With Amanda Kim’s documentary Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV on general release, it seems the perfect time to reflect on the work of the “grandfather of video art” and how huis work remains so contemporary.
by Cici Peng
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV (Amanda Kim, 2023)
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV begins with the image of a digital butterfly, its electric blue and emerald wings flapping slowly across the screen. As the camera zooms out, we see the eponymous video artist Nam June Paik, staring intently at the butterfly bouncing across his television screen. With a mic in hand, Paik murmurs, then sings for the little creature, the sound of his voice makes the wings burst into blobs of blue and green. The artist Paik and the butterfly are having a conversation.
Communication and expression is a central subject for the artist, who grew up in Japanese-occupied Korea where he was forced to speak the coloniser’s tongue, then as an immigrant in Germany and New York, “learning to speak German and English badly.” In Amanda Kim’s documentary, we hear Paik’s writings given voice by actor Steven Yuen: “Everyday is a communication problem for me. My problem is how to communicate back.” At the heart of Paik’s art is an attempt to speak back, to hear the echo of another and return the call. Throughout the documentary, we sense Paik’s attempt to use technology to create dialogues across boundaries – national, political and personal.
Kim’s film situates Paik historically to contextualise his radical political lens that shaped his desire to speak – Paik was making art during the Vietnam War, the partition of Korea and the erection of the Berlin Wall, all while technological advances were being made in broadcast media. Often referred to as the “grandfather of video art,” Paik was one of the few video artists examining the effect of television and computers on our everyday life. Wary of the medium’s ability to manipulate its viewers, Paik says, “Television is a dictatorial medium. When the superior says something to the inferior, they can just listen and answer ‘Yes.’ Talking back is what democracy needs.” In 1969, Paik worked with the television technician Shuya Abe to invent the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer which mixes moving images, colourising and warping them into a new visual language that punctured TV’s illusory objectivity. Paik’s practice is an attempt to “talk back to the television”. The viewer, in tandem with Paik, can transform and deform TV’s images by twisting knobs and keys on the synthesiser to create new images to psychedelic effect. Although the tool helped create a new aesthetic for music videos and digital art, Paik’s tool also intended to estrange viewers from television itself by attacking the sanctity of the broadcast image. By disrupting the images, he reminded viewers that they could challenge the mass media’s representation of reality, to awaken themselves from the sedating effect of television.
The Korean-born artist died in 2006, the year that Twitter was made. Looking back to his oeuvre, you could see that Paik anticipated many of the technological debates we are having now – from creating work that imagines machine consciousness as he attempts to “humanise technology”, to his coining of the term “electronic super-highway” in 1974, which he conceptualised as a system that would link everyone on Earth together. In 1994, after his prophecy came true with the birth of the internet, Paik celebrated it with a work titled Internet Dreams, where multiple ever-changing screens immersed you in a frenzy of information overload.
With the development of AI, and debates around its creative consciousness, Paik’s work takes on new dimensions, reimagining what “becoming robot” means in the digital age. Robot K-456 (1964), one of Paik’s early works, unlike the automata of our science fiction imaginations, is no perfect fighting machine. Robot K-456 is a frail, hunched creature, endowed with cameras for eyes, a speaker for a mouth, bouncy foam breasts and a flint and sandpaper penis. It even shits beans while it moves. “My work looks whimsical but it has a profound background. I make technology ridiculous,” Paik says. As Robot K-456 hobbles down the street reciting an old speech by John F. Kennedy on loop, its beauty emerges in its idiosyncratic quirks – the limp in its left leg, the trail of white beans left in its wake, its sexual features, its broken-record mumblings that signal to the evasive nature of memory. Paik didn’t want to create a perfect robot, what made the robot seem more human was its failures.
TV Buddha (Nam June Paik, 1974) installed at the Tate Modern in 2019 as part of a retrospective of Paik’s work.
Rather than imagining a conscious machine, free of a body and its failings, Paik exposes the chaos of being alive – of a body that desires, shits, and ages – his imagination of consciousness is a bodily one. Although AI researchers have primarily tried to achieve consciousness through pumping data into a network of computer circuits, Paik’s robot seems to question whether consciousness can ever be achieved without any haptic responses, without a body that experiences all the world’s sensations. The robot’s fragility was affectively dramatised twenty years later, when Paik had Robot K-456 lumber down the street as part of his 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a car ran into it in a staged accident. When a news reporter asked Paik what happened, he responded, “It is the catastrophe of technology in the twenty-first century. And we’re practising how to cope with it.”
Paik’s view of consciousness is interdependent and embodied, borrowing from Buddhist concepts of the self. In his most famous work, TV Buddha (1974), Paik poetically expresses a view of a shared consciousness. In the work, Buddha is placed opposite a TV with a camera attached above it, streaming live-action footage of the Buddha in a closed-circuit loop.
When you stand behind the Buddha, you’re suddenly startled by your own reflection in the TV, joining, disrupting and contributing to the Buddha’s image. The Buddha statue, our physical symbol of true enlightenment, recognises himself in the TV-image, looking at his own awakened state. Although his reflection in the TV is not real, the reflection represents a truth, a kernel of the Real, captured and recorded, in an eternal loop between the Buddha’s eyes, the camera and the TV. Here, Paik captures the sense of the eternal soul in Zen Buddhism, which flows in a looped ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘mental flow’.
Yet, the TV-image is one that’s unstable, dependent on other bodies to enter its frames and disrupt its stillness, to witness the Buddha recognising himself. When we stand behind the Buddha, we see ourselves too, looking alongside him. If, within his reflection, we can see the Buddha’s understanding of truth, maybe it informs how we see ourselves too. In Buddhism, each self is a mirror set against an infinite number of mirrors, composed of all its infinite reflections of others. Paik’s TV Buddha borrows from the hall of mirrors to poignantly suggest our interconnectedness: we depend on each other to be seen and to see. The invitation of the camera to look together grasps towards a collective truth.
Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is currently on general release in the UK courtesy of Dogwoof.
Cici Peng is a writer based in London, who has contributed to Little White Lies, gal-dem, The Quietus and The FACE. She specialises in global art cinema, experimental moving-image work, and contemporary literature.