We are launching the 48-hour NJP School, a new beginning in Nam June Paik Research. The Noise Jubilee Praxis School is an innovative art program where participants experience and learn music, media studies, and kinesthetic learning together over the course of 48 hours. Like the eight Fluxus artists who performed continuously for "24 hours" together through the night at Parnass Gallery in Germany in 1965, we seek to share the new materiality of time, solidarity, and practice.

The Motto of the School :

1. We traverse music, body, and media signals. 
2. Time, practice, and solidarity are our new materials.
3. We welcome unfamiliar sounds, awkward gestures, and new theories.
4. For 48 hours, we respond to outdated art and institutions with transformative change.
5. Everyone is a newcomer; here we forge new solidarity together. 

Now, without telling your friends, take 48 hours off and register alone for the School. It is time to meet new people and experience confusion. The moment you enter, all past sensations and memories will flow into you. Through the night of purification and the night of physical joy, nothing will remain the same as before. And even after 48 hours, certain moments will continue to endure.

1. LP Listening Session: The Festival Opens Toward the Night

Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 | 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Venue: Random Access Hall, 1st Floor, Nam June Paik Art Center
Artist: Nam June Paik
Talk: Shin Yeasul / Music Critic
Moderator: Jisoo Kim / Nam June Paik Art Center
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)

Nam June Paik's 1977 limited-edition LP album contains "My Jubilee Ist Unverhemmet." This album features Paik's recording of Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht(eg: Transfigured Night, 1899) played at quarter speed. We will listen to this album together on-site, and music critic Shin Yeasul will discuss the new music we seek to hear between Schoenberg and Nam June Paik.

Shin Yeasul is a music critic who studied musicology at Seoul National University and authored Objects of Music: Scores, Automatic Instruments, and Records. She contributes to Kyunghyang Shinmun, Monthly National Theater, SPO, and Club Balcony, and occasionally works as a curator, dramaturg, and editor.

2. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4

Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 | 7:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Venue: Lobby, 1st Floor, Nam June Paik Art Center
Performance: Korean Chamber Orchestra(KCO)
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)

The Korean Chamber Orchestra will perform Schoenberg's original Verklärte Nacht as a string sextet. This piece, composed before atonal music, is neither avant-garde nor experimental but rather demonstrates the programmatic character of late Romanticism. Like the poetry and narrative embedded in the music, as darkness falls, we are drawn into the festival night through music's mysterious and transformative power.

The Korean Chamber Orchestra(KCO) was founded in 1965 under the name Seoul Baroque Ensemble and continues to expand its   repertoire under music director Kim Min. It maintains its status as Korea's representative chamber orchestra.

3. Media Workshop: Mediated Togetherness, Saving Video

Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 | 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM
Venue: Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Nam June Paik Art Center
Lecture: Alexandra Juhasz / Professor of Film, City University of New York
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)

In this hands-on workshop we will navigate between Paik’s video art and the stinking realm of YouTube seeking empathy and expression from the rot of bad and boring video. We will consider the role of AI and the human, of streams and study, in one online world.

Alexandra Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU and is the author/editor of AIDS TV(Duke, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Media(Minnesota, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing with Jesse Lerner(Minnesota, 2005), Learning from YouTube(MIT Press, 2011), A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film with Alisa Lebow(Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African-American Lesbian Media-making with Yvonne Welbon(Duke 2018), AIDS and the Distribution of Crises with Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani(Duke 2020), and Really Fake with Nishant Shah(U MN Press, 2021). She is the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy and the feature films The Watermelon Woman(Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls(Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture.

4. International Symposium: "Boring Video, Bad TV“

Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 | 1:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Venue: Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Nam June Paik Art Center
Speakers: Grant Bollmer / University of Maryland,
Sangmin Kim / Yonsei University, 
Sooyoung Lee / Nam June Paik Art Center
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)

 

Grant Bollmer, “The Statistical Materiality of AI and the Banality of Streaming Video”

“The only reason why videotape is so boring and television so bad,” wrote Nam June Paik in “Random Access Information,” “is that they are time-based information. Human beings have not really learned how to structure time-based information in recording and retrieval very well…” This talk argues that, today, what once appeared as time-based information—video, television—is better grasped as statistical information, and this statistical information bypasses human experience so the task of judgment is short-circuited. What human beings see and sense are secondary to the material dimensions of dataprocessing that operate through statistical means. It would be incorrect, however, to frame this statistical logic as either entirely new or specific to streaming video. I argue that a general statistical logic of prediction, preemption, and control has long been built into not only the materiality of digital media and technology, but the general logic of the “culture industry.” This talk concludes by examining the sometimes strange nature of statistical normalization and video by thinking through AI, algorithms, and how they shape platforms, along with how this statistical logic guides the global media strategies of entertainment corporations—not only Silicon Valley’s behemoths like Netflix and OpenAI, but Korean K-pop entertainment giants like the Hybe Corporation and SM Entertainment. Contemporary fan-centered platforms and media economies embrace a broader banality of global cultural production that is both “global” but also predictable, in which interpretation and judgment are offered in advance, numbing the critical faculty of judgment that has guided cultural critique throughout modernity.

Grant Bollmer is Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author or co-author of five books, including Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeolgy of Connection(Bloomsbury, 2016), Theorizing Digital Cultures(Sage, 2018), Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction(Bloomsbury, 2019; translated in 2024 by Kim Soo-Chul), The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion(Minnesota, 2023), and, with Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube(Stanford, 2024). With Katherine Guinness and Yiğit Soncul, he has edited the forthcoming De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Cultures(De Gruyter, 2025). Grant has taught in the US, Australia, and New Zealand, and his research has been supported by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the e-flux Foundation, and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Kim Sang-min, "The Future of AI Algorithm-Based Art"

If Nam June Paik contemplated ways to search and curate the overwhelming flood of video information in the 1970s and 80s, how are we now approaching, consuming, and creating visual data forty years later? Generative artificial intelligence is developing rapidly, equipped with the ability to predict and generate content across images, text, and sound. By crossing the boundaries of perception and sensation, AI is reconstructing our audiovisual culture in ways radically different from the past.
The experience of personalized curation services like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube's short-form video content, or Spotify's playlists, is stirring as a new aesthetic under the domain of predictability generated by AI algorithms. We aim to explore together various perspectives on our changing tastes and sensibilities alongside artificial intelligence, and furthermore, the future of artistic creation.

Kim Sangmin is a visiting professor at Yonsei University Graduate School of Communication. He is a cultural researcher interested in the diverse (non)human lives observed at the intersection of technology, media, and art. He currently serves as the director of the Non-Human Research Group in the Transdisciplinary Research Program at Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS). His major publications include Culture and Technology of Digital Self-Recording, Artificial Intelligence, Platform, and the Future of Labor (co-author), Curating Pandemic (co-author), "Social Disasters and the Politics of Things," and "The Crisis of Digital Literacy and New Tasks for Liberal Education.“

Lee Sooyoung, “Sea of Bad Videos”

In his 1980 lecture “Random Access Information,” Nam June Paik pointed out the temporal limitations of video and foresaw new modes of information access as well as the potential for digitalization. In 2022, the Nam June Paik Art Center digitized his video archive and made it accessible through an online platform. However, it remains like a small island amid a vast sea of commercial platforms. Today, video is no longer a material-based medium, but has instead become a new apparatus of information control, wrapped in algorithms. This presentation critically navigates the materiality and history of video, as well as its algorithmic reality, exploring new possibilities for video culture.

Lee Sooyoung is a curator at the Nam June Paik Art Center. Through Paik’s artistic world, she has actively engaged with the public and curated various exhibitions and scholarly programs, with a particular interest in the philosophy of technology.

5. Performance: A Night of Entertaining Gods

Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 | 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Venue: Nam June Paik Art Center, 1st Floor Lobby
Artists: Won Jaeyeon x Tamura Ryo, Shinbi Band, More
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)
Please note that some performances may not be suitable for minors.

Won Jaeyeon × Tamura Ryo, “Children of the Garden” July 19, 2025 vol.1

The performance “Children of the Garden” July 19, 2025 vol.1, presented by two percussionists Won Jaeyeon and Tamura Ryo, explores unfiltered interpretations of what ‘music’ means to each of them. Drawing inspiration from Nam June Paik’s idea of “catharsis-producing shocks, extreme electronic impulses and astonishment,” the work highlights diverse forms of energy expressed in the realm of momentary sensations.

Won Jaeyeon is an experimental artist and singer-songwriter whose practice is rooted in traditional percussion while crossing genres such as indie music, electronic sound, and exhibition-based performance. Her work centers on creating meaningful connections with the audience. Tamura Ryo is a sound artist known for his sensuous percussion that blends traditional and contemporary styles. He collaborates across diverse fields such as sound, dance, and visual art, using sound, the body, and the vibrations of nature as mediums to communicate with the world.

Shinbi Band, Ear of the Sound

Before the birth of the universe, before music and dance were named and distinguished, there was a single grain. That grain was a single point where music and dance were fused together before they were ever named or distinguished. With the Big Bang, the grain exploded and scattered in all directions, and all beings, as fragments of that grain, inherited the mysterious fate of moving and making sound on their own. One day, a burning heart set off on a singing journey, driftwood carried by the sea began to dance, hollow stones started to sing, and eventually, dance began to sing and song began to dance.

SHINBI BAND is an experimental improvisational duo consisting of CrystalEar and EarlySun. Since 2016, they had been secretly performing and producing sound and music works under the name Barinamo Sound, before changing their name to Shinbi Band in 2021. Starting with their first concert at Sinchon Theater in 2021, they have been exploring encounters with the sounds of a world full of mystery.

More, Namjoon Oppa and Kkisooni

More, with no money and no penis, came up to Seoul from the edge of Jeolla-do.
More is Kkisooni, armed with nothing but KKI(sassy talent).
More pees into the chamber pot that Nam June Oppa left on the moon two thousand years ago.
Pee, pee, oppa, this is two-thousand-year-old pee.
I trample on his footsteps, wipe my butt, watch TV, and whisper,
Oppa, I'm cumming right now.

More studied ballet at the School of Dance, Korea National University of Arts. Wearing heels in low places and pointe shoes in high ones, More lingers and dashes between dance and drag, between the mainstream and the marginal. More wrote the autobiography More: A Hairy Fish, and the documentary I Am More, which tells More’s life story, was invited to the Busan International Film Festival in 2021 and screened at major festivals, winning several awards.

6. Birdwatching in the TV Garden

Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 | 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Venue: In and around the Nam June Paik Art Center
Instructor: Lee Wooman
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)

Lee Wooman, who majored in painting, initially worked as an illustrator for various media. A chance opportunity to illustrate an ecological essay sparked his interest in nature and ecology. For over 20 years, he has observed and documented birds, sharing their stories through drawings and books, while exploring ways for humans and nature to coexist harmoniously. Having spent 14 years living near a small mountain in the city, Lee has produced scientifically grounded bird illustrations in watercolor, and since his original painting exhibition in 2021, has been expanding into bird-themed drawings and paintings.

7. Ha Eunbeen, Improvisation Workshop Plus–Minus: Time Remembered, Gesture Forgotten

Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 | 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Venue: 1st Floor Exhibition Hall and Random Access Hall, Nam June Paik Art Center
Artist: Ha Eunbeen
Admission: Advance reservation recommended (Free admission)

Nam June Paik once said that videotape is a medium of “plus” information, a medium of memory, in which “too much information is recorded and preserved.” If that is the case, then dance is a medium of “minus” information, a medium of forgetting. Because each gesture vanishes without a trace in time. In this workshop, we dance within Paik’s video or move alongside images projected onto our bodies, blending the “plus” and “minus” dimensions of time embedded in us, remembering and forgetting. Paik said that “electronic memory has made forgetting impossible,” but we still have the body, and always will. A body that is finite, imperfect, and endlessly forgotten in the flow of time. A body that continuously reopens in the horizon of the present, making new “random access” into unknown times.

 
Ha Eunbeen writes and performs. She is the author of the essay collection Runaway and Lullaby, and translated Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection into Korean. She has created and performed movement in works such as As Ȯ of You. Her work explores the disabled body, the broken heart, and the person who has done wrong.