Nam June Paik, an American artist, was born in South Korea in 1932.
He has been concerned with video and realtime image presentation. The recent leap of popularity in the Internet and the world Wide Web has been a boon for Paik, who is now making work in that vein. While still incorporating TV and video images, he is turning towards even more modern technology. His most recent exhibition is the "Electronic Superhighway". This show is a travelling collection of Paik's new, technologically oriented works.

Paik's first artistic interest was music, which he studied at University of Tokyo, the University of Munich, and the Conservatory of Music in Freiburg. During this time, he met composer John Cage, whose innovative, almost randomized sound motivated paik's interest in garbled television noise. With this background, he began pioneering video art as a medium. Supplementary video and readymade television sets have becom a trademark of Paik's work.

"Television could become a humanistic tool in the hands of the artist, a tool capable of transforming society -- not toward an anti-intellectual cynicism or oppressive dictatorship, but toward new applications of interactive informational exchange, new horizons of cognition and purposeful speculation." -Robert C. Morgan's "Paik's Fragments"

Paik was a member of the Fluxus group, founded in 1962 by George Maciunas. The word "Fluxus" describes a flow or a continuous movement. I believe this name was inspired by the Fluxus Indians. The group was founded on the tenets of expanding the "acceptable" art media category. Paik fit easily into this group, as video and television were highly uncommon in the art sphere of the early 1960s. This movement also wanted to remove the distance that had grown between the art world and the viewing public since Duchamp and the Dadaist movement. The Fluxus group has a World Wide Web site now, which features artists such as Paik, Amy Greenfield, and Alison Knowles. ...

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