The modern city is suffused with light that emanates from screens day and night. It exists as something like a vast interface with unending flows of image and sound information. The light we encounter every day does not simply stimulate our physical senses—it also exists as a converted form of electric signals that transmit and process video images and sounds. The volumes of information that light can contain have increased enormously, along with the speed of their transmission. Millions of video images stream across the city and appear before us, replayed with light. This is more than just a new kind of experience—transcending the bounds of human cognition, it is a phenomenon that alters the way we remember and perceive the world. Such transformations in the urban media environment conjure associations with Nam June Paik’s “videory*”: his prediction that human events would one day be recorded in video rather than told or written language. As Paik foresaw, history today is documented in image and video form. This shows that in a spatial and temporal setting where millions of video images overlap—containing the information, events, and stories of humankind—we are no longer beings who simply “perceive” video. We live in a time and place of layers of human history recorded and formed by video.

The title of this exhibition The City of Nam June Paik: The Sea Fused with The Sun directly evokes the sort of video-connected life that Nam June Paik envisioned. The phrase “the sea fused with the sun” is taken from the poem “Eternity” by Arthur Rimbaud. This quote may have been Paik’s attempt to poetically capture video’s distinctively nonlinear sense of time. Taking as its point of departure Paik’s explorations of the essence of the time and space that video creates, the exhibition focuses on contemporary artists who explore the multilayered time and space of media created with the contemporary era’s most advanced technology. In a world reconfigured by video, these artists will encourage us to adopt a new perspective on present moments entangled with events that happen simultaneously and exist in non-causal connections.

*The word “history” came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or video. Therefore from now on there is no more “History”, bit only “Imagery” or “Videory”. Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter(1972)