Two of the leading video artists who helped develop the form are Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. Nam June Paik is generally credited with starting the video art movement:
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. Paik was involved in several Fluxus activities.
Paik wrote a letter to John Cage in 1959, expressing his theoretical and artistic interest in television as a medium. He purchased thirteen second-hand televisions in 1963 and held his first show of video art, "Exposition of Music--Electronic Television" at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. This was a large exhibition occupying many rooms. Paik used the thirteen altered television sets, three prepared pia...