![]() ![]() ![]() Later experiments with the medium spawned films like Global Groove (1973) as well as installations like Fin de Siècle II (1989) and sculptures like Untitled (1993). Kennedy speeches, and the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer (1969), which enabled anyone to distort the color and shape of video images in real time. With the engineer Shuya Abe, Paik began to develop more advanced technical interventions, such as Robot K-456 (1964), a remote-controlled robot that “defecated” dried beans while playing snatches of John F. Paik made his first foray into video in 1963 with an exhibition in Wuppertal, West Germany, that featured Zen for TV (1963/1981) and other television sets whose receptions he had altered. The pair embarked on a decades-long partnership that generated performances including Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns (1964) and Opera Sextronique (1967), during which they were arrested for indecent exposure. ![]() ![]() In 1964, Paik moved to New York, where he met the cellist Charlotte Moorman. Termed “action music,” works like Étude for Pianoforte (1960)-which concluded when Paik leapt into the audience and cut off Cage’s tie-caught the attention of artists like Karlheinz Stockhausen, who wrote a part for Paik in Originale (1961), and George Maciunas, who invited Paik to join Fluxus. An electrifying encounter in 1958 with the composer John Cage inspired Paik to incorporate objects, theatrical interruptions, and pre-recorded sounds into his compositions. He enrolled at the University of Tokyo, where he wrote a thesis on the German composer Arnold Schoenberg, then moved to West Germany to pursue graduate studies at Munich University. Born in 1932 to a wealthy family of textile manufacturers, Paik trained as a classical pianist in Seoul before fleeing to Japan with his parents and siblings upon the outbreak of the Korean War. His prediction that we would one day develop international telecommunications networks has prompted scholars to dub him a visionary, while his early experiments with the emerging technology of video have earned him the oversize epithet “father of video art.” A member of the international avant-garde Fluxus movement, Paik is best known for creating massive sculptural installations dominated by television monitors. 1 The tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating nature of the quip is characteristic of Paik’s attitude toward art making. I have to entertain people every second,” Nam June Paik has said. “I come from a very poor country and I am poor. “Our life is half natural and half technological. ![]()
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