Paik, Nam June

1932–

Multimedia Artist

Nam June Paik is a Korean-born artist and composer who lives in New York and Düsseldorf. He was the first artist to work with television and video, and his career includes many contributions to intermedia and multimedia. Paik's 1964 manifesto, “Utopian Laser Television,” conceptualized a world in which television meant thousands of channels broadcasting at any time, day or night, each channel programmed by its owner-director for an audience as small or as large as any concept might attract. In a 1974 study for the Rockefeller Foundation, Paik coined the term “electronic superhighway,” which evolved into the ideas of the information superhighway and the Infobahn.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Paik lived and worked in Germany, where he had gone to study music. He conceptualized music as an extended frame of action and philosophy linked to the ideas of John Cage. Paik's ideas involved a Buddhist vision of universal and anti-elitist approaches to music, art, and social philosophy. He shared these with the international community of experimental artists, architects, composers, and designers known as Fluxus.

The Fluxus ideas included the unity of art and life; an experimental approach to the arts; and the use of chance, playfulness, and simplicity. Another central idea is the concept that artist and composer Dick Higgins labeled intermedia.

The intermedia idea erased the boundaries between art forms in a fluid, experimental approach to the arts—including music. New forms emerged across the boundaries of existing media, and entirely new arts media were born.

During his stay in Germany, Paik began to imagine new ways of understanding and working with television. Unable to gain access to expensive studio equipment and costly broadcast time, Paik's first television experiments used magnets directly on the cabinets of early television sets to distort the broadcast images shown on screen.

By 1964, Paik had moved to New York. There, he purchased the first available Sony portable video camera. Within moments of the purchase, he shot about ten minutes of raw, grainy footage and made history that evening with a presentation of the world's first video art at New York City's Café a Go-Go. Paik essentially invented the medium of video art as an experimental extension of his search for new music.

Later, as a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the California Institute for the Arts, Paik began to experiment with ever-more-sophisticated video techniques. Among other things, he invented the world's first video synthesizer together with Japanese inventor Shuya Abe, and taught a generation of artists who were later to emerge as the first video artists. Paik's students had also become the first generation of producer-directors on MTV, closing the circle in two decades from experimental art to commercial entertainment.

Many of Paik's Fluxus colleagues were important to the birth of video art, multimedia, and inter-media. These included the Germans Wolf Vostell and Joseph Beuys, Japanese artists Takehisa Kosugi and Shigeko Kubota, Lithuanian-born Americans George Maciunas and Jonas Mekas, and French artists Jean Dupuy, Robert Filliou, and Ben Vautier, among others. The interpretations that these artists gave to multimedia and intermedia ran from the simplest and most primitive possibilities, typified by the folklore-based projects of Sweden's Bengt af Klintberg and the poetry performances of American Emmett Williams, to Paik's own technologically dazzling installations and the sophisticated book/print/installation works of American Alison Knowles.

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