Research III: Global Groove – Nam June Paik

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This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” – Nam June Paik on Global Groove 1973

Nam June Paik’s introductory statement stands for the tape’s principle and message – global channel changing, a visionary precursor of subsequent developments. Paik displayed his understanding of the significance and power of the television as a broadcast medium, as a device which is able to display electronic moving images and explored those as a tool and means for artistic creation. In a sense Paik seemingly prefigured the Internet! He pushed media culture and made it do something it wasn’t imagined to do; he expressed how media ultimately gives us our understanding of the world – even if it means just sitting in front of your regular ol’ television.

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Nam June Paik, Global Groove , 1973

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”
“Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village… a simultaneous happening.”
– Marshall McLuhan, 1962

Global Groove -which essentially is a non-traditional art form- conveys Marshall McLuhan’s theory of a future ‘global village’, which Paik matched with an idea of his own: ‘If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.’

Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality.
Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.
Nam June Paik

Paik embraced telematic space and appropriated PEPSI commercials from Japanese television in his stylised composition.  The eclectic combination of mass media and avant-garde delighted both art-lovers and ‘normal’ TV-viewers alike with its deliberately fast cut edits and accompanied with catchy Devil with a Blue Dress On audio. In my opinion, this piece addressed the global impact of telecommunications. These days, we’re able to stream videos from any part of the world and enjoy it on our own personal devices – Paik was spot on when he mentioned that it would be the video landscape of tomorrow! This piece embraces the act of open source that would encompass video and media-sharing. In the time when the piece was created, the idea was considered revolutionary and now, decades down the road his vision is a reality.

With new technology, came new ways of responding to it through artistic media. Paik’s commentary on our media-saturated world leads to a trend towards the CCTV in the early 1990s through the use of webcams promoted surveillance and also voyeurism. People now have easy access to the internet and most electronic devices we purchase today are fitted with a built-in webcam that provide a sense of documentary realism. What differentiates the webcam from the televisual like Global Groove is that webcam footages are often in real time, not pre-recorded or edited, stage-managed or involve complex camera tricks; in contrast to film, television documentaries and current live reality TV shows. The webcam provides a mediated user experience and the desire to connect to others in real time may be driven by the response of a “loss” of a public realm. We can relate the liveness and actuality of the webcam to the qualities of performance art.

An experiment to research the webcam as an art medium reflected that a persons awareness of the surveillance sometimes heightened their actions, while at others, they felt themselves “dissolved in the ubiquitous surveillance which now erases the boundaries between private and public.”

Webcams function to deliver aesthetic experiences, interactions and contributions between performer and audience via the Internet which is in the centre of OSS. With that, I end my post with an appropriate quote by Nam June Paik himself relating to virtual bodies in space;

Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good.
You cannot deny that high-tech is progress.
So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.
Nam June Paik

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