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the first artist to show abstract forms on a television
Nam June Paik was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea. The onset of the Korean War forced his family to flee to Hong Kong in 1950. They soon moved to Japan, and Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956 with a degree in aesthetics. To pursue his interest in avant-garde music and composition, the artist then went to Germany, where he met John Cage and George Maciunas. Paik participated in the neo-Dada Fluxus movement and gave his first performance in 1962. He immigrated to New York in 1964 and began to collaborate with cellist Charlotte Moorman. Paik was a pioneer in performance and technology-based art. He was the first artist to show abstract forms on a television, using a magnet to distort the image (in 1963), and the first to use a small portable video camera (in 1965). By 1970, he had invented a color video synthesizer with Shuya Abe that could combine and manipulate moving images from different sources. He is considered to be the founder of video art.
PROJECTS
Electronic Opera #1(1969, 5 min)
Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984, 30 min)
First aired in 1969 as part of The Medium is the Medium, a special “artist transmission” commissioned by WGBH-Boston. Set to classical music and featuring “hippies,” a dancing model, and national political figures, Paik’s five-minute contribution is a form of what he called “participation television.” Here, he instructs you — his audience — to open or close your eyes while the hallucinatory images swirl and twist into frame. The original premiere marked Paik’s first foray into television broadcast and remains an early and ironic example of his ambition to turn inherently passive viewers into active and integral participants.
In order to realize his vision of a borderless world and to showcase the possibility that art could bring the world together as one, Paik produced his first major international satellite broadcast Good Morning 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 - one of the earliest machines co-designed by Paik and his collaborator Shuya Abe, which allowed the artist to alter and manipulate existing video images.
