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Transmitted Live : Nam June Paik Resounds

9 Aug-19 Oct 2013

Talbot Rice Gallery
Edinburgh EH8 9YL

Overview

No other artist has had greater influence on the use of technology in art than Nam June Paik; he prophesied changes that would shape the contemporary world, exemplified in his pioneering ideas, ‘Participation TV’, ‘Random Access Information’ and ‘Video Commune’. Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik’s first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music - Electronic Television (Wuppertal 1963), when the artist brought television into the realm of art for the first time, presenting it as a tactile and multisensory medium. As part of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, Paik believed that artists should humanise technology, get their ‘fingers in and tear away the walls’ of the establishment. Paik, a trained musician, treated technology as a material part of his repertoire, which later expanded to include video, satellite transmissions, robots and lasers.