Paik's Something Pacific for the Stuart Collection was his first permanent outdoor installation. This work relates specifically to its site, which includes the lobby of the university's Media Center as well as the lawns surrounding the building. Outdoors, the work features several ruined televisions embedded in the landscape; some are paired with Buddhas, and one, a tiny Sony Watchman, is topped by a miniature reproduction of Rodin's Thinker. In striking contrast to this video graveyard, the lobby of the Media Center houses one of Paik's lively interactive banks of TV monitors. By means of a control panel, viewers are able to manipulate sequences of Paik's own tapes and broadcast MTV. Like much of Paik's art, Something Pacific's outdoor and indoor sections use the video medium to contrast two very different experiences of time -- one involving extended contemplation and the other instantaneous reaction. More importantly, the scattered ruins of televisions offer a cautionary tale for those entering the Media Center. Paik places televisions in the landscape in order to dramatize his belief that television has defined the American landscape since World War II. The outdoor TVs are all "dead" sets, skeletal remains that Paik has returned to nature, perhaps to be discovered in future archeological digs.
View Pictures http://stuartcollection.ucsd.edu/StuartCollection/Paik.htm
Showing posts with label nam june paik. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nam june paik. Show all posts
3.11.09
Nam June Paik Pt 5- Global Groove 1974
Watch here
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/
Nam June Paik
«Global Groove»
'This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.' Paik’s introductory statement stands for the tape’s compositional principle and message – global channel zapping, in 1973 a visionary precursor of subsequent developments. The spirit of the tape conveys Marshall McLuhan's theory of a future 'global village', which Paik matched with an idea of his own: 'If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.' A typical Paik mixture, the tape includes excerpts from TV programmes, contributions by artist friends such as John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman and Karlheinz Stockhausen, footage by other video artists like Jud Yalkut and Robert Breer, and excerpts from earlier Paik videos. The combination of mass media and avant-garde was aimed at art-lovers and 'normal' TV viewers alike. The video was broadcast by WNET-TV on 30 January 1974.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/
Nam June Paik
«Global Groove»
'This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.' Paik’s introductory statement stands for the tape’s compositional principle and message – global channel zapping, in 1973 a visionary precursor of subsequent developments. The spirit of the tape conveys Marshall McLuhan's theory of a future 'global village', which Paik matched with an idea of his own: 'If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.' A typical Paik mixture, the tape includes excerpts from TV programmes, contributions by artist friends such as John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman and Karlheinz Stockhausen, footage by other video artists like Jud Yalkut and Robert Breer, and excerpts from earlier Paik videos. The combination of mass media and avant-garde was aimed at art-lovers and 'normal' TV viewers alike. The video was broadcast by WNET-TV on 30 January 1974.
Nam June Paik Pt 4 - Quotes by NJP
* "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."
* "Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence. "
* "The future is now. "
* "Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence. "
* "The future is now. "
Nam June Paik Pt 3-Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society – The 21st Century is now only 26 years away»
We now are at a different point in history. The effort to bring black and white children together by means of school busing is going awry. Desegregation strategies have become questionable. But television power can help achieve integration and understanding, and it has the added advantage that it happens over the air, unhampered by our polluted and complicated earth. I wonder what would happen if two day care centers for pre-schoolers, one in a black neighborhood and the other in a white one, would be able to hear and see each other by means of a two-way cable television set-up, so that the children of the two different cultures could start to play with one another over the air waves, without having to cope with stressful bus trips and their negative side effects.
Is this escapism mere hypocrisy, or is it a kind of first aid meant to initiate a long-range cure for the race problem? In any event, the technology exists; it is only waiting to be pressed into service, and it would cost very much less than ferrying kids around by bus.
Video-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television (for shopping, bibliographies, opinion polls, health care, bio-communication, data transfer from office to office) and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an «expanded-media» telephone system with thousands of novel uses, not only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself.
This «mini- and midi-television» (to use Professor René Berger’s expression) will join ranks with many other forms of paperless information transfer, such as audio cassettes, telex, data pooling, continental satellites, micro-fiches, private microwaves and eventually, fiber optics on laser frequencies. All of them together will constitute a new kind of nuclear energy for information and the improvement of society. I would like to call it tentatively a «broadband communication network.» Setbacks suffered by local cable companies have considerably delayed the arrival of this new nuclear energy. A recent article in the New York Times said: «There never was any question that cable television would become an independent medium; the only question was always when? Optimists still cling to their prediction that it will happen in the 1980s; pessimists predict a longer take-off period, some don’t think it will happen before the 21st century.» (10 March 1974).
Even if we accept the most pessimistic forecast, the 21st century is now only 26 years away. The fact that the dilemma concerning VHF frequency stations and public educational television is a direct result of the faulty planning of 26 years ago demonstrates beyond all doubt that the BROADBAND COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION has to begin, and it must begin NOW. (...)
Is this escapism mere hypocrisy, or is it a kind of first aid meant to initiate a long-range cure for the race problem? In any event, the technology exists; it is only waiting to be pressed into service, and it would cost very much less than ferrying kids around by bus.
Video-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television (for shopping, bibliographies, opinion polls, health care, bio-communication, data transfer from office to office) and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an «expanded-media» telephone system with thousands of novel uses, not only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself.
This «mini- and midi-television» (to use Professor René Berger’s expression) will join ranks with many other forms of paperless information transfer, such as audio cassettes, telex, data pooling, continental satellites, micro-fiches, private microwaves and eventually, fiber optics on laser frequencies. All of them together will constitute a new kind of nuclear energy for information and the improvement of society. I would like to call it tentatively a «broadband communication network.» Setbacks suffered by local cable companies have considerably delayed the arrival of this new nuclear energy. A recent article in the New York Times said: «There never was any question that cable television would become an independent medium; the only question was always when? Optimists still cling to their prediction that it will happen in the 1980s; pessimists predict a longer take-off period, some don’t think it will happen before the 21st century.» (10 March 1974).
Even if we accept the most pessimistic forecast, the 21st century is now only 26 years away. The fact that the dilemma concerning VHF frequency stations and public educational television is a direct result of the faulty planning of 26 years ago demonstrates beyond all doubt that the BROADBAND COMMUNICATION REVOLUTION has to begin, and it must begin NOW. (...)
Nam June Paik Pt 1-TV BRA FOR LIVING SCULPTURE & TV CELLO
View pictures
http://collections.walkerart.org/item/enlarge_fs.html?type=object&id=874&image_num=1
"As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences." -- Nam June Paik (1965)
"The real implied issue in 'Art and Technology' is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing rapidly -- too rapidly. Progress has already outstripped ability to program...TV Brassiere for Living Sculpture (Charlotte Moorman) is also one sharp example to humanize electronics...and technology. By using TV as bra...the most intimate belonging of human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers NOT for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology." --Nam June Paik (1969)
TV Bra For Living Sculpture raises a number of relevant questions about the notion of hybridity as we move down the path towards the possibilities of a Y2K apocalypse or a coming virtual nirvana. The object itself, a piece of technology meant to be worn during a musical performance, was itself a radical hybrid in the sense that McLuhan was suggesting. As a work of art it was rigorously intermedial, combining performance, sculpture, and video within the context of an art gallery structure traditionally focused on painting and sculpture. As a pioneering work of video sculpture that transgressed the various traditional boundaries of art, but also the boundaries of conventional science and engineering, Paik and Moorman's TV Bra For Living Sculpture provides an important historical antecedent and antidote to the numbing, ahistorical hysteria that often swirls around the explosion of the digital revolution. (FROM WALKER ART CENTER WEBSITE)
TV Cello (1964...1984 remake for pbs)
[TV Cello is] the first real innovation in cello design since 1600."--Charlotte Moorman
Since the early 1960s, Nam June Paik has explored the potential of television as an art object and an expressive medium. TV Cello is one of several objects Paik designed to be used by the late avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991). The three televisions in this work originally displayed three images: a direct feed of the immediate performance, a video collage of other cellists, and an intercepted broadcast television feed. As Moorman played this one-stringed cello with a regulation bow, she also created a series of electronic sounds, transforming the television into a musical instrument. When TV Cello was acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1992, Paik created new video images for the piece by combining existing footage of Moorman with excerpts from his video work Global Groove (1973).
http://collections.walkerart.org/item/enlarge_fs.html?type=object&id=874&image_num=1
"As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences." -- Nam June Paik (1965)
"The real implied issue in 'Art and Technology' is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium, which is progressing rapidly -- too rapidly. Progress has already outstripped ability to program...TV Brassiere for Living Sculpture (Charlotte Moorman) is also one sharp example to humanize electronics...and technology. By using TV as bra...the most intimate belonging of human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers NOT for something mean but stimulate their phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology." --Nam June Paik (1969)
TV Bra For Living Sculpture raises a number of relevant questions about the notion of hybridity as we move down the path towards the possibilities of a Y2K apocalypse or a coming virtual nirvana. The object itself, a piece of technology meant to be worn during a musical performance, was itself a radical hybrid in the sense that McLuhan was suggesting. As a work of art it was rigorously intermedial, combining performance, sculpture, and video within the context of an art gallery structure traditionally focused on painting and sculpture. As a pioneering work of video sculpture that transgressed the various traditional boundaries of art, but also the boundaries of conventional science and engineering, Paik and Moorman's TV Bra For Living Sculpture provides an important historical antecedent and antidote to the numbing, ahistorical hysteria that often swirls around the explosion of the digital revolution. (FROM WALKER ART CENTER WEBSITE)
TV Cello (1964...1984 remake for pbs)
[TV Cello is] the first real innovation in cello design since 1600."--Charlotte Moorman
Since the early 1960s, Nam June Paik has explored the potential of television as an art object and an expressive medium. TV Cello is one of several objects Paik designed to be used by the late avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991). The three televisions in this work originally displayed three images: a direct feed of the immediate performance, a video collage of other cellists, and an intercepted broadcast television feed. As Moorman played this one-stringed cello with a regulation bow, she also created a series of electronic sounds, transforming the television into a musical instrument. When TV Cello was acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1992, Paik created new video images for the piece by combining existing footage of Moorman with excerpts from his video work Global Groove (1973).
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