Nam June Paik’s experimental, innovative, yet playful work has had a profound influence on today’s art and culture. He pioneered the use of TV and video in art and coined the phrase ‘electronic superhighway’ to predict the future of communication in the internet age.
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Tomás Saraceno
artist / researcher
Tomás Saraceno’s (b.1973, Argentina) oeuvre could be seen as an ongoing research, informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, astrophysics and engineering; his floating sculptures, community projects and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment. Aerocene, an open-source community project for artistic and scientific exploration initiated from Saraceno’s vision, becomes buoyant only by the heat of the Sun and infrared radiation from the surface of Earth.
In 2015, Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight. During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and the Natural History Museum London.
He was the first person to scan, reconstruct and reimagine spiders’ weaved spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection to existence. Saraceno lectures in institutions worldwide, and directed the Institute of Architecture-related Art (IAK) at Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany (2014–2016). He has held residencies at Centre National d’Études Spatiales (2014–2015), MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2012–ongoing) and Atelier Calder (2010), among others. In 2009, Saraceno attended the International Space Studies Program at NASA Ames. The same year he presented a major installation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and was later awarded the prestigious Calder Prize. His work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions such as Aerocene, at Solutions COP21, Grand Palais, Paris; Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions, at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Becoming Aerosolar, at 21er Haus, Belvedere, Vienna (all 2015); In orbit, at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen K21, Düsseldorf (2013–ongoing); On the Roof: Cloud City, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Cloud Cities, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2011–12), amongst others. Saraceno’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others. Saraceno lives and works in and beyond the planet Earth.
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