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Video art pioneer Paik dies
Associated Press
Published January 31, 2006
MIAMI - Nam June Paik, an avant-garde composer credited with inventing video art, died Sunday night of natural causes at his Miami apartment, associates said. He was 74.
The Korean-born Paik played a pivotal role in using video as a form of artistic expression. A member of the Fluxus art movement, he combined the use of music, video images and sculptures.
Paik's work gained international praise from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, among others, and much of his work is on display at the Nam June Paik Museum in Kyonggi, South Korea.
"He really led the development of a new art form, bringing the moving image into the modern art world," said John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts at the Guggenheim. "He foresaw that video would be an artist's medium."
Paik completed degrees in music and aesthetics in Japan before pursuing graduate work in philosophy. Some of his experiments were in radio and television, and he is thought to have coined the terms "information superhighway" and "the future is now."
Paik made his artistic debut in West Germany in 1963. He moved to New York City in 1964 and worked with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman to combine video and performance.
In a performance titled TV Bra for Living Sculpture , Moorman used stacked television sets that formed the shape of a cello. When she drew the bow across the television sets, there were images of her playing, video collages of other cellists and live images of the performance.
One of his pieces, TV Buddha , is a statue of a sitting Buddha facing its own image on a closed-circuit television screen. Another, Positive Egg , has a video camera aimed at a white egg on a black cloth. In a series of larger and larger monitors, the image is magnified until the actual egg becomes an abstract shape on the screen.
In 1988, Paik built a media tower, called The more the better , from 1,003 monitors for the Olympic Games at Seoul.
Paik was left partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1996.
Funeral services will be held this week in New York City.
[Last modified January 31, 2006, 00:29:05]
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