Nam June Paik — Wrap Around the World — Seoul Olympics satellite broadcast

1988

Artists: Nam June Paik · Year: 1988 · Medium: Live international satellite broadcast — art event coinciding with Seoul Olympics opening ceremonies · Substrate: Satellite linkage connecting 10+ countries; multi-city coordinated live performance; broadcast to estimated 50 million viewers · Place: Seoul, South Korea / global (multi-city satellite linkage) · Institution: KBS (Korean Broadcasting System); international broadcast partners Nam June Paik's Wrap Around the World (October 1988) was a live satellite broadcast produced to coincide with the Seoul Olympics opening ceremonies. The program linked ten or more countries in coordinated live performance — David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keith Haring, Merce Cunningham, and dozens of others appeared live or pre-taped across the multi-city broadcast. The estimated audience exceeded fifty million viewers internationally. The production followed Paik's earlier Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) and Bye Bye Kipling (1986) satellite-art broadcasts but at larger scale. Paik's Korean heritage was central to the 1988 broadcast. The Seoul Olympics were a moment of international attention on South Korea; Paik, who had left Korea in 1950 and spent his career in Japan, Germany, and the United States, used the broadcast to assert Korean identity at global scale. The programming mixed American and European performers with substantial Korean-heritage content, producing a specifically mixed-culture broadcast that was characteristic of Paik's lifelong project. The broadcast was technically ambitious in ways that contemporary audiences do not appreciate. International satellite linkage of this complexity — ten or more simultaneous live feeds, video-mixed in real time, broadcast internationally — was expensive and technically fragile. The broadcast succeeded largely because KBS committed substantial production resources, and because Paik's team at WNET had developed the multi-city satellite infrastructure over the previous five years. Paik died in 2006. Lore Wrap Around the World was produced in under a year of intensive planning; the technical team at WNET worked nights through the autumn of 1988 to coordinate the simultaneous broadcasts. Paik personally lobbied broadcasters in eleven countries — including Soviet Gostelradio, then in the late perestroika period — to secure participation; the Soviet contribution was negotiated through a personal connection with the cultural attaché at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. The broadcast aired live on September 10, 1988, the day before the Seoul Olympics opening ceremony, and reached an estimated audience of over fifty million viewers worldwide. The Korean broadcaster KBS underwrote a substantial portion of the production cost as a Seoul-Olympic-tie-in. Paik's wife Shigeko Kubota assisted with the New York production and is briefly visible in the broadcast's behind-the-scenes documentation. Sources • Electronic Arts Intermix — Wrap Around the World catalog • KBS archive — 1988 Olympic-era broadcast records • Hanhardt, John G. — The Worlds of Nam June Paik (Guggenheim, 2000)