Nam June Paik Video Innovations
Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, Korea on July 20, 1932. He was the fifth and youngest child of a textile merchant. In 1947, at the age of 14, he studied piano and composition with two of Korea's foremost composers. The family moved to Tokyo, Japan in 1950 to avoid the havoc of the Korean War. Paik studied music, history, art history, and philosophy at the University of Tokyo from 1953 to 1956. He did his graduate dissertation on Schoenberg. In 1956, he moved to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music. He studied music history under Thrasybulos Georgiades at the University of Munich and composition under Wolfgang Fortner at the Hochschule fűr Musik. He also attended classes under Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, David Tudor, and John Cage. Paik lived in Cologne for the next five years and then returned to Japan for a short time to conduct experiments with electromagnets and color TV sets. In 1964, Paik moved to New York and still resides there today. While he lived in Korea, Paik had become familiar with the work of Schoenberg. Paik was interested in Schoenberg above all others because of his radical compositions. They reflected the social atmosphere of Seoul at the time. In 1947, Paik had
Paik once told Manfred Eichel that “The five principles of media are: Sex, Violence, Greed, Vanity and Deception. On the lawns, several ruined TVs are embedded in the ground along with Buddha sculptures and a Sony Watchman is paired with a miniature of Rodin’s Thinker. Paik’s “child” represents the child of the future, and the present, who has been raised with television as his/her main source of entertainment and information. Paik, Nam June, Video Time- Video Space, New York, 1993. Paik had only two compositions by which to judge his “guru. com/smithsonian /issues97/oct97/hlhts_oct97. He began to conduct experiments with the help of an electronics engineer, Shuya Abe. Emerson steps up to the microphone and begins to imitate the sound of alarms and sirens, while a video projection of Beuys growling and speaking is played. Paik has been given the title of “Father of Video Art,” as he was the first to use video and television as a viable medium. All of this is set to audio ranging from ritual chants to rock, and is controlled by a complicated setup of disc players, computers, and digital sequences. “It’s grand scale and technological prowess,” says NMAA chief curator Jaquelyn Serrver, “demonstrate Paik’s extraordinary capacity to move video from the sphere of the ordinary to the limitless domain of the imagination.
Common topics in this essay:
Jonathan Huffman,
Global Groove,
Simone Forti,
High-tech Child,
Rodin’s Thinker,
Finland Japan,
Beuys Cage,
Paik’s Megatron/Matrix,
Music—Electronic Television,
Jaquelyn Serrver,
global groove,
video art,
opera sextronique,
john cage,
“father video art”,
paik’s influences,
studied music,
zen film,
music history,
simone forti,
family robot,
studied music history,
opera sextronique paik’s,
|
Acceptance Essays
