Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik, born 1932 in Seoul, Korea, lived and worked in New York. He died in 2006. Nam June Paik worked in many media--including sculpture, performance, music and television--and is a pioneer in the field of video art. Paik was based in New York but realized his projects and video installations globally. Spectacular works like the worldwide satellite broadcast of Good Morning Mr. Orwell on New Year´s 1984 and the Medle Tower of over a thousand monitors built for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 have made Paik famous worldwide, and show his unmistakeable knack for taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by new electronic media and their significance for global civilization.
In the wall work I Never Read Wittgenstein, color bars quote the test pattern of US television. Four antique television casings suggest a history of television, and their configuration implies the four corners of the earth. A videotape created by Paik especially for this project runs in asynchronous sequence on the four televisions.