Nam June Paik, MAGNET TV, 1965
An altered television set combined with a magnet sitting on top is unlike the majority of artworks back then. It is not an autarchy. This screen does not broadcast fixed programme but shows a crooked moving abstract image, that can be manipulated at will.
Norbert Wiener’s 1954 essay “Cybernetics in History” outlined the basic concepts of Cybernetics. I drew out my interpretation of it in the below diagram.
A complex action is one in which the data introduced, which we call the input, to obtain an effect on the outer world, which we call the output.
This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback…
Interpreting Magnet TV through Wiener’s Cybernetics lens’, the viewer’s action could be considered the input of the system, the output is the distorted image, and the feedback of the system is achieved by viewers‘ cognitive process, which then informs their next possible action. The work is established in this interactive process. To a certain extent, Paik has turned the passive spectators, to active participants, even the co-creators of the piece. A true piece of Modern Art, in the definition of Roy Ascott.
I came across the following video by a visitor to the Whitney Museum in NYC’s exhibition of this work last year.
I, then wondered, is this the work Magnet TV artist intend to create?
Wiener in “Cybernetics in History” said the following “A shift in the point of view of physics in which the world as it actually exists is replaced in some sense or other by the world as it happens to be observed.”
In considering Magnet TV with this perspective, if every situation is formed by the moment of observing, and “observing” means controlling the movement of the magnet in this context, the informed movement of the magnet controlled by a viewer made the work come into existence.
In another word, when interaction is removed, the work doesn’t exist anymore.