion: from Nam June Paik to Refik Anadol

Abstract

Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA was recently acquired by the renowned New York museum for its permanent collection. With this gesture, which marks the beginning of a new chapter in thehistory of digital art, the Museum of Modern Art welcomes its first generative AI and tokenized piece.
Refik Anadol’s work has slowly been reshaping the perception of museum institutions — and beyond — about the potential of computer-generated art, partially similar to what Nam June Paik had done in the secondhalf of the 20th century. This paradigmatic Korean-born author revolutionised time-based media art by turning television into a form of creative expression and by integrating computational te- chnology into a visualand plastic vocabulary that was previously unknown. In addition to his epic exhibitions, Paik also envisioned the future of the internet and the advent of social media with astonishing clairvoyance. The power of hisideas would expand artistic languages such as sculpture or installation, imbue the moving image with other meanings and open up the dense frontiers of a market that hadn’t yet looked at video as a collectable artisticmedium. The change initiated by Paik, based on the new compositional instruments he explored, is now fundamental for a better understanding not only of Anadol’s work but also of post-internet art itself. Through ananalysis of the pioneering work of these two artists, this paper seeks to explore their achievements, discuss some of the transformations they undertook, reflect on issues of authorship and originality, as well as consider the role of digital tools and human-machine interaction in contemporary artistic practice.