Early TV Experiments by NJP

• Jud Yalkut

As part of the Fluxus movement, the video art pioneer Nam June Paik worked with the playful, technical manipulation of the everyday medium of television. Artists are no longer understood as ingenious creators, but rather as initiators of anarchic, artistic action. The aim is radical dissolution of the boundaries between the individual genres of art, between artists and the public, and between art and everyday life.

In the video work »Early TV Experiments by NJP«, swarms of dots, intersecting lines and curves, dot grids rotating on their own axis, and bright colored stripes appear instead of a television picture. Images contract into a line and unfold again into moving colored patterns. Short sequences from the »TV Cello« performance by Charlotte Moorman are faded in like highlights.

The video shows Paik’s technical manipulations of the TV set – he was one of the first to take it out of the living room and into a sculptural context – as well as his earliest experimental attempts with the seemingly endless variation possibilities of the video synthesizer, which he developed in cooperation with Abe Shuya. The artist Jud Yalkut recorded Paik’s experiments on 16 mm film.