Nam June Paik — Global Groove

1973

Artists: Nam June Paik, John Godfrey (collaborator) · Year: 1973 · Medium: Video collage — 30-minute television program composed of processed video footage · Substrate: Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer; WNET Television Lab editing facilities; broadcast on WNET January 1974 · Place: New York, USA · Institution: WNET/Thirteen (broadcaster); Television Lab at WNET Nam June Paik's Global Groove (1973) is a thirty-minute video collage broadcast on WNET/Thirteen in January 1974. The program splices Paik-generated video processing (via the Paik-Abe Synthesizer) with found footage — Korean dance, American commercials, Richard Nixon, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham — producing a dense layered flow in which every second contains multiple simultaneous images. The opening narration promises "a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow." The program's visual style has been one of the most-imitated in the subsequent fifty years of video art and commercial television. Global Groove is the most widely-distributed Paik work of the 1970s. Because it was broadcast on public television with broad national reach, hundreds of thousands of American viewers encountered it at first airing; subsequent rebroadcasts extended the reach further. It is, by most accounting, the first piece of video art to have a broadcast television audience comparable to commercial programming. The piece's argument — that television is a medium whose future is layered, global, collaged — has aged into near-truth. Most contemporary digital-video aesthetics, from TikTok to Netflix interstitials, descend from Paik's Global Groove logic even when the descendants do not know the ancestor. Global Groove is held by Electronic Arts Intermix and is in the collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum. Lore Global Groove was produced in approximately six months at WNET's Television Lab, a specialized facility for experimental video art that also supported work by the Vasulkas, Bill Viola, and others. The WNET Lab was directed by David Loxton, who had been central to early American support for video art at public-television scale. The broadcast was accompanied by substantial critical coverage in the New York press, which helped establish video art's mainstream legitimacy. Sources • Electronic Arts Intermix — Global Groove catalog record • Smithsonian American Art Museum — Paik collection • Hanhardt, John G. — The Worlds of Nam June Paik (Guggenheim, 2000)