“Signals”

Video is everywhere—on our phones and screens, walls and streets, defining new spaces and experiences, spreading memes and lies, fervor and power. Shared, sent, and networked, it shapes public opinion and creates counter-publics in turn.

This talk explores the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned video as an agent of world change, focusing on key works in Kuo’s forthcoming exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World (co-curated with Stuart Comer). From viral video to TikTok War, surveillance footage to televised revolution, video overflows boundaries of medium and geography; it splinters and migrates across disparate viewing conditions, sites of display, and modes of address, both forming—and fraying—the networks of power within which we now live.

Dr. Michelle Kuo is The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 2010-17, she was the Editor in Chief of Artforum International. She has published and lectured widely on new media and materials in contemporary art, and is working on a book about the postwar organization Experiments in Art and Technology.

Devin A. Fore is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is editor of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Yale University Press, 2017) and History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Zone Books, 2014); he is also author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (The MIT Press, 2012).

Image: Nam June Paik. Good Morning Mr. Orwell. 1984. Video (color, sound). 38 minutes. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. © 2022 Estate of Nam June Paik. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Please visit M+M’s official website for the full events calendar and current information.