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In the 1960s, Nam June Paik embraced the medium
of television, and became the founding father of video art.
His long and prolific relationship with electronic media began
notably with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, in controversial
performance works such as Opera Sextronique from 1967.
Paik's oeuvre later included television sculpture, satellite
art, robotic devices, and giant video walls with synthesized
imagery pulsating from stacks of cathode-ray tubes.
Paik suggests that art should embrace the
technologies of the information society. Paik presents himself
as artist-shaman, synthesizing art and technology in an effort
to exorcise the demons of a mass-consumer, technology obsessed
society. Paik uses rejected media artifacts in his work, such
as vintage television sets. His video works, with their liberal
doses of "cybernated shock and catharsis," are poignantly cynical
pieces that comment on an American techno-culture dominated
by starry-eyed optimists.
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