PART III

Chapter 10

Nam June Paik: Media Visions

Early Electronic Media

The advent of the portable video recorder was also greeted as a new tool that might change the structure of television. It could become another means to distribute information and a new educational tool. Apart from discussions comparing the new medium to film, comparisons were made between broadcast television as a one-way communication system and the videotape recorder which had input (camera and microphone), storage and processing (the record/playback deck), and output (monitor), and thus functioned as an entire information system. It allowed personal feedback, which in turn extended the mode of communication and control. In video ‘feedback’ is used to describe the process of returning a signal to its source, making video, as it were, instantaneous. As said, the most important technical features of video equipment are described as feedback, and real time processing, language with which we have become familiar in cybernetics and systems theory. The idea of video as a two-way communication medium principally attracted those artists who saw it as a means to influence the existing television structure. The television structure, from production to broadcast, was totally consolidated by the mid-sixties and in the hands of major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) and a number of public stations (WGBH, KCET, WNET, KQED). The home television receiver had been introduced in the United States in 1946, and by the end of the sixties almost every second American household had a television set. Television was seen as the technology with the greatest influence on western society since World War II. It was often looked at suspiciously by the educated as a medium, an information system, which by nature or by way of its organizational structure and popular programming, was bound to brainwash the viewer. Alternative and guerrilla TV groups sprang up like mushrooms. Many artists perceived the networks as a bulwark of control and power, to be attacked in much the same way as the existing art world. Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell demolished television sets as early as 1959, as a part of their environmental media collage pieces and Fluxus activities. The early use of video by artists who were looking for new material turned it into an anti-art statement, similar to the earth art movement. However, it was, relatively quickly recognized as means a of expression in art, and the history of the cooptation of video art is not so different from land art. Soon galleries and museums showed interest in this ‘non-commercial’ medium.[291] Few developments were followed as closely as those of the use of video in art, and by 1973 the ‘history of video art’ was written as one of painting and sculpture, as a medium to be compared with other technology-based media, that had infiltrated the visual arts since the nineteenth century, like photography and film.

In the beginning, writing on video was often restricted to an explanation of the technical features that qualified the videowork. For example, the late film curator David Bienstock wrote in the program notes accompanying the first videotape exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1971), which consisted almost entirely of image-processed works: “It was decided instead to limit the program to tapes which focus on the ability to create and generate ‘its own intrinsic imagery,’ rather than its ability to record reality. This is done with special video synthesizers, colorizers, and by utilizing many of the unique electronic properties of the medium.”[292] Having no antecedents, the development of a comprehensive theory of its aesthetics caused problems, because few scholars or art writers at the time were able to deal with the medium as part of the larger social context in which television was already playing a dominant role. An exception was René Berger’s distinction between a macro-, meso-, and micro-level of television. Macro-television were the networks, meso-television consisted of cable stations and the like, micro-television was the work of independent producers, including artists, and groups whose productions were created with portable equipment.[293]

A few curators like David Ross and James Harithas, who were involved with the ‘video as art’ phenomenon early on, were able to see the new medium as an instrument of complex layers in which the technological, the cultural / art components, the political, the institutional / television, and the economic / production all came into play. They perceived video as a system of production, distribution and reception, with none of the qualities of a precious art object. For the videotape is just a tape when not played. Secondly, the possibility of replication as an inherent quality of videotape distinguishes it from being ‘unique.’ In principle, it is exactly this technical feature that would have enabled the ‘art tape’ to partake in another existing marketing system, the audio and video cassette industry. However, most video artists have dealt with this aspect rather ambiguously. Initially intending to derange the art system with non-precious and replicable videotape, many artists still wanted their work to be treated as an art object. Copies were and are rented out for a hundred dollars or more per screening by special video art distribution centers. Occasionally, the artist will sell a master copy to a museum. Only since the late eighties the video art distribution centers have been offering cheap 1/2 inch copies for a reasonable price (ca. $65), just a little more than your popular video film at the videostore.

As technical developments proceeded, many of the ‘video artists’ of the first hour returned to the confines of the art world and to the medium they originally came from. Many made only a few tapes, like Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, Beryl Korot, Peter Campus, Robert Morris, or Terry Fox. Others kept returning to video occasionally, like Vito Acconci, or Bruce Nauman. There were several reasons for that. Art itself had changed directions again. Performance and body artists who experimented with video feedback and the closed-circuit format, had moved toward theatrical and professional, multi- or intermedia productions. The medium video was rarely used to document processes now, and nobody was interested any more in long hours of unedited minimalistic actions, taped without interruption. Other artists switched to the sculptural video installation, which fits the traditional concept of sculpture as object and is thus better suited for museum and gallery presentation than the videotape. The video sculpture allows the spectator to pass by or walk through the exhibition space as usual. The expectations with which the visitor looks at the work are those of an art object.[294] This development actually parallels a general pattern of the art world in which attention was paid again to the autonomous work of art. A video installation is a composition of television monitors to which an ambient frame may be added. A video installation, or video sculpture, as Wulf Herzogenrath preferred to call these works, is defined by its spatial setting.

But there was yet another development. In the seventies, a generation of video artists familiarized themselves immediately with the digital and electronic technologies. There was also a tendency to specialize again; a direction that was partially determined by the growing technological sophistication. This trend has continued until today through the introduction of better cameras, the digital computer, interactive laser discs, electronic networks, virtual reality technology, etc. The video-tape still exists, but for how long? Now that video and computer works have all become digitized, they have become part of the same family of electronic digital media. And it is in these areas that the most far-reaching concepts for new art forms are have developed, for the rapid developments in information technologies have totally changed the context in which video/television and the computer operate. The complexity of the technology, even if it becomes ever more ‘user friendly,’ requires a constant up-date of knowledge. This means that the artist has to learn how to use ‘Harry,’ CAD systems, or has to hire an editor; that he has to become a hard- or software developer himself or to collaborate with a computer programmer/scientist.

Interestingly, though, a number of issues heavily debated in the sixties have come to the fore again in the art and technology discussion. One of them is related to the non-objectness of digital technology, as a consequence of which the discussion about art as a system has opened up again. For video and the computer are technologies that operate in a larger structural frame or network of communication systems. Secondly, in dataspace there is no definite version of a work. The status of digital work depends on the history of a specific set of interactions; each interruption in the information stored will create another work in progress. In an interactive computer - video or tele-communication or satellite work of art - the final result depends on the interactions of the participants, as in an open system. This aspect will affect the traditional concepts of authorship and authenticity, something which Nam June Paik already dealt with in his earlier work, but which will become important as the digital and electronic technologies become more and more networked. It goes without saying that if an artist wants to be involved in these developments, he or she will have to move out of the art system as it functions now, far beyond the frame of the television set and the computer screen, into the real world.

The following chapters discuss the work of artists who have played a major role in the development of media art forms from the start, and still do, and who have created a new role for themselves as artists: Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Paul Ryan, and the Vasulkas.

Nam June Paik: Crossing Boundaries

History decided that he was to become the ‘father of video art,’ though, and his main body of work consists of the medium video. However, he has never allowed his work to be pinned down to strict categories and his interdisciplinary activities exemplify this. Nam June Paik was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea. His family had to flee to Japan in 1950, because of the Korean War. Paik studied music, art-history and philosophy at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated in 1956 with a paper on Arnold Schönberg. He continued his music studies in Munich and Freiburg, Germany. Nam June Paik’s interests soon shifted to electronic music and ‘action-music,’ and he became involved with Fluxus. He participated in the Fluxus - Internationale Festspiele neuester Musik, at Wiesbaden, in 1962. It was followed by his first, much remembered exhibition at Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, in 1963, entitled Exposition of Music/Electronic Television. Paik returned to Japan the following year and began his first experiments with television electronics and electromagnets together with an engineer, Shuya Abe, to develop a concept for participatory television - Participation TV - in which the viewer was requested to actively participate in the creation and recreation of the images. Curator James Harithas concisely phrased Nam June Paik’s position in the introduction to the first major retrospective of the artist, staged at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, in 1973, Nam June Paik: Videa ‘n’ Videology (1959-1973): “Paik’s esthetic position is based on broad cultural experiences. In part, his thought and work show the effect of Buddhism, his training in classical and electronic music, his involvement, his penetrating interest in the work of John Cage and Norbert Wiener, among others, and his incessant experimentation with cybernated systems and television.”[296]

By 1973, Nam June Paik had already experimented with various media, such as music composition, performance, ‘sculpture’ and video. He had even gained a certain notoriety as a Fluxus performer (in collaboration with Charlotte Moorman). From then on, he decided to express his ideas about art and television, and about the new communications media via multi-monitor installations, videotapes, television and satellite programs. However, Nam June Paik did not stop at the crossing of the boundaries, but acquired knowledge and expertise from a number of disciplines. He experimented with technology not only out of curiosity, to make a technological art, but was just as interested in the philosophical, social and political implications of the media he explored, viz. television, video, computer applications, satellites. For Paik, television was not merely a box in our living-room or bathroom, not merely a screen presenting images. Television represented a whole new set of social and political ramifications, including production and broadcast control by the television networks. It involved questions as to who controls what is to be aired, in what format and when, as to the behavioral aspects related to viewing television and whether and how it might affect other types of social conduct. Paik informed himself about the technological developments as well as the related scientific theories. They influenced his work as much as some of the earlier art movements, like Dada. In the early sixties he met John Cage who was to influence him deeply. They became life-long friends. Cage had already introduced the notions of chance and indeterminacy into his compositions and performances, and indicated the obsolescence of the theoretical ideas underlying classical and modern music in 1961, referring to the new electronic media in a collection of essays published under the title Silence. Cage: “It is high time to let sounds issue in time independent of a beat in order to show a musical recognition of the necessity of time which has already been recognized on the part of broadcast communications, radio, television, not to mention the magnetic tape, not to mention travel by air, departures and arrivals from no matter what point at no matter what time, not to mention telephony.”[297]

Considering Paik’s research into the new electronic technologies and computer sciences, we may assume that these concepts were just as important to him as the ones in the arts. For example, in his New York archive, in a chest of drawers with ‘personal junk’ from 1961, Paik collected an article written on the occasion of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s birthday, in which the scientist’s research into the essence of matter is described.[298] As said before, in Heisenberg’s model, the unobserved atom, or electronic particle, for instance, does not have a definite position, but exists only as a tendency and has the inclination to be in several possible positions at the same time, so it is not actually anywhere, but potentially everywhere; attributes that may be ascribed to it are possibilities, not actualities. Nam June Paik connected the theory of cybernetics, in which the interdisciplinary approach was a major principle, with his own experiments that crossed over to different disciplines. In his writings he regularly refers to Norbert Wiener’s and Marshall McLuhan’s theories in relation to his own ideas of the communication aspects of art. The article “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan” (1967) sets out to compare Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics with Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, and quotes both at length. Paik wrote: “Twenty years ago Norbert Wiener, whose hobby was to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z, anticipated the Intermedia. ... The above conception of intermedia brought forth an interscience called cybernetics, and the latter pushed the electric age (engineering with the technique of strong current) into the electronic age (control and communication using the technique of weak current), which was explored as the escalated ‘Mix Media’ in Marshall McLuhan’s global village. ... Norbert Wiener wrote that the information, in which a message was sent, plays the same role as the information, in which a message is not sent. It sounds almost Cagean. ... Indeterminism, a core in the thought of the twentieth century from Heisenberg via Sartre to Cage, reflected also in Wiener and McLuhan. For Wiener indeterminism was entropy, a classical terminology of statistics, and for McLuhan indeterminism was ‘the cool media with low definition’. ... It is illuminating to seek the common denominator running through these parallels. ... Wiener used these characteristics as the micro-form to construct the technical interior of the electronic age, whereas McLuhan used them as the macro-form to interpret the psychological and sociological exterior of the electronic age.”[299] It goes without saying that Paik’s understanding of Norbert Wiener’s concept of a message in terms of communications theory and Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a message as information received via the media - “extensions of man,” as McLuhan called them - was related to the communications aspects of his own work in electronic television, and that he understood the implications well. For it is illuminating that Paik quoted exactly those passages in which both authors discuss the essence of (a) message, when communication becomes information in the ‘electronic age.’ As far as references to Wiener go, Nam June Paik chose the interdisciplinary approach of cybernetics, as related to the concepts of ‘intermedia’ and ‘crossing boundaries.’ Fluxus may have provided the young artist with a taste for chance and accident, but throughout his career, the artist kept returning to the scientific definitions of indeterminacy and randomness. This is apparent from the terminology he used when answering, for example, Jud Yalkut’s question regarding a creative use of the computer in art with: “The more it deals with the character of randomness and repetition, the more efficient is the computer. These are the two poles of human artistic materials. Total repetition means total determinism. Total randomness means total indeterminism. Both are mathematically simply explicable. The problem is how to use these two characters effectively. Therein lies the secret for the successful usage of the computer in the creative arts.”[300] In terms of video, the notions of chance and randomness were related to qualities like low resolution or low definition, and electromagnetic disturbances, but also to the possible random effects which one could create with its feedback options and build into the digital computer when it was hooked up to the video synthesizer. It has always fascinated Paik to create seemingly (or really?) random effects with a technology apparently completely controlled.[301]

For example, a result of his early collaboration with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe involved the construction of a robotic sculpture, Robot K-456 (1964/5). The life-size, fragile-looking robot with its body of metal parts and wires and its motorized feet had a remote-control, a built-in audiotape with John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, and threw white beans on command. The sculpture was generally interpreted as an extension of the kinetic tradition. But Paik’s attitude toward the work differed essentially from that of the kinetic artists, who were mainly interested in formal and optical aspects of movement. Instead, Nam June Paik’s concerns should be explained in terms of cybernetic notions of control and communication. It was part of his research into indeterminacy, that is into controlling the unpredictability and randomness of the robot’s movements. The artist presented his robot regularly in exhibitions and performances. For the videotape A Tribute to John Cage (1973) Paik and Cage had their robot, guided by remote-control, wander through the streets of New York, and staged an accident with it. Therefore, one might prefer to see the semi-operative automaton as an ironic gesture toward the popularized notions of cybernetic control, Cyborg Art, as it was called by Jack Burnham, who described Robot K-456 with its 20 Channel Radio Control and 10 Channel Data Recorder as a robot “stripped bare of everything but her skeletal aluminum components.”[302]

Nam June Paik has never clearly expressed himself as one of Marshall McLuhan’s adversaries nor admirers, but in effect, one of his early videotapes was a pun on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. In McLuhan Caged (1967), he portrayed the media guru in the form of a caricature. In 1967, NBC and CBC did a feature program that was videotaped by Nam June Paik. By manipulating the pre-recorded images (including the sound) with magnets, he created a portrait that equals a critical and ironic cartoon. On the whole, McLuhan’s influence on the interested art community was diffuse. It appears to have been restricted to a few of his ideas, but the subject deserves further research. McLuhan was apparently a fascinating person whose charisma effectively radiated when lecturing in public. Although his fame and fortune waned quickly during the seventies, he deserves merit for being the first author who created a conceptual framework for understanding the new electronic media. He was also among the first who recognized the impact that these media might have on our perceptual senses, as well as the implications this could have for the education system at large. Paik’s visions were congruent with McLuhan’s arguments in that the electric or electronic technology (McLuhan used both terms indiscriminately) and its consecutive automation techniques and computerization would bring about a major change in the concept of learning and knowing. McLuhan’s non-hierarchical treatment of the different art forms may also have appealed to Paik at the time, being in tune with the artist’s own approach.[303]

Video as Communication

Paik has put his ideas in writing since 1963, although he was most prolific between 1965 and 1974.[304] During these years, the artist published his visionary ideas concerning television and other electronic media as the communication and information technologies to dominate and determine our daily environment. In subsequent years, Paik kept publishing extensively about television’s role as the new information structure of our society and the possible function that art could play, although his videotapes expressed his concerns even better, as they were always created with television in mind. His writings reveal a great belief in the potential of these new media, whose possibilities are explored by him on different levels. In the first place, they would open new options for the artist as producer in areas such as television, video centers, and network systems.[305] He believed in a vast virgin land lying before us with ample space to experiment. That artists would collaborate on this development interdisciplinary with engineers and technicians was a matter of course. Secondly, he held the opinion that video and the computer would play an influential role in the field of education. Paik: “Combinations of computers and beautiful color TV synthesizers will be an effective teaching machine for computers, media, TV, art and man-machine relationships in general.”[306] Thirdly, he was convinced that the electronic audio-visual media, being the feature of American mass culture, would revitalize so-called “Europe-imported High Art” through their combination of abstract, surreal and realistic images, creating a new aesthetics. This “Videoland” of communications media on the rise would enable the growth of a video culture which would, if modeled after the European Common Market, argued Paik, “strip the hieratic monism of TV culture and promote the free flow of video information through an inexpensive barter system or convenient free market.” This utopian belief in the “free flow of video information” was put forth in an interesting article titled “Global Groove and Video Common Market,” in which Paik elucidates the effects that a “Video Common Market” could have on world peace and the survival of the “Spaceship Earth” (Fuller), the ecology, education, and the progress of knowledge. He continued that “ecology is not ‘politics’ but a devoutful Weltanschauung, which believes in world design, global recyclization, the shift of our attention from ‘you OR me’ to ‘you AND me’, as Mr. Fuller, the guru of the whole movement, never ceases to emphasize.”[307] Paik insisted that a major factor in the world’s economic and political problems lay essentially in the failure of communication, leading to wars like World War II or the Vietnam War. With McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, he was convinced that one had to think globally now. For Nam June Paik media information was ‘free information.’ In accord with this, he uses pre-recorded television programs, videotapes and films by friends and colleagues, and has continuously recycled his own material. After all, talking about the ‘uniqeness’ of a work of video art was a contradiction in terms to him. So were the concepts of authorship and authenticity, which Paik has consistently flouted.

Nam June Paik has always shown a sincere interest in education, recognizing the necessity to introduce the new media into the education system - these media constituting the most influential communication systems - so that (art) students would familiarize themselves with these technologies and learn to understand their wider social and political implications. He ventilated some ideas about the integration of new technologies in the American (art) education system when he elucidated how television and video could, for example, be used for a “Global University,” referring to McLuhan. He proposed ways to use the inter-dependent electronic media to exchange cultural information universally, philosophizing about possibilities to visualize medieval, classical and electronic music to make them more accessible.[308] It is important to note that he never solely discussed the aesthetic possibilities of the television and digital image, but always tried to create a context to connect the art with the technological, and scientific developments, to create a dialogue between video art and television, between art and politics, or East and West.

A letter to the New School for Social Research in New York, written as early as 1965, indicates the direction that Paik thinks of at the time. For that reason I quote this letter at length: “Projects for Electronic Television, I hope to open a studio for electronic color television in New York City so that I can begin more complicated technical experiments such as maximum exploitation of shadow mask color TV picture tube, self programming of whole video signal through TV cameras, tape-recorders (visual and audio), the combination of electronic music and electronic TV, and if possible, combining the TV with computers and self-invented 50 channel data recorders. As an adjunct to these experiments I plan to construct a compact version of electronic TV for concerts so that it can easily be transported and demonstrated in colleges. It will have unprecedented education effects since it bridges two cultures, appealing both to artistically and scientifically minded people. These two projects of experimentation and education are aimed at a third stage, development of an adapter with dozens of possibilities which anyone could use in his own home, using his increased leisure to transform his TV set from a passive pastime to active creation.”[309]

Many of the artist’s visions must have seemed rather utopian at the time of writing. Already in 1974 he said concerning Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society: “the building of new ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAYS will be an even bigger enterprise. Suppose we connect New York and Los Angeles with a multi-layer of broadband communication networks, such as domestic satellites, wave guides, bunches of co-axial cables, and later, the fiber-optics laser beam. The expenses would be as high as moon landing, but the ripple effect ‘harvest’ of byproducts would be more numerous.”[310] At any rate, Paik’s presentation at the 1993 Biennale di Venezia was not without irony. Entitled Electronic Superhighways: Bill Clinton stole my idea, the artist comments that in 1974 he had proposed the idea to the Rockefeller Foundation, made $12,000 and subsequently had it printed in Germany, where 3000 copies were sold. “Maybe Bill Clinton read it in the Oxford Library. He used exactly the same terminology.”[311]

Although we are still far away from these positive environmental returns today, global communication networks are spreading rapidly. More and more universities and colleges are surfing the Internet. In the world of finance and entertainment, the whole system of communication will soon totally depend on integrated digital computer network systems. However, if the word utopian is used as the German philosopher Karl Mannheim defined it, i.e. as a vision that can be realized under specific circumstances rather than as a vision which lacks any chance of ever coming into being, then Nam June Paik’s Utopia falls in the latter category.[312]

The Paik-Abe Synthesizer and Other Collaborations

The interest and support of WBGH-TV in Boston enabled Nam June Paik to work on a video synthesizer, together with Shuya Abe. The audio synthesizer had already existed since 1965, but the two sought to combine synthesized sound with synthesized images. Paik was not the only one interested in this area. Stephen Beck and Eric Siegel had been building similar machines that were meant to create synthetic images. However, Paik’s goal was to construct a machine that would synthesize and manipulate existing images. In the beginning of 1970, Paik and Abe presented the Paik-Abe Synthesizer for WGBH-TV in Boston. A live-broadcast presentation followed in the summer, Video Commune, in which Shuya Abe and other guests ‘played’ the synthesizer under Paik’s direction. The sound of the program was pre-recorded and contained the whole oeuvre of the Beatles. Paik considered the video synthesizer as a medium, just like any other material or apparatus, and ‘gave’ the discovery to other studios as well as art institutions and colleges, which were soon able to integrate the synthesizer in their program or curriculum. This gesture is again indicative for Paik’s point of view on ownership of ideas or originality. Paik later: “I was very proud at the Media-Art Conference in Washington D.C. on December 2, 1972, because the Paik-Abe video synthesizer was played not by Mr. Paik but by Mr. Ron Hays. If a machine is to survive as hardware, it should be universally applicable...like an automobile, which anyone can drive. So far the Paik-Abe synthesizer is the only video synthesizer being used cross-country (WGBH, WNET, Binghamton TV Center, Chicago Institute of Arts, California Institute of Arts at Los Angeles) by more than 100 artists and it has been aired locally and nationally quite a few times.”[314]

Around 1968, Nam June Paik had made contact with computer technicians at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, to do computer research as a “residential visitor” under the guidance of Michael Noll, a programmer-engineer who made some important contributions to the developments in computer graphics and also wrote about computer art related issues. At Bell Telephone Laboratories he also met engineer Bob Diamond, and their collaborative efforts led to the connection of the digital computer to the video synthesizer.[315] Expressing his ideas about the collaboration between artist and engineer in an interview with Jud Yalkut, he said: “I also envisage the day when the collaboration of artist and engineer will progress into the unification of artist and engineer into one person. According to my past experience, the best results were achieved through accident and error. As you see, the transistor was discovered by accident. This means that the present computer age was the product of chance to a high degree. Therefore, if I give an order to an engineer, and if I don’t go through all the experiments myself (that is, the complicated process of trial and error), I will lose all these precious errors, I will only get what I want, and miss all the disappointment and surprises. I have found that the by-product is often more valuable than the first envisioned aim.”[316] This dialogue took place in 1968.

Throughout his career, Nam June Paik has collaborated with engineers, technicians, producers, and artists and friends. And not only has he always acknowledged the fact that the production of videotapes and multi-monitor installations is a collaborative process, he is even convinced that collaborations result in more imaginative discoveries and ‘masterpieces’ than brooding alone in the studio. Thus he tells how his first collaborator, a “teenager named Guenther Schmitz” whom he met in Cologne, “guided me through the discovery of horizontal and vertical modulation and other techniques which became the scan-part of the video synthesizer later on.” Playing down his technical knowledge, he maintains that he never even played the Paik-Abe synthesizer himself. Freely acknowledging his ignorance (is he really that ignorant?) about the workings of a televison studio he continues “In the making of ‘The Medium’... I was in complete panic. So I told Fred Barzyk and David Atwood: ‘I am not here, do whatever you want. In any case I don’t know anything about it.’” Since 1982 Paik has collaborated with Paul Garrin. In the same article he continues: “Anyway my collaboration with Paul Garrin is like an improvisation of a 4man jazz ensemble. ... If the first tenor is a new machine, the first soprano is Paul Garrin, a guy who is at least 200 times faster than me in those machines. That means in the first $1,000 dollars-a-hour machine time expense he can produce 200 times more than me.”[317] Everybody Paik works with is always fully credited.

The distribution of the Abe-Paik synthesizer to other television stations and colleges shortly after its invention also tells something about Nam June Paik’s attitude toward ownership of ideas, of images, and of inventions. From the start, Nam June Paik utilized existing imagery, original television footage, films, taped lectures and concerts, anything, in combination with material he had taped himself. He has continuously recycled his videotapes. In the same way, he keeps revising his installations, creating multiple versions. For example, his most renowned works TV Buddha (1974) and TV Garden (1974) exist in a number of variations. Yet their main theme remains the same. The original TV Buddha shows the seated Buddha reflecting his own mirror image on the monitor in front of him. TV Buddha is a closed-circuit installation, with a camera recording the statue whose image is fed back into the monitor. For TV Buddha No. X (Whitney-Buddha-Complex, 1974-1982), Paik covered the monitor with an earthen pyramid, with only the monitor screen left free. The Buddha statue used for this version was a Korean one from the 7th century. In Stone Buddha (1974-1982), the mountain consisted of natural stones, while Buddha no longer watched himself, but A Tribute to John Cage, an earlier videotape. For TV Garden (1974), Paik arranged a ‘garden’ of tropical plants, among which he placed 20-30 monitors. In the first version, he planted some one hundred tropical palm trees in between 28 color television sets. The television sets were laid down randomly, screens upwards. The images were not completely visible among the plants, which created the impression of “television sets (that) function as organic forms.” As TV Garden imagery, the artist consistently showed his Global Groove videotape.[318] By continuously changing the same or similar imagery, Paik shows how vulnerable our visual impression is to making us believe that we perceive something new all the time. Paik’s videotapes are a reflection of how in effect we constantly rearrange the signals received into messages and into new information,. Television and video are the media that technically represent this quality. The images can be re-edited, put into another sequence, or deleted; they are temporary, indefinite. Nam June Paik has consistently pointed at this basic quality of video.

Participatory Television

Viewer participation has remained one of Paik’s continuing concerns, although it often remained restricted to making the viewer aware of the viewing conditions by setting up situations which required the visitor to become physically involved. For example, Paik had his spectators lie on a TV Bed (1972), or on their backs watching Fish Flies on Sky (1975). Paik felt that people could create their own art by sending video to their friends by video-telephone lines to “elevate their mood by watching or attaching certain medical electronic gadgets and control their own brainwaves in order to achieve an instant Nirvana.” These ideas are congruent with the artist’s idea that we should get rid of the hierarchy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, that it was time for the distinctions between creator and audience to disappear. Meanwhile, he has created works in which he uses the principle of interactivity, made possible by new interactive computer technologies (San Diego).

Overkill Strategies

While Paik utilizes and accepts the entertainment aspect of television with its information overkill, he shows himself critical of the system at the same time. In adopting the same formula as television does, but with subtle modifications, he plays with the medium’s perceptual qualities on the one hand, by consciously applying his own formal structures as methods of manipulation and exploitation, the global communication medium that television wants to be is questioned on the other hand. David Ross once interpreted this ambiguity as: “It becomes evident that Paik relishes the contradictions inherent in the very interface of an uncompromised aesthetic and politic within a context of total compromise that IS broadcast TV.”[325] After all, it was at WGBH-TV Boston that Paik produced his first videotapes, The Selling of New York (1972) and Global Groove (1973).[326] The collaboration with WGBH-TV Boston was discontinued in 1972, after a program called Video Variations, produced by Fred Barzyk, with artists James Seawright, Stan VanderBeek, Russel Conner, Douglas Davis, Mimi Garrard, Constantine Manos, Jackie Cassen. Paik’s contribution was entitled Electronic Opera No. 2 (1970). The collaboration was renewed with A Tribute to John Cage, made on the occasion of Cage’s sixtieth birthday in 1972. In this tape, John Cage presents and discusses his ideas and work. The composer specifically re-orchestrated 4’33’’ (Tacet, Tacet, Tacet), originally performed by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, and now played by Cage himself on Harvard Square at Woodstock. The musical sequences alternate with excerpts from previous videotapes, such as Chroma Key Bra, Video Commune, The Selling of New York, and Variation No. 5, and interviews with friends. A Tribute to John Cage shows the typical Paikian way of filming and editing; a fast pace with an overkill of images is alternated with slow fragments. The imagery covers a broad cross-cultural spectrum. Here as elsewhere, dance functions as a metaphor to bridge different cultures and make international communication possible.

Working at WGBH-TV allowed Paik to closely research the television structure with which and against which he has worked since. His investigation of electronic imagery kept revolving around its meaning for our culture industry, an industry permeated by and totally “dependent upon the electronic media for communication, instruction and pleasure.” Paik said to Douglas Davis in 1973: “But in the future world, you will have cable TV, video cassettes, and picture phones. You will also have video tranquilizers, like my Synthesizer Machine. If the video structure is diversified, one of the first results will be less pollution. It will be a major solution to the ecology crisis. Why move, why drive somewhere in your car, if you can do everything right at home.”[327]

Paik’s overkill strategy expressed itself in video installations which became larger and larger, with image frequencies so fast that they appear to flicker before the eye. Initially TV Garden, with its 20 to 30 monitors, looked impressive. Fish Flies on Sky first presented in 1975, already used 88 monitors and 2 videotapes. The multi-monitor installations of the eighties became gigantic by comparison. Among the most majestic pieces was Tricolor Video (1982), conceived for the Centre Pompidou in Paris: 384 monitors were laid out in a square on the floor, in twelve rows of eight. These rows were divided in three, one color from the French flag dominating in each section of four rows; blue, white and red respectively. To complicate matters, Paik had designed an image program with 8 videotapes running diagonally. The videotapes contained sections and images from Global Groove, Suite 212, Guadalcanal Requiem, etc. As usual, there was material from television programs and films, among others Casablanca, and even sequences from videotapes by other artists.[328] Often the work was adapted to the architectural space, like TV Trichter (Düsseldorf, 1984), where 99 monitors spiraled upwards in a cone shape, screens downwards.

The peak of this development is certainly formed by the enormous video wall conceived for the Chase Metrotech Lobby in Brooklyn, called Chase Information Wall, in 1992, and Sistine Chapel, first shown at Holly Solomon gallery in New York, 1993. The Wall includes computers, laser discs, 429 television sets in different formats, and cable TV. The Chapel is a multi-channel projection piece. Video projectors and speakers were placed randomly on a large scaffolding in the middle of the room, beaming images onto the walls and ceiling, like in the real Sistine Chapel, in a fast rhythmic staccato pace. The sensory overload reminded one of rock concerts, or the now popular techno-parties. Still one could discern the figures of Paik’s long-time friends who had died recently: Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman and Alvin Ailey, interspersed with landscapes, the American flag, sports events, and schools of swimming fish.

Opposites with Crossovers

As said repeatedly, certain images keep evolving over the years, like the Buddha, the egg, moon and fish. Despite their formal qualities, Paik has obviously also their symbolic aspects in mind - as related to the medium video. Being characterized by constant reconceptualization and manipulation of formal elements, Paik’s work appears to be based on a formula of opposites with crossovers. Appears, because they are never true opposites, nor irreconcilable. Rather, they are complementary, like the yin and yang symbol; herein one may recognize the Asian and Buddhist in Paik. The elegiac contrasts with the overload strategy. The single motive closed circuit installation opposes the rapid fast cut non-narrative sequences of multiple images, the sacred meets the profane, nature features in technology, East infiltrates West.

As Paik pushed his investigation into electronic television further, his field of research expanded to comprise a range of concerns, including the social and political function of television, the role of the viewer and viewer participation, and the function of the electronic and computer technologies as communications media and global networking systems. To set up live television programming, simultaneously broadcast via satellite in different continents was one of his early visions. In fact, already in 1966, he designed a Utopian Laser TV Station, which was published as a manifesto, in which he envisioned that “Very, very high frequency oscillation of laser will enable us to afford thousands of large and small TV stations. This will free us from the monopoly of a few commercial TV channels.” The idea of a global communication network certainly sounded utopian, then. But with the technology already being developed at the time, the possibility existed in principle. The first satellite experiments had taken place in 1960 via Echo 2 and Telstar 2, and television satellite broadcasts between the United States and Europe started in July 1962. Things developed slightly differently from what Paik thought, and they have not brought active viewer participation much closer, except in such rare instances as the experiments of “Van Gogh TV,” presented by the Ponton group in Germany. But the world is covered with satellite dishes now, which indeed make multiple channel reception possible world-wide. In BBC’s Saturday Night Clive, the viewer travels with Clive James in real-satellite-time in thirty minutes from London to Hollywood/Los Angeles, to Sidney, to Manilla in the Philippines and back in an hour. Via satellite the latest news on the Gulf War was brought into the living room without delay, and we saw CNN’s Peter Arnett report from the roof of the Rashid hotel in Baghdad. The Gulf War was to a large extent a media war as well. Not only has this medium changed our view of war, and the world, through a direct, simultaneous stream of news information. It had a direct impact on the way news is presented, just because of its immediacy.

It should not come as a surprise that the artist has also ventured into this realm. Although Paik had investigated the possibility radio-casting a piano concert simultaneously in San Francisco and Shanghai in 1961/1962, not before Documenta 6, Kassel, 1977, was Paik able to set up his first satellite program. The next satellite project was Good Morning Mr Orwell, on 1 January, 1984. As locations from which the broadcast took place were chosen the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a WNET-TV studio in New York City.[330] The program consisted of live performances by (avant-garde) artists and pop-rock musicians. The structure of the program was comparable to that in his videotapes: a fast-paced collage of heterogeneous real-time, electronic and synthesized images. Among the participants in Paris were Ben Vautier, Joseph Beuys, Robert Combas, Yves Montand, and the group Urban Sax. In the New York studio were Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Peter Gabriel, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, The Thompson Twins, Mauricio Kagel, and Charlotte Moorman. Paik used the split-screen technique to show what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. Criticism of technical failures, of delays and inconsistencies abounded. However, in being intercontinental, in combining elements of entertainment and contemporary (high) art, interjecting multi-cultural subject-matter, and as an interdisciplinary collaboration, Good Morning Mr. Orwell was for Nam June Paik a model for satellite television as a social, political and educational communication system, in which he embodied his ideas about television and video as communication media that might truly contribute to a better communication among humankind, and lead to a better understanding of the world’s problems.

The theme of communication runs like a red thread through Paik’s videotapes and video installations, for, in his view, war and global conflicts are primarily the result of a lack of communication. This is also why his works contains a layering of multi-cultural elements (dance, poetry), ideas and symbols (moon, egg, fish), and historical and political features. The elements of nature and state-of-the-art technology are of equal importance, both being a part of our daily lives.[331] Nam June Paik will broadcast his last TV show live on January 31, 1999.