Nam June Paik Exhibit

The Nam June Paik exhibit at the Asia Society Museum was very interesting because of how unusual it was in it's use of technology and mixed media. One of the most interesting pieces was the multimedia video toward the beginning of the exhibit. The footage in the video has been warped and manipulated to have strange colors and shapes. The reason I found this interesting is it was done in a time period before digital media, which is much more easily manipulatable, was in existence or popular usage. Altering the footage in order to make it appear as it does before the creation of digital video must have not only been very difficult, but the person doing it must have had a thorough, detailed knowledge of how the materials worked and how to manipulate them. Paik was clearly very skilled in his manipulation. Additionally, his work in this piece feels very familiar because of how contemporary it seems. Though this piece was made 50 years ago, stylistically and thematically it is something that could easily fit in with the more contemporary digital and mixed media works of today. In addition to that video piece, another part of the exhibition that stood out to me was the family made of various appliances. I thought it was very interesting to see the way Paik considered every factor in his creation, from the shape of the pieces selected for each member to the time period they were from (selecting older appliances for the adults and newer ones for children, for example). All of this is a reminder of the thought and care that should go into media pieces when they are created--no object or placement is an accident. I also find it interesting how predictive his work seems to have been. As was the case with the video being a precursor to contemporary experimental media, I feel his use of technology in all of his work was predictive of the current state of the world in the permeance of media and technology in our society. There was one piece hanging that was a simple clipping from a book from the 50s about the rise in households with televisions in them around the country, indicating to me that a prediction of the prevalence of mass media was exactly Paik's intention with many of his pieces.