Nam June Paik

Internet Dweller

Nam June Paik’s Internet Dweller attests to the artist’s longstanding fascination with human and machine interaction. The work draws a temporal arc, as its title references the digital era, but is assembled from archaic analog technology: wooden televisions, vacuum tubes, and a switch hook telephone. The obsolete objects are revitalized by Paik, who arranges them into the shape of a face, even adding light fixtures at different spots to mimic ears, eyebrows, and a hat at the top of the figure’s “head.” Regarded as a pioneer of video art, Paik often arranged objects into anthropomorphic sculptures that recall the human figure and question the boundary between humans and machines. This sculpture, for instance, questions how much of the internet consumes us now and, similarly to a sci-fi film, whether we will eventually live inside it as obsolete dwellers.