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NAM JUNE PAIK

Sistine Chapel (1993) at Tate Modern

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I spent a good few hours visiting this exhibition when they had it displayed at the Tate Museum. The room I was most interested in was the one where they displayed the “Sistine Chapel” and a few of his video art projects. Even though the videos were in a loop, each time they started it felt like you were watching something new. Each sequence made you more focused, trying to find new connections between the images. The editing made the videos quite confusing, almost disconcerting, but the soundtrack gave the experience a bright, happy feel. The combination between the two should not have worked, but somehow it made perfect sense – it created the perfect balance between “the good” and “the bad”. The way images were bathed in oversaturated colours that kept changing in time with the music or the background sounds made me consider a new way of editing the video for the final project, a more artistic way to showcase the end result. I tried to edit the videos in Nam June Paik's style - his piece Global Groove (1973) being a big inspiration - but it turned out I was on the wrong path. As such, I realised that the idea was not the right fit for my project, so I ended up only practising it in my experiments but never pushing it towards the final piece. However, the contrast created by Nam June Paik left a big impression on me and I tried to incorporate that idea in my drawings.

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TV Eyeglasses (1971) at Tate Modern

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