Zen for TV

In 1963 the trained composer Nam June Paik presented his legendary Exposition of Music. Electronic Television at the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal. He exhibited four prepared pianos and thirteen manipulated televisions, which marked the birth of video art. Paik’s approach to television not only showed his great interest in contemporary technology, but also how he questioned the conditions of the production and broadcasting of images by manipulating the medium. Zen for TV was a television set deprived of its form and function and thus an act of sabotage. Instead of something from the current television program, the viewer sees an abstract vertically glowing line on an otherwise dark screen stood upright. A manipulation of the TV tube ensures that the images are still broadcast, but they cannot develop. Paik reduces the spectrum of information on screen to a single line, focusing on one continuous glowing impulse and fixing the television image, which is usually transient. The title of the work refers to Buddhism and East Asian philosophies of life. The television becomes an object of quiet and immersion.