This research aims to discuss Paik Nam June’s historical consciousness: as a member of Fluxus, he worked for performance art and has been considered as an avant-garde composer, pioneer of video art and new-media art, and cultural terrorist. Exploring his projectsfrom Yellow Peril, c’est moi (1962) in which he made a self-declaration to Key to the Highway (Rosetta Stone (1995)-demonstrates that he focused on restoring nomadic culture for his video art as well as a vision of world history.
Paik defined himself as “Stationary-Nomad” in 1970 and discussed his Turanian(UralAltaic) identity through numerous writings and interviews including From Horse to Christo.
In addition, he revealed that the grand travel through the road-station system during the Silk Road and Pax Mongolica eras-a traffic system to lend a horse to government officials in stations; it was popular in East Asia from the Ancient to the Pre-modern-brought the grand voyage. He thought nomadic people were not a destroyer of civilization. Rather than it, they were the historical subject who combined Western and Eastern cultures together and re-created them. Although he focused on Shamanism constructing his ideas, this research discusses the ways in which Paik established the twenty-first century’s electronic Silk Road by re-examining history of nomadic people and his research of it.
The twenty-first century’s electronic Silk Road by Paik already appeared in Media Planning for the Post Industrial Age: Only 26 years left until the 21st Century that he submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1974, and in a sense, this writing predicted the Internet. Eventually Paik realized electronic highway in the German Pavilion in Venice Biennale in 1993. He entitled Electronic Superhighway: Fram Venice to Ulaanbator for this exhibition and showed video installations as well as robot-works such as Marco Polo, Tangun as Scythian King, Alexander the Great, and Rehabilitation, all of which revealed his historical consciousness.
That is to say, he readdressed the Scythian, Huns, and Mongolian in to the subjects who invented highways and united Western and Eastern cultures rather than barbarous invaders. He inscribed his ideas on Key to the Highway(Rosetta Stone) in multiple languages. In conclusion, this research demonstrates that Paik’s Electronic Superhighway was created based on his ideas that the roots of the twenty-first century’s convergence and emergence is originated from the road-station system and the Silk Road, combined with today’s electronic technology.