Nam June Paik and Bill Viola

A unique achievement is that of Nam June Paik, the Korean-American artist and musician who was in at the origin of Video Art and who, more than twenty-five years later, continues to dominate the scene with his varied and elaborate video sculptures, environments and installations, while he remains true to his Fluxus-inspired critical position.

Bill Viola has been an important figure in the movement and has produced a number of important and challenging works using video as a medium.

Nam June Paik was born in Korea in 1932. He studied music and composition before the family moved to Hong Kong in 1949 because of the Korean War. He graduated with a degree in aesthetics from the University of Tokyo. In 1956, he traveled to Germany and studied music at the University of Munich. In 1958, he attended the International Summer course for New Music in Darmstadt and met John Cage. He settled in cologne and worked at Westdeutsche Rundfunk's Studio for Electronic Music. He performed a number of theatrical music pieces over the next several years. He met George Maciunas in 1961. Maciunas was the founder of the Fluxus movement, an anarchic association of artists who used their actions, exhibitions, compositions, and manifestoes to create a small rebellion against the institutions and trends of high culture.

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th artistproduced videos in an organization based on a complex mixture of image and sound. This is why critics can say that "no other artist is so closely identified with the fusion of art and technology." A retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art in 1996 included a number of Paik's major pieces, including Zen TV, Magnet TV, and Sonatine for Goldfish along with an entirely new group of works collectively titled Cybertown, one of Paik's largest efforts ever developed around a singular theme: Cybertown is a witty, irreverently playful exploration of the revolution our society is currently experiencing as information systems undergo sweeping changes. It's the place where smalltown America meets the information super highwayand a future where no one will have to leave their home for services or information. Robert C. Morgan states of Paik's work, and of video art in general, Television could become a humanistic tool in the hands of the artist, a tool capable of transforming society not toward an antiintellectual cynicism or oppressive dictatorship, but toward new applications of interactive informational exchange, new horizons of cognition and purposeful speculation. Bill Viola was born in 1951. He
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Approximate Word count = 1701
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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