Nam June Paik: mercurial global guru

Can TV really connect the world?  As a child in the 1970s I used to sit on a corner of my bed and watch the neighbour’s colour TV flickering through the hedge. Without sound I made up my own dialogue, story and plot, as fantastical colour images filled the suburban spaces around me. 

By 1984, everyone in the street had colour and many had video players. We all were connected to the great broadcast transmitters that dotted the highest peaks around our cities. Probably none of us witnessed Good Morning Mr Orwell Nam June Paiks’ extraordinary satellite broadcast installation that redefined not only the possibilities of  transatlantic broadcasting, but the parameters of artist’s media.  Paik’s vision of television was far from Orwell’s, rather than the tools of oppression Paik foresaw a global environment of telethons, reality TV, and artistic experimentation.  Paik’s interventions found their way into media art practices in video and television, and the social and cultural upheavals that marked the turn of the twentieth century. His was a utopian dream of the coming together of the technosocial environment.

Paik was a Korean-born artist whose artist life began with an interest in composition and performance, these methods continued to inform as he introduced new patterns of thought to electronic image and sound in the mid-1960s. His work encompassed a range of electronic materials as he sought to ask fundamental questions: what does broadcasting mean? What effects do moving temporal images have? These new forms of image making were more than a shift in materials, Paik undid those materials from the inside out. Televisions were compressed back into their surfaces: in Zen TV(1963)  becoming a single line of unintelligible data, and in TV Garden (1982) a lush population of refreshed broadcast materials. The Paik/Abe Synthesiser (1969) took this a step further and opened up new sensibilities for performers, listeners and viewers as images flowed and distorted through contaminated video signals. Working with numerous collaborators Paik connected the art world to video experimentation, and real-time performance. Performed by Charlotte Moorman, the Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971) marked a key moment when instruments produced simultaneous image and sound. Other works like Video Buddha (1976), engaged closed feedback circuits of video cameras and monitors to explore our perceptions of ourselves and ultimately create a profound questioning of how we understand the world.

Paik’s practice teaches us that the media culture of the late twentieth century did not simply appear, that from the very first the tools were there to be corrupted or celebrated. This aesthetic, political and social strategy is still available, and involves us all in picking up the media tools of mercurial transformation.

Su Ballard is Academic Leader for Electronic Arts, and senior lecturer in Theory and History of Art, in the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin. Her research focuses on digital aesthetics, visual culture, sound, and media ecology. She recently completed a PhD through the Centre For Contemporary Art and Politics at UNSW, Sydney. Her PhD used histories of cybernetics and sound to examine contemporary digital installation practices in art galleries. Su is also a curator, writer, and musician.