Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Muybridge: Nam June Paik


When video technology was still relatively new, Nam June Paik was able to reshape its purpose to fit his artistic ambitions. Paik’s interests lied in performance, and he believed video could enhance the “expressive capacity and conceptual power” of performance. He would put televisions in odd places (like outdoors in the grass) or arrange them to form different shapes (like a robot). Various videos would be playing on these televisions, sometimes making no sense in the context in which they were being played. This is so in his piece where a television playing some kind of fish tank video was placed inside a shirt.


Paik has also done pieces where instead of a television playing a video, he used lasers to project moving images. These projections were displayed on different surfaces, such as water, scrims, and sculptures that were filled with smoke. Paik was really the forerunner in turning video into an art medium. Through his innovative works, Paik made people view videos and television in a whole new way.


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