Nam June Paik at the Tate

I visited the Tate Modern exhibition, showing work from across Paik’s artistic career. I have always been a big fan of Paik for his use of electronic analogue video equipment in his works. Paik often hacks these technologies, exploiting the ways in which they work to create new and interesting effects. This misuse I find most interesting in clips [2] and [8] in the above video in which Paik has intentionally misaligned the three signals that make up a component video signal.

This signal protocol uses three separate cables to transmit the Luma component (the overall lightness of the whole image), the Luma-Blue component (the luma signal with the Blue component subtracted) and the Luma-Red component (the luma component with the Red component subtracted). From these three signals the complete signals for Red, Green and Blue can be derived while still retaining backwards compatibility with older monochrome equipment. Paik misaligns these signals in different ways, sometimes using multiple cameras to produce each signal separately, sometimes modifying the display itself.

Elsewhere Paik uses various modes of visual display in his work, regularly using multi-channel video to juxtapose different clips against one another. In his ‘Sistine Chapel’ piece [9], Paik uses a multitude of projectors to cover all walls and the ceiling of the space, completely encompassing the viewer in the visuals. The projector itself in this piece also becomes a sculptural object in this work, with the support structure for this many projectors taking up most of the room. Interestingly, the ubiquity of the projections covering the walls of the room means that any view of the projector structure is in context of the room, it is supplying its own context. I also noticed that plenty of the projectors were newer models, likely from Tate’s equipment store that would not have been released at the time of the piece’s inception or necessarily at the time of Paik’s death in 2006. Perhaps an interesting example of artworks (especially technical) being fluid and continually maintained and updated.

I like the way that Paik plays with the real and the electronic realms using cameras and displays to in real time make copies of objects in the electronic realm. This live feedback is something I have been interested in in the past and it is something I hope to start working with again soon. I have a project on the back burner at the moment that uses a motorised fader to enable control of analogue video equipment from a digital environment and allows management of this equipment to be controlled and replayed faster than it could be manipulated manually.