Analysis of revolutionary Visual Artist Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik is considered to be the founder of video art. What I find super interesting about him is how he manipulated video without the help of a computer. A great example is ‘Nixon’1, a video installation which was created in 1965. It consists of two televisions, with two magnetic coils in front of the tv’s causing the screen to distort in various ways. The method he used may be outdated but manipulating images to create something new is still at the core of how a lot of artists create their work today. His installation ‘Electronic Superhighway’2 showed various videos on 47 different screens stacked up next to each other. This resulted in a video wall that was described as “a visualization of the information-overload that we would come to experience as travellers on the future electronic superhighway” 3. You wouldn’t be able to grasp every single detail of each video, it was more about the sensory overload of this huge wall of flashing images. This effect is still used to this day, with big festivals having huge screens behind the artist accentuating the show. The focus there is less on each individual screen and more on how those screens combined effect the viewer.