![]() ![]() Paik continued along these lines in New York, where he further pursued the participatory potential of his altered sets. That is, in his Wuppertal exhibition he took the inherent ability of television to transmit identical broadcasts to an extensive number of receivers and turned it on its head his televisions, in effect, transformed these identical pictures into individualised distortions, viewable only within the space of the exhibition. As the art historian Christine Mehring has noted, Paik was attracted to television at this early moment ‘not as a means of broadcasting and reaching out, but rather … as a way of creating electronic pictures’. He achieved this goal in three ways: by physically altering internal circuitry to distort broadcasts by introducing external input – for example, by allowing audience members to speak into a microphone whose audio signals would alter the picture and by relying on the sheer variability of broadcast television, allowing whatever happened to be playing to become part of his art. In an essay, Paik explained that he intended these works to introduce ‘indeterminism and variability’ into visual art. There, he exhibited a dozen television sets whose inner workings he had modified to produce a range of effects – from twisting distortions of the picture signal, to abstract kinetic shapes and simple lines. ![]() They found an ideal partner in WGBH, which had a growing reputation as a hub for experimental television.īy the time he reached Boston, Paik had been working with television for several years, having debuted television-based artworks in his first solo show, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963. The group selected six artists, including Paik, to take part in a pilot programme. In 1968, as Wise was organising another show, TV as a Creative Medium, he met a group of producers from the Ford Foundation’s recently established Public Broadcasting Laboratory who were embarking on an initiative to enlist artists to collaborate with public television. There, he had been exhibiting his work at the upstart Galeria Bonino when the gallerist Howard Wise – a promoter of kinetic, light and electronic art – included his work in a 1967 group show, Lights in Orbit. Paik came to WGBH four years after his move from Germany to New York City. While recovering understudied work by a major video artist, this paper also sheds light on post-war artists’ shifting ideas about the value of viewer participation and the potential of technology’s global reach. The work Paik produced for the station reveals how he moved from efforts to achieve direct participation to programmes that present a more expansive understanding of audience engagement, with the crux of this shift occurring in 1970. Paik came to realise that, while television could not easily accommodate the physical participation he had invited in his sculptures, what it could do is disseminate ideas to a broad audience and unsettle habitual ways of thinking. His productions for WGBH show how his thinking about this unknown audience evolved over time. TV: You give away through airwave… you don’t even know, to whom it went.’ 2 In a 1972 letter to John Cage, Paik explained, ‘TV is … a form of giving away… even more so than music. In contrast with the audiences at the performance festivals and gallery exhibitions to which he had previously been accustomed, television audiences were anonymous, geographically dispersed, and, as they were likely watching from home, susceptible to a range of distractions. Addressing the whole of Paik’s work there, with particular focus on his most ambitious project – the four-hour Video Commune 1970 – it shows how Paik sought to reconcile the artistic aims he had been articulating in other media with the distinct nature of broadcast television.īroadcasting forced Paik to confront the question of audience in a completely new way. This paper draws from unpublished archival documents and conversations with the station’s producers to provide a fuller picture of Paik’s engagement with WGBH. Considering that WGBH was the site of many ‘firsts’ for Paik – including his first production for broadcast and the invention of his video synthesiser – it is surprising that little scholarship has been produced on this strand of his work. Eschewing traditional formats, his programmes were hallucinatory collages of abstract, electronic images interwoven with footage of avant-garde performances and references to pop culture, often framed by dry voiceover narration. During the years that followed, he developed a body of work at the station that subverted all conventions of public television. In 1968 the artist Nam June Paik arrived at the studios of WGBH-TV in Boston. ![]()
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