Media art and video art

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.

Is the screen here a window to look into, or an object to walk around?