Art & Technology #16: Legacies of Nam June Paik

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  The first thing that comes into his or her mind upon hearing the name Nam June Paik will be a television. He is known as an artist who took the medium, a mass medium, into the artistic context for the first time. The artist showed works, in which the screen, a symbol of the mass media that delivers contents only from the one side, is manipulated by magnets so that the receivers can change the video on the screen monitor at their pleasure. Paik also filmed videos by himself with Portapak, the first portable video camera developed by Sony in 1965, which he bought in the year it was released, and created an analogue video synthesizer with Japanese electronic engineer Shuya Abe in 1969. A synthesizer is a device with which sounds of various frequencies or waveforms are composed to create a new sound, or already saved sound tones can be electrically modulated by the user. Paik used this video synthesizer to delete, copy, or input information contained in many different videotapes, or transforming by putting colors on the videos. In other words, the artist focused and studied the television as a mass medium which bears the social meaning and also as a medium for expression in an artistic sense, while suggesting the origin of the video art and expanding the video art on the multidimensional level by encompassing all the activities of producing, modifying, and editing videos. For these efforts of his, Paik is regarded important in art history today as a pioneer in video art and media art.

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  The start of the video art is marked by the first private exhibition of Nam June Paik, Exposition of Music – Electronic medium, held in Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963. Paik advanced a research on the TV which had become a powerful idol of the public from 1955 to 1960, and demonstrated the result of the research in this exhibition in the form of artworks, in which the television is used in a piece of art for the first time. He did not merely use it as a visual material of his works: 13 pieces of artworks, of which the screens are warped by diodes and magnets, were arranged disorderedly and randomly in the display space. The monitors chaotically placed together with the distorted images in the same place broke the existing frame of the concept of the TVs that shows the same contents to the public one-sidedly. The viewers came to exist as an active interpreter in front of the work, rather than a one-sided receiver. This is where the television had made its entrance in the art history for the first time, and the one-wayness of it as mass media was crushed. It was also the moment when the concept of interaction in an art piece appeared, according to which a work is finally completed when the viewer is more actively involved, apart from the relationship between the viewer and the already completed and fixed work.

Bakelite Robot

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  Another interesting aspect of the works of Nam June Paik is usage of robots. Paik has continuously created works related to robots since K-456 in 1964. In this work, a robot stands in front of people as a living thing, walking, talking, and excreting beans towards the viewers. K-456 had become a popular work that had been displayed frequently in his private exhibitions for 20 years. In 1982, this robot “dies,” hit by a car in front of Whitney Museum in the U.S. Through the performance that demonstrated the death of the robot, the artist showed his viewpoint that the robot, born from machinery and technologies, is an existence on the same level as human, rather than an opposite counterpart to human. He regarded a robot as a result of technologies that resembles human. The artist applied the concept of death, which is a characteristic of living organisms, to a robot in order to reveal that he is focusing on technologies, the society, and human related thereto, not merely looking at technologies or a robot separately.
  Most of the robot works of the artist after K-456 do not actually walk or do activities, but are in a form of video sculpture. The sculpture pieces are composed of objects, that is, ready-made objects, and each of the robots is made from ready-made mass media products such as monitors and radios.

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  Bakelite, from the title of Paik’s piece Bakelite Robot, is the name of the first artificial synthetic resin, which was a then-state of the art material optimized for mass production and enabled the ultimate standardization of radios. Thanks to this material, the Bakelite radios are completely distinguished from the past radios with lavish exterior as in furniture, obtaining modernity with the highlighted function and technology of the time. Bakelite Robot shows the subject of the technologies that represented that time. It can be said that the artist demonstrated human beings who uses and are affected by the technology of their time, consequently synchronized with the contemporary time.
  The screens installed in the radios show videos related to robots endlessly. The seven kinds of videos created with a video synthesizer display different scenes seamlessly and simultaneously. The images shown in the same place at the same time through multiple channels in such manner provided a whole new experience, different from the existing perceptual experiences. Contrary to passive interpretation of receiving one certain content in a linear manner, this perceptual experience includes active interpretation of analyzing a whirlwind of images scattered on many screens by one’s own standard in one’s own way, associated with participation unlike in the existing experiences, and reflected with the form of the new art and new society unlike those of the past.