Can We Talk Post-Preservation? A letter to Nam June Paik - Invited lecture at the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Soul, South Korea

This is a letter from the past to Nam June Paik in the future. This might sound paradoxical but I had been writing this script a few weeks ahead of its presentation at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Seoul in November 2022. We were celebrating the 90th anniversary of Paik's birth in his absence. “The future is now.”

This paper starts forging a creative and interpretive engagement with the past liberated from the (paradoxical) constrains of the authentic material. It means that, on the one hand, we should agree that dysfunctional media carry a timeless aesthetic that might liberate your works from the threat of obsolescence. On the other, it might mean to continue your works by activating them in the present moment, e.g. by deploying artistic gestures and creative re-enactments which would leave behind the fetish of the object and the historical ballast of the outworn. After all,“the eternity cult is the longest disease of mankind,” claimed Paik.