CAMP awarded Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2020

Oct. 13, 2020

Image: CAMP studio (handmade book scanner, optical scanner, four computers, NVR recorder, joystick, microphones, salad box, water, biscuits, coffee on the folding table. Bookshelves made of paper rolls, books, routers, awards, air conditioning and fan above. Inventory of electronics + museum of Jurassic technology below the tables, flooring replaced from wear. Some persons on a break, a person taking the picture.)

Acceptance note, by CAMP

First, to the jury and the institution, thank you. We are honoured to receive this award in Nam June Paik’s name in this year of ubiquitous, traumatic, and banal media interaction. The 1984 transmission Good Morning Mr. Orwell and the follow-up 1986 Bye Bye Kipling are meaningful and poetic, today. They are reminders above all, that things change, that we can take positions, that we can be wrong or glitch or fail, and that the collective work of artists might still be some of the more vivid milestones we have of desire and memory on Earth.

There is an old saying :) about media, that every new medium takes previous ones as its content. So that TV's content is theater, film and novels, the internet's content is TV serials, phone chats and magazines, AI's content is stuff on the internet, and so on. Nam June Paik showed us that this can also work in reverse, and in many other directions, including barely-perceptible futures. TV can be sculpture, but also a garden, or planetary-scale broadcast art. And not just as metaphors. There are moves other than cannibalization, academization, stuffing one thing into another to reap some profits. Art is not a subset of existing culture. Technology is not exhausted by its current deployment, or its critique. You and your friends can and should, dare to again play in the gardens or sewers of the “medium,” which after all is just another word for the environments we are in.

CAMP cherishes and hopes to relay the artistic but also more general values of getting one’s hands dirty, lightness, radiant generosity, transnationalism, media specificity, courage, relentlessness; historically alive, time and space bending, friendship and invention that are our translation, of what this award contains. We wish to thank all our collaborators, and friends and comrades of CAMP, over the years. Onwards.

Our best wishes,
CAMP