The Dutch-Belgian artist duo JODI’s series Untitled Game consists of various levels for the first-person shooter Quake. The levels presented are CTRL-Space and Arena. The players are confronted with just a white surface, which is framed by image elements. Arena represents the transformation of a game into an entirely unplayable one, and is the most radical intervention in the structures of the gameplay. The degree of abstraction goes as far as the complete eradication of representational images. The artistic strategy of deletion used evokes associations with monochrome images in art history. In Zen for Film (1963) Nam June Paik let an unexposed, ‘empty’ roll of film run through a projector.

Zen for Film is an art historically significant film by the Korean composer and video artist Nam June Paik. The original version ran for 20 or sometimes 30 minutes. The film is simply a transparent blank film, which accumulates dust and scratches as it passes through the projector over time with each successive screening. This idea or an “undetermined” piece stems from Paik’s approach to music composition influenced by John Cage’s 4’ 33” (1952), a score which is based on imperfections found in paper.

Since the 1990s, we have seen artists turning their attention to video games. The Chinese artist Feng Mengbo is one of the pioneers of this new artistic focus on digital games. The spectacular work Long March: Restart leans aesthetically toward the two-dimensional video games of the 16-bit era. In Feng Mengbo’s video game, the world of symbols of communist propaganda mixes with set pieces of the Western consumer world and Asian stereotypes in video games such as Street Fighter II.

A stationary bicycle is operated by a user in a darkened space to simulate a bicycle ride through the streets of Manhattan, Amsterdam, and Karlsruhe. The visitor is actively integrated into the installation by using the bicycle, which is positioned in front of a screen onto which three-dimensional street views of the different cities are projected. The city views are composed of computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form the buildings along the sides of the streets and at the same time make up words and sentences that have literary or historical references to the depicted location. (Text by Chiara Marchini)

Players move within a three-dimensional environment, which they experience from the first-person perspective. The surroundings constantly adapt in a subtle way to how the player treats the environment, how they explore it, and how they get to know it. Audio-visually, The Night Journey is comparable to Viola’s other video works. The graphic artists participating in the project have modeled the computer graphics on the image lines of video and translated the grainy, almost blurred appearance of Viola’s video images. The game utilizes the entire range of video aesthetics and places them in an interactive form of computer graphics.

Since November 2011, the artist Alan Kwan from Hong Kong has been recording every step he takes with a camera that is attached to his glasses. Every evening, the artist uploads the video material to the video game Bad Trip, which Kwan designed and programmed himself. The players can then experience the images as memory fragments in the 3D environment of the game, and metaphorically navigate the memories of the artist. Bad Trip foregrounds the highly topical themes associated with life-logging and the Quantified Self Movement.

Memoirs is a memoir of the humanity’s struggle for inventing home appliances in pursuit of happiness. Its antique outlook stimulates a sensibility of nostalgia for old-fashioned home electric appliances. As you come close to the piece, a custom made Polaroid camera automatically recognizes your face and takes a picture of you. Like bringing films to the photo printing office, taking a card with printed web address (http://everyware.kr/memoirs) from a stack gives you a recess to reminisce the good old days. With photos stacking up on the web server, we collectively build and share one’s memoirs through the piece.

Nixon TV is composed of a pair of monitors on which the broadcast image of the former American president Richard Nixon is distorted every eight minutes when electricity is sent through the magnet coil. Nam June Paik has referred to this effect by stating, “TV picture is ‘disturbed’ by the strong demagnetizer’s place and rhythm.” Nixon failed in his presidential campaign because of his unsuccessful use of the media in the TV debate with John F. Kennedy. This made Paik pay attention to the influence of media, inspiring him to create Nixon TV.

10,000 Moving Cities is an interactive net and telepresence-based installation that deals with globalized cities. Visitors can select any city of the world using data goggles as digital interface in a virtual reality system. User-generated content linked to the selected city such as recent news, tweets, images, videos, and posts from social networks, is searched and retrieved in real time and displayed as a multiple moving collage onto the façades of an abstract urban environment.

In the serious game 1378 (km), the player is transported to different sections of the border between East and West Germany. The year is 1976. Players can assume the role of either an East German border guard or an East German refugee. In detailed reproduced scenarios of sections of the inner German border, the situation there can be experienced in the form of a first-person shooter. It is only possible to win the game if one does not shoot. If one shoots a refugee in the role of a border guard, the players find themselves in a court room. In a trial they are held accountable for their actions. 1378 (km) was created as a student art project with an educational character at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) in the GameLab. It was planned to release 1378 (km) on German Unity Day 2010. The art project caused a scandal, which was particularly orchestrated by the negative reviews of BILD newspaper, which described the game as “disgusting.” Some of the relatives of victims killed at the inner German border felt offended, which led to a complaint being file charged against the author Jens M. Stober for “incitement of popular hatred.” The charges against the student were dropped, and the German press council condemned the reviews published by BILD newspaper.

Frontiers has a serious political background: The subject of the first-person shooter faces a refugee situation at Europe’s borders. The game shows the focal points of a refugee route, which leads from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe: The players experience four different border situations and a nightmarish room with documentary materials, which the artists have assembled during their on-site researches. The players can choose from various perspectives: they can choose between the role of a refugee, or that of a border guard.

Papers, Please is set in the fictional state of “Arstroztka” during the 1980s, in the historical background of the Cold War. The gameplay of Papers, Please focuses on the work life of an immigration inspector at a border checkpoint. The player inspects arrivals’ documents and uses an array of tools to determine whether the papers are in order for the purpose of keeping undesirable individuals such as terrorists, wanted criminals, or smugglers out of the country.

In 1999, Small Fish was created at ZKM in the course of the series ‘Digital_Arts_Edition’. It is a cooperation between the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics and the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media, and is now also available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. The elements which can be used to change the score and thus influence the music are widespread abstract forms, circles, points, lines, or moving colored patterns. In the 15 different graphic scores, the player can arrange the multiple parts to affect the music immediately.

“As collage technic replaced oil-paint, the cathode ray will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins & junk.”
-Nam June Paik, Electronic Videotape Recorder in Pamphlet of Paik’s video screening in Café au Go Go, New York, 1965

Nam June Paik played his first video recorded tape in 1965 at Café au Go Go in New York, where he frequently performed. There, he distributed a pamphlet called Electronic Videotape Recorder. Fontainebleau, which comprises 20 color monitors placed in a quaint wooden frame gilded in gold, is a piece that shows Nam June Paik’s comment that the cathode ray will be replacing the canvas. This two-channel work shows decorative and abstract images flashing by. The title ‘Fontainebleau’ appears to be taken from the Fontainebleau castle in France. This is where the rulers of France including Napoleon stayed, and also the location of the François I Gallery, which is the archetype of all ‘galleries’ and the exhibition space that featured paintings with gilded frames.

Nam June Paik, having begun to learn piano and composition in an early age, started composing his own music in the age of fifteen in 1947 while he was still going to Gyeonggi High School, such as pairing Sowol Kim’s poems Someday and After Many Many Days with music. Paik, as a middle school student, was familiar with contemporary composers such as Schönberg and Bartok. In particular, he took to Schönberg’s music, and wrote his graduation dissertation on Schönberg at Tokyo University in Japan. Paik moved to Germany to continue his studies in music, and joined the ‘Fluxus,’ an artist group that experimented with borderless art across genres.

Paik’s performance presents the fundamental characteristics of the Fluxus in its nature of ‘intermedia’ crossing. His scores, consisting of textual sentences instead of musical scores, simultaneously embody visual elements in that the instructions are sometimes presented in scrolls; performative elements in that the performer acts according to the sentences; and literary traits in that the scores are made of sentences along with musical faculties.

Mary Bauermeister was Nam June Paik’s close colleague and a Fluxus artist. This work consists of written correspondences between the two artists, and scenes from a concert that took place in the early 1960s at Bauermeister’s studio. The piano, decked with paper and photographs, is also part of the actual object that was used at the concert. Along with Paik’s piece Klavier Integral(Integral Piano), which was introduced at Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, the destroyed piano shows the experimental spirit of the artists at the time, who expressed new concepts of art such as viewer participation, improvisation, and coincidence.

John Cage had noted that three works share the property of silence: Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, a presentation of an a film containing nothing, with Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting, which consists of an empty canvas, and his own work 4’33”, wherein the audience listens to the ambient noise from the surroundings while the player sits there without playing anything for four minutes thirty three seconds. To Paik, the empty film was a kind of plane that is not empty but is indeed empty. The strong light emitted from the 16mm film projector while it spins the film clearly shows the form of dust specs stuck to the film on the white wall.
Meanwhile, Paik also saw the film as a plane that portrays changes in movements. He made 16mm black and white film pieces that record simple, repeated action. The films he produced during this period are also the product of various artistic explorations Paik engaged with while his interest was moving on from performance to electronic media, such as the relationship between performance and video, or video and sound.

This is part of Nam June Paik’s experimental “video-film” series he collaborated on with Jud Yalkut. It not only features Paik himself, but also Takehisa Kosugi and an unidentified Native American. The screen introduces the varied facial expressions and performances of the people in the film and in a black and white plane, divided in different proportions, while minimizing movement. This piece shows Paik’s experimental spirit, as it moves on from video to performance and film, along with Hand and Face.

Paik began to use the television as an alternative canvas beginning in the early 1960s. He developed an interest in television by meeting people in the field of broadcasting and encountering various equipment in the industry between 1958 and 1963, when he was working with electronic music at Germany’s WDR broadcasting station. In 1963, he introduced thirteen televisions that became a piece of art in his first solo exhibition Exposition of Music – Electronic Television. What distinguishes Paik’s use from that of other artists is that he places weight on the interaction of the viewers, through which the artwork becomes complete, and presents the expansion of networks in an artistic yet also widely accessible manner. Paik’s works using television, developed into a variety of forms, are interesting in that they present television as a medium located in the process by which something is made or becomes something else, instead of a state that embodies a preexistent becoming.

In this piece, comprising two Philco vacuum tube televisions, one of them becomes a fish tank, deprived of all its mechanical components. In the TV-fish tank, there is a real fish swimming about. The other television presents a real-time image of the fish, mediated through a closed circuit camera. This piece shows both a live fish and its real-time visual mediation; the viewers, as they watch the piece, are drawn to ponder on the meaning of experiencing conceptualized time.

Nam June Paik introduces the Family of Robot series at the 1986 Chicago International Art Exposition. From thereon, he reconfigured various people into robots, producing a robot series modeled after Korea’s historical celebrities such as Jang Youngsil, King Sejong, and Queen Seondeok. This piece, which portrays Yul Gok the Confucian and politician from the sixteenth century in the form of a robot, consists of seventeen monitors which show various videos such as fan dance performance in a glamourous and quick presentation.

To edit and transmit television images real-time, Nam June Paik produces a machine called Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer in 1969 in collaboration with the engineer Shuya Abe. The synthesizer is unique in that it does not experiment with videos according to predetermined criteria, but instead produces unforeseeable combinations through various manipulations. The first to be produced with the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer was Video Commune: The Beatles from Beginning to End, which was broadcast real-time by the U.S. public broadcasting network station WGBH in 1970. Paik transmitted the videos he produced not only through broadcasting networks, but also satellites. Starting with his satellite piece live-broadcast for Kassel Documenta 6 opening ceremony, he produced a large-scale satellite project called the satellite trilogy: Good Morning Mr. Orwell(1984), Bye Bye Kipling(1986), and Wrap Around the World(1988). Paik’s experiments were mediated not only to gallery visitors but also to television viewers sitting in their households through the broadcasting networks and satellites.

This piece portends Nam June Paik’s satellite trilogy Good Morning Mr. Orwell, Bye Bye Kipling, and Wrap Around the World. Nam June Paik produced a live satellite broadcast performance for Kassel Documenta 6’s opening ceremony in 1977, connecting various places in collaboration with Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, and Douglas Davis. This piece includes a number of Paik’s signature performances, such as Paik playing the piano by striking on the keys with a video camera, or Paik covering Moorman’s head with a television case while she plays Brahms’s Lullaby.

Inspired by the star-crossed love story between a heavenly shepherd and seamstress(Gyeonu and Jiknyeo) in Korea, China and Japan. Faint waves coming from television screens in New York and Paris cross ways in the sky, which symbolizes the encounters of stars across time and space, as shown in Good Morning Mr. Orwell. Paik mentioned that encounters between great geniuses such as Joseph Beuys and John Cage, who were friends but never actually met on the stage, or Beuys and Allen Ginsberg, who also never co-starred in spite of sharing many visions, will continuously accumulate through a geometric process of evolution.

Nam June Paik continued his work with passion and ceaselessly tried out new ideas, playing the piano with his right hand or even producing pieces that incorporate laser technology even after suffering a incapacitating stroke in 1996. The drawings and paintings Paik produced during this period resemble the overlapping images within a single frame we see in his satellite or TV pieces. Paik’s drawings and paintings, which appear to be spontaneous, are reminiscent of innocent drawings made by children. In these works, it feels as if Paik – as he freely moves between media, time, and space – is looking back upon and returning to his childhood days.

Nam June Paik produced Key to the Highway(Rosetta Stone), encrypting the changes in his works and the paths he took to arrive at those transformations. The upper portion of this work, modeled after the Rosetta Stone discovered by Napoleon’s troops they marched into Egypt, consists of video drawings. The mid-body part shows his artistic profile, and the lower portion houses images taken from Paik’s videos. The mid-body portion also explains why Paik began with music and moved to video media; how he joined Fluxus; and his relationship with other artists with whom he exchanged influences and inspirations, in Korean, English, French, German, and Japanese. This part provides information about the changes in Paik’s artistic oeuvre.