Nam June Paik — Good Morning, Mr. Orwell

1984

Artists: Nam June Paik · Year: 1984 · Medium: International satellite broadcast — live video art performance · Substrate: Live satellite link between WNET and Centre Pompidou; video mixing; international broadcast · Place: New York, USA / Paris, France (simultaneous broadcast) · Institution: WNET (New York) and Centre Pompidou (Paris); satellite link On New Year's Day 1984, Nam June Paik produced Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live international broadcast linking WNET in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris via satellite. Performers including John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Peter Gabriel, Charlotte Moorman, Merce Cunningham, and others appeared live or pre-taped across the two-city broadcast, with Paik's video-mixing studio cutting between locations in real time. The broadcast reached an audience estimated at ten to twenty-five million viewers internationally. The title was a direct engagement with the Orwellian premise of 1984: that television would be an instrument of totalitarian surveillance and mass control. Paik's counter-argument was that television could be an instrument of international collaboration and art-at-a-distance, and that the satellite infrastructure built for commercial and military purposes could be repurposed for live global artistic exchange. The broadcast is, more than any other single event, the founding moment of what came to be called telematic art — the practice of making art with and across telecommunications networks. Paik had been working toward Good Morning Mr. Orwell for years. His 1977 Documenta 6 satellite broadcast (with Beuys and Moorman) was a technical precedent. His TV Garden and Video Synthesizer work had established him as the artist most willing and able to operate at television's institutional scale. The 1984 broadcast was the synthesis. He continued producing large-scale televised satellite events into the 1990s, though none matched the cultural moment of Good Morning, Mr. Orwell. Lore The broadcast was organized by Nam June Paik and WNET producer Carol Brandenburg over approximately eighteen months of cross-Atlantic technical and political negotiation. The live-satellite link required permissions from the FCC, the French CNES, and the West German Postal Ministry — three distinct regulatory regimes whose technical certification processes Paik personally walked the project through. The performers included Laurie Anderson and John Cage in New York and Joseph Beuys at the Pompidou; Beuys was already terminally ill (he died eighteen months later in 1986), and the broadcast was effectively his final international appearance. The live audience at the Pompidou included dozens of Beuys's students and collaborators who had flown in from Düsseldorf for the event. Paik dedicated the broadcast publicly to George Orwell and privately, in interviews afterward, to the specific question of whether 1984's totalitarian-television vision had come true. Sources • Electronic Arts Intermix — Good Morning Mr. Orwell archive • Hanhardt, John G. — The Worlds of Nam June Paik (Guggenheim, 2000) • WNET broadcast archive