Film Video Works #3

Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut
1966-69, 7 min, b&w and color, sound, 16 mm film on video
1967, 2:35 min, b&w and color, silent
 
1967-69, 4:25 min, b&w and color, sound
 

These two historical collaborations between Nam June Paik and Yalkut, originally documented on 16mm film and now available on video, reveal some of Paik's earliest experiments with television and electronic imagery.

In Missa of Zen, a TV screen, filmed from an extremely oblique angle, appears as a ghostly, flickering sliver at the side of a darkened frame. The images playing across its surface are rendered abstract by the perspective: we witness the transmission of information, but at a great distance. Isolated in silence and darkness, the television set slips into the realm of the unheimlich — an uncanny object, at once familiar and unfamiliar. Situating mediated America at the crossroads of missa — Latin for the Christian mass — and Zen Buddhism, Paik highlights the connections between mass culture and the transcendental. In Electronic Moon, flickering, colorized images of the moon are accompanied by Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade.

 
 

PLEASE NOTE: Allow extra lead-in time if you are planning a public screening or exhibition of Nam June Paik's single screen video works. All such orders must be forwarded by EAI to the Paik Studio for their agreement before any event can be confirmed.

This is a video transfer of a work initially shot on film. This is best shown as a projection, to reflect the original medium.
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