Exposition of Music – Electronic Television

IMAGE
Large
Lupe
poster for Exposition of Music - Electronic Television
Courtesy Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels e.V. ZADIK, Cologne

Nam June Paik presented his first solo exhibition from 11 to 20 March 1963 in the private home of the gallery owner and architect Rolf Jährling. Its title, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television, already indicated that the artist’s interests were shifting from music to the electronic image. Paik used almost all the rooms in the villa to display his prepared pianos, his record and tape installations, and much more. In the garden room on the first floor, he set up twelve television sets, each of them manipulated in a different way so that the pictures from the regular program were shown distorted and deformed, inverted or with static lines running through them. Six of the sets were also influenced by acoustic impulses—for example, one was connected to a tape recorder, another to a radio, etc. One of the televisions could be controlled by the voices of the audience: speaking into a microphone generated impulses that produced an explosion of dots on the screen.



 

Workdetails
  • original Title: Exposition of Music – Electronic Television
  • Date: 11.3.1963 – 20.3.1963
  • Genre: Audio/visual installation