The global groove was one of Nam June Paik’s staple video which he would, like most of his other videos, re-edit, reuse and remix to create new expanded experiences of light and motion. But I think I may be getting ahead of myself.
As part of the television side of the aforementioned show Exposition of Music- Electronic Television, Paik arranged twelve black and white manipulated television sets almost haphazardly in an isolated room in which they all silently blinked to the same on-air program, all except one.
Zen For TV
During transport to the exhibition, one of the televisions feel and broke and all that was left was one horizontal line, which he turned vertical. Watch Paik coyly describe the event below:
This accident marked a breakthrough for Paik, up until then he had been using televisions which would broadcast live television programming which he would then manipulate with magnets.
But, Zen for TV was a television that could be seen at its most fundamental level, one single line that connects the image to the hardware of the tube. In one accidental bump, Paik found a way to deny the flat screen (or concave depending on the era) its window-like escapist route into another reality and firmly planted them in the present.
The television became one united structure, with its physical materiality (the hardware) and the flat surface of the screen seamlessly bound together onto one continuous surface.
The information era was now confined to the surface, and Paik utilized this new surface of information to realize Marshall Mcluhan‘s most famous theory:
“For it is the ground of any technology that is the medium that changes everybody, and the Medium that is the Message.” (McLuhan “Take Today; The Executive dropout, 1972)
