Feel the Sound

In March 1963, Nam June Paik showed Exposition of Music – Electronic Television at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, West Germany, scattering television sets through the rooms and distorting their pictures with magnets; this is often taken as the starting point of media art. The works that followed take a few broad forms: single-channel video, shown on one screen with a fixed running time like a film; video installation, which arranges several monitors, projections, and objects in a space that visitors walk through; and interactive works that change in response to a visitor's movement, voice, or brain waves. Cathode-ray tube sets and other equipment are produced less and less and are hard to find even second-hand, so keeping such works alive means weighing repair against replacement; Paik himself allowed owners to make the technical changes needed to keep his works running.

Read the medium line on the label. “72 monitors, 4-channel video” means 72 screens are showing four different videos: find the screens playing the same one and see how they are arranged. For a single-channel work, the label gives the running time; check it before deciding where to start watching.

• Media Art 미디어 아트→Same topic in Seoul

Installations are often made for one particular site, and visitors move through them, so where you stand is part of the looking. Materials range from everyday objects and natural materials to video and sound, and a work may be permanent or taken down when the exhibition closes. As the name of an art form, “installation” is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1969; in 1958 Allan Kaprow called the indoor spaces he transformed “Environments.” The events the Gutai Art Association staged in Japan from 1954 are counted among early installation art, and they influenced Kaprow. Some artists step inside their own installations: Aki Sasamoto builds spaces from string, tubes, household things and sound, then talks and moves within them, so that the work becomes an event that changes over time.

Look from the entrance, from the middle and from a corner. Notice how the light, the sound, and the path you take change the work.

• Installation Art 설치 미술→Same topic in Seoul
• Installation art 裝置藝術→Same topic in Taipei