Nam June Paik Originated the Art Form of

"Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body'south new membrane of existence."

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"The only way to win a race is to run alone."

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"(Video synthesizer is) a device that would
enable us to shape the Television canvas
every bit precisely as Leonardo
as freely equally Picasso
every bit colorfully as Renoir
as profoundly as Mondrian
equally violently as Pollack and
as lyrically as Jasper Johns"

iii of eight

"Information is no longer a means to get something alive and physical, but has become an end in itself. The age of 'Information'southward Sake" is dawning after a hundred years of 'Art for Art's Sake.' Communications flow is the new metabolism of Homo sapiens. Abiding alter in gustatory modality and way is an organic input/output process equivalent to the transformation of food in protoplasm; every bit natural equally breathing in our trunk, waves in the sea, or the waning of the moon. Someday brain-power must prevail over oil-power and petrol volition go equally obsolete as the dinosaur."

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"While flick, Boob tube technique volition be revolutionized, the telescopic of electronic music will be widened to the new horizon of electronic opera, painting and sculpture will exist shaken upwards, intermedia art will be further strengthened, bookless literature, paperless poem volition be born."

5 of viii

"The building of new electronic super highways will become an even huger enterprise. Assuming we connect New York with Los Angeles past means of an electronic telecommunication network that operates in strong transmission ranges, as well every bit with continental satellites, wave guides, bundled coaxial cable, and after also via light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation beam fiber optics: the expenditure would be well-nigh the aforementioned every bit for a Moon landing, except that the benefits in term of by-products would be greater."

6 of 8

"Suppose a girl in Kentucky wants to report the Japanese Koto instrument, and a graduate at U.C.L.A. wants to experiment with sure Farsi or Afghanistan musical instruments. How would they do this? The malleable boob tube (i.e. videotape) would enable individual lessons for many subjects to be given from anywhere to anywhere."

7 of 8

"What nosotros demand now is a champion to free trade, who volition form a Video Common Market modeled after the European Common Market in its spirit and process; this would strip the hierarchy of Goggle box civilisation and promote the free flow of video data through an inexpensive castling arrangement or convenient free market."

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Summary of Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik, known every bit "the father of video art," surfed the forefront of cut edge technologies and utilized them to realize artworks, the likes the world had never still seen. His diverse experiments positioned video equally a viable art grade, and a tool toward accomplishing widespread, global connectivity - an oeuvre eerily prophetic to our gimmicky information historic period. His revolutionary practice laid the groundwork for today's artists working in new media art.

Accomplishments

• Paik's early on preparation in classical music combined with his involvement in utilizing sound elements from existent life, inspired by artist John Cage, positioned his career early as a member of the Fluxus movement. His passion for combining sound, visual, and electronic elements was formed there.
• A corking want to humanize technology underlies all of Paik's piece of work. Whether this is seen through the combination of anthropomorphic objects with video imagery of homo beings, the use of a alive person in dialogue with technological components, or equipment equally a functioning, or the forced interaction of a viewer with a particular artwork - his work incites reflection on both our relationship with technology and its affects on, and benefits for, modern human.
• Very early in his career, Paik began writing about his desire for a "video common marketplace" that would allow for the costless dissemination of not only artwork, but also teaching, collaboration, and dialogue on an international scale. His ideas have come full circle with the advent of today'due south Facebooks and Youtubes - the online platforms that draw users past the billions.
• Paik coined the term "electronic superhighway" to denote what he saw as a time to come in which applied science would allow for boundary-less connection between people on a global scale. His term might exist considered the get-go mention of the concept that would eventually become manifest in the Internet, and is in fact, the term used universally today.

Biography of Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik led a life of intense creativity and his trailblazing innovations fix the path and inspiration for many hereafter artists.

Important Art past Nam June Paik

Progression of Art

1964

Robot K-456

Subsequently Paik's departure from Germany and before his arrival in the Usa in 1964, he spent a twelvemonth in Tokyo with his family unit where he met Shuya Abe, an engineer specialized in experimental physics and electronics, who became Paik's long-term collaborator and technical banana. During the sojourn in Japan, Paik devised his first automated robot, Robot K-456, with Abe'southward assistance. Paik humorously named this life-sized anthropomorphic robot later on Mozart's piano concerto No. 18 in B-flat major, K. 456 (a catalogue number in the Köchel listing - an inclusive, chronological catalogue of compositions by Mozart). Robot Thou-456 is made out of $.25 and pieces of metallic, cloth, a data recorder, wheels for walking, and a loudspeaker playing John F. Kennedy'due south speeches. The materials reflect Paik's long-term involvement in transforming cheap, disposable objects into aesthetic forms associated with new technologies. Originally androgynous - with breasts and a penis, the robot was programmed to walk, talk, and defecate beans via twenty radio channels and a remote control. Its concrete composition, hybrid-gendered nature, and remote-controlled movement embody Paik's desire to humanize robotics without hiding its bare-bone structure and materiality nether the glossy metallic skin.

Robot G-456 was congenital for impromptu street performances, every bit Paik recounted, "I imagined it would meet people on the street and give them a split-second surprise, like a sudden testify." It was showtime featured in the operation project Robot Opera (1964) at Judson Hall in New York, alongside Charlotte Moorman's cello functioning, and in a series of performance-based projects through the cease of the 1960s. In 1982, the robot returned to action during the artist'southward first major museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Fine art. At ane point of the exhibition, Paik took the robot out of the museum to orchestrate an "accident" on the streets, a operation titled Showtime Accident of the Twenty-First Century. The robot was made to walk up the sidewalk outside the building beyond Madison Avenue. While crossing 75^thursday Street, it was struck and thrown onto the crosswalk by a motorcar driven by artist William Anastasi. The local CBS affiliate covered the incident. When the CBS reporter asked Paik what it all meant, Paik answered that he was practicing how to cope with the catastrophe of applied science in the 21^st century. He besides noted that the robot was twenty years one-time and had not had its Bar Mitzvah (the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony) yet. Playful and extravagant, the performance ended with the "trunk" of the robot beingness wheeled into the museum. This street functioning demonstrated that Paik did not see his artworks as inert and complete but rather as "living" objects that could be constantly remade and refashioned.

The hybrid, complex nature of Robot K-456, with its unexpected juxtaposition of visual materials, sounds, performances, and popular culture, embodied Paik's foresight into the time to come of robotics. He was also revolutionary because he claimed robotics as a viable medium for use in multimedia art, triumphantly declaring the potential for creative innovation through technological means. Throughout his career, Paik would adamantly advocate that the artist's duty was to reimagine engineering science in the service of art and culture.

Twenty-channel radio-controlled robot, aluminum profiles, wire, wood, electric divide, foam material, and control-plough out - Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnof

1974

TV Buddha

TV Buddha is one of Paik'southward best-known pieces. This sculpture centers on an 18^thursday-century sculpture of a brassy Buddha posed with a tranquil meditation mudra (a symbolic paw gesture used in Buddhism). A video camera in front of him simultaneously records the statue and displays his reflection on a futuristic looking, sleek white telly screen. In this closed circuit loop, the Buddha constantly faces his ain projected image, caught in an eternal present tense and unable to transcend from his own physicality. The infinite play of the alive electronics indicates that the Buddha is doomed to stay on the surface of reality forever defenseless in the trip the light fantastic toe between the heed and object reality.

In its simplest reading, this installation highlights the juxtaposition between the East and the Due west, or the historical and the modern, Just more than complexly, it reveals some fundamental issues brought up by engineering, including the ambivalent position of faith, history, and images of our selves in contemporary lodge when viewed upon a screen, in one case removed from reality. Every bit the media theorist Marshall McLuhan states, "It is the continuous embrace of our ain applied science in daily utilize that puts us in the Narcissus function of subliminal sensation and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves."

The success of TV Buddha (1974) triggered a series of similar works by Paik. Later variations of the work include Stone Buddha/Burnt TV (1982), which features a Buddha observing a burned idiot box without any electronic power, Goggle box Buddha (1982), featuring a Buddha contemplating a monitor covered by a mound of dirt, and TV Rodin (1982), which places a miniature reproduction of Rodin's The Thinker on pinnacle of a Sony Watchman. The proliferance of the Buddha in Paik's piece of work throughout the years might be seen every bit society's continual contemplation of its own image through the mirrors of ever-morphing technological advancements; an important introspection past the artist regarding his own ever-evolving relationship with modernity.

Video installation, closed-excursion, eighteen^th-century Buddha statue - Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

1975

TV Bra for Living Sculpture

Upon his arrival in New York in 1964, Paik began working with the avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman, who would become his primary collaborator until her death in 1991. This series of performances with Moorman reflects Paik'due south longstanding interest in introducing manipulated television receiver to the public and his attempts to humanize boob tube and video technology through collaboration with the body. In this string of seminal projects including Robot Opera (1964), Opera Sextronique (1967), Idiot box Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), and Boob tube Cello (1971), Moorman's body, often in various stages of nudity, functioned as a sail onto which Paik attached his prominent electronic objects. For example, in Opera Sextronique, staged for a private audience at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque (125 West 41^st Street) in New York, Moorman performed as a topless cellist, which confronted the cultural norms of the time and resulted in her arrest for indecency. Moorman protested to the police force that she was "only performing Paik's score."

Television set Bra for Living Sculpture was performed past Moorman every bit role of the groundbreaking group exhibition "TV every bit a Creative Medium" at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Moorman, the "living sculpture" and an indefatigable performer, wore two performance television sets over her bare breasts as she played her cello. The television screens alternately featured alive television programming, prerecorded video footage, and a closed-circuit photographic camera's live feed of the audience.

Through these projects, Paik brought video engineering to a human scale and consequently redefined the medium, conventionally identified with public mass entertainment, equally something accessible on an extremely intimate level. Paik reflected in 1969 on their collaboration: "The real result implied in Art and Technology is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium ... Boob tube Brassiere for Living Sculpture (Charlotte Moorman) is besides one sharp case to humanize electronics ... and applied science. By using TV as bra ... the almost intimate belonging of [a] human being beingness, we will demonstrate the human being use of technology, and likewise stimulate viewers, not for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to wait for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology."

By collaborating with Moorman, Paik also emphasized his conventionalities that fine art and engineering were important tools of human being connectivity paving the way for futurity performance/new media hybrids.

Cello, ii television set sets, microphone, amplifiers, deflection coils, "fussbedienungsgerate," cables - Friedrich Christian Flick Drove im Hamburger Bahnof, PAIKN1734.01

1984

Good Morning Mr. Orwell

Beside his long-term passion for the medium of television, Paik was too interested in exploring satellite technology every bit a means to disseminate information in a more democratic and efficient way beyond the world. As shown in Paik's written report "Expanded Teaching for the Paper-Less Society" to the Rockefeller Foundation (1968), the artist predicted the ascension of an "instant global university" where "a daughter in Kentucky wants to study the Japanese Koto instrument, and a graduate at U.C.L.A. wants to experiment with certain Persian or Afghanistan musical instruments." The artist questioned, "How would they practise this?"; and offered his own answer, "The malleable television (including videotapes) would enable individual lessons for many subjects to be given from anywhere to (everywhere)."

In order to realize his vision of a borderless earth and to showcase the possibility that art could bring the world together as ane, Paik produced his first major international satellite circulate Good Morn Mr. Orwell in 1984. The televised event combined simultaneously broadcast footage of live programs in New York and Paris with video interventions by the artist, using the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer - i of the earliest machines co-designed by Paik and his collaborator Shuya Abe, which allowed the creative person to alter and manipulate existing video images. The program was a rebuttal to author George Orwell's dystopian view of the effect technological advances on hereafter lodge every bit described in his novel 1984 in which the Authorities surveils citizens through Closed Circuit television and turns engineering science into a devil; Paik intended to demonstrate, via Skilful Forenoon Mr. Orwell, the benign, or more positive effects of technology on our lives. Paik's live broadcast, a collaboration between the goggle box stations WNET/THIRTEEN in New York and F.R. iii in Paris, aired on Sunday, January 1, 1984, and was transmitted simultaneously to France, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, and the The states, facing over 25 one thousand thousand viewers. Notable artists - Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Philip Glass, Peter Gabriel, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others - participated in the broadcast to create a dynamic and unprecedented program that transcended fourth dimension zones and cultures. Good Forenoon Mr. Orwell besides witnessed a crucial moment in history: as someone who had lived in East Asia, West Deutschland, and the United states of america, Paik sought to understand the world toward the terminate of the Common cold War and the start of a new more interconnected millennium through this project.

This work can be seen every bit an essential forebear to today's mass connectivity through the Net that allows artists to share and view works on an international level outside the confines of the normal gallery, museum, or geographically static setting.

Video; color, sound. 38 minutes - Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

1986

Family of Robot: Baby

In the early on 1980s, afterwards experimenting with television and video images for virtually two decades, Paik came back to the idea of creating robots, to further his goal of humanizing technologies. Family unit of Robot, the start serial of video sculptures that Paik created, consists of three generations of family members: a grandmother and gramps; mother and father; aunt and uncle; and children. This family structure is a reflection of Paik's traditional Korean upbringing. The generational differences within the grouping are represented through Paik'southward conscious choice of materials, narrating a unified history of family and technology. The grandparents' heads are synthetic of 1930s radios and their bodies of 1940s television frames refitted with Sony or Quasar screens, while the parents' heads are more recent than their bodies. The children are made of newer televisions. In some cases, the children's heads are two decades more advanced than their bodies, and in others, both sections are made of uniform parts. For instance, the Art Constitute's Baby - one of nine unique infant robots - was assembled from thirteen Samsung monitors, which at the time were the almost upwards-to-date equipment manufactured in Korea. This group of sculptures, viewed as a whole, correspond the history of media hardware evolution in the 20^th century.

In order to indicate the gender difference between the robots, Paik used monitors with rounded consoles to represent females, while their male counterparts were synthetic from more than athwart models. Each robot also has a unique personality shown through its monitors that display looped video imagery carefully curated by the creative person. For example, Baby displays an artist-created videotape which consists of flashing, vibrant images of hearts, psychedelic patterns, revolving bands and planets, and excerpts of newscasts depicting people, especially children, in Africa and India.

Admitting the robots' anthropomorphic forms, they have a relative human scale and were assembled by hand, which creates an immediate physical connection with the viewer's own trunk. Humanizing engineering science through this series, Paik encourages the viewer to "resonate" with engineering and to take an agile office in it rather than accepting it blindly, commenting that, "Ane must . . . know engineering science very well in society to be able to overcome it. (The purpose of video art) is to liberate people from the tyranny of TV (and its images)."

Single-channel video sculpture: thirteen television monitors and aluminum armature - The Art Institute of Chicago

1995

Electronic Pike: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii

Electronic Superhighway - constructed of 336 televisions, 50 DVD players, 3,750 feet of cablevision, and 575 anxiety of multicolored neon tubing - illustrates Paik's understanding of a diverse nation through the lens of media technology. This piece of work is a awe-inspiring presentation of the physical and cultural contours of America: each state is represented through a video clip that resonates with the artist's ain impression of that country, suggesting that our image of America has ever been molded by motion-picture show and television. For example, Oklahoma shows flashing images of potatoes, while Kansas presents the Wizard of Oz. The representations of some states are based on Paik's personal connections: composer John Muzzle in Massachusetts, performance artist Charlotte Moorman in Arkansas, and choreographer Merce Cunningham in Washington.

In 1964, when Paik came to the United States afterward having lived in Nihon and Deutschland, he was astonished by the enormous scale of America and its newly built interstate highway system which was just ix years erstwhile at the time. The highway organization ambitiously connected the nation together and claimed to offering everyone the freedom to "run into the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet." Paik's selection of the video clips' fast speed imitates the experience of seeing the country "as though from a passing car." Echoing the physical highway arrangement, which facilitates the transportation of people and goods, "electronic throughway" - a term invented by Paik - suggests a network of virtual communication through the screens of televisions and home computers, which became popular in the 1980s and 1990s, with the help of cables and the Internet.

While Paik's work is generally interpreted equally a commemoration of the artist's utopian idea that the "electronic superhighway" allows us to share information and communicate with each other beyond geographical boundaries, this detail work can also be read equally exposing the problems brought by technology. For instance, the video clips allude to how each state's identity becomes homogenous and stereotypical through film and television. Likewise, the physical calibration of the work and number of simultaneously played clips get in hard for the viewer to absorb all details at once, resulting in what we now telephone call "information overload." Electronic Superhighway, made before the authority of the Internet, manifests Paik's assuming vision and prescience regarding the benefits and bug brought by the information age.

49-channel closed excursion video installation, neon, steel and electronic components - Smithsonian American Fine art Museum, Washington DC

1995

Megatron/Matrix

Megatron/Matrix, holding 215 monitors, resembles a hypnotic, flashing billboard. The artwork consists of two sections. The Megatron is a massive grid of monitors placed side by side in direct rows and columns. The screens show smaller clips in an array of disparate real globe images from the Seoul Olympics to Korean folk rituals to modern dance. On the boundaries between screens, larger, animated images emerge, demonstrating the thought of a world without borders in the electronic historic period. If the Megatron conveys the vast reach of media culture, the smaller section, the Matrix, emphasizes its impact on each of usa. In Matrix, the monitors are arranged in a way that the images seem to screw inward around a lone, central screen showing two partially nude women. The creative person may be suggesting that our bodies are our primal connection to the world, but like the lone screen we are surrounded by "too much information."

The slice symbolizes Paik's prophetic awareness of the ability of video technology and how it is realized in the new millennium. Today, there are myriad streams of arts, imagery, or amusement available to us at all times via the smart telephone, the goggle box, and the reckoner.

Eight-aqueduct video installation with custom electronics; colour, audio - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Like Art

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced past Artist

Useful Resources on Nam June Paik

Books

The books and manufactures below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These as well suggest some attainable resources for further research, especially ones that can exist found and purchased via the net.

exhibitions

• Nam June Paik: Global Visionary Our Pick

  Past John G. Hanhardt and Ken Hakuta

• Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004

  By Nam June Paik, John G. Hanhardt, Caitlin Jones

• Nam June Paik: Condign Robot Our Pick

  Past Asia Order, Melissa Chiu, Michelle Yun

• Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music, Electronic Tv, Revisited

  By Manuela Ammer, Susanne Neuburger, Nam June Paik

• Worlds of Nam June Paik

  By John One thousand. Hanhardt and Nam June Paik

• Nam June Paik: Whitney Museum of American Art, Apr 30 - June 21, 1982

  Past John 1000. Hanhardt

artworks

• Nam June Paik: The Tardily Style Our Selection

  By John G. Harnhardt

• Nam June Paik

  By Sook-Kyung Lee and Susanne Rennert

• Nam June Paik: Video Time, Video Space

  By Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellein

• Fluxus/Video Our Pick

  By Nam June Paik, Shuya Abe, Wulf Herzogenrath

Content compiled and written past Jiete Li

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols

"Nam June Paik Creative person Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Jiete Li
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols
Available from:
First published on 22 Dec 2017. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/paik-nam-june/

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