A New Design for TV Chair

Korean-born Nam Jun Paik’s impact as a media-based artist has been global, most profoundly in the arenas of television and video. Paik’s life grew out of the politics and anti-art movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, during which he pursued a determined quest to combine the expressive capacity and conceptual power of performance art with the new technological possibilities of the moving image, in particular, of broadcast television and documentary video. Through television projects, installations, performances, and his writings and teaching, Paik redirected television from a commercial venture to an artistic medium and transformed video into an expressive art form in his many projects.

In this lithographic image from 1973, Paik has appropriated an image from a 1940s popular- science magazine depicting the home viewer of the future watching television. Under the provocative heading "Do you Know...?", he posits a number of visionary questions for an alternative future of television—one outside the domain of corporate and commercial broadcasting of the period. Instead of a one- way venue of communication from producer and advertiser to consumer audience, he envisions an open-ended electronic medium among artists and between artist and viewer. In this, he anticipated by several decades the "electronic superhighway" of the personal computer and such recent iterations as the ubiquitous home digital TV flat-screen, iPad museum labels, and the democratization of YouTube internet video postings.