"I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns."
Nam June Paik is a Korean artist considered to be the godfather of video art. From the outset, Nam June Paik's work is marked by these heterogeneous, transdisciplinary, and experimental influences. Nam June Paik's body of work consists of video installations wherein he introduces musical instruments and television monitors that he modifies to divert them. In his series "robots", he stacks television sets in an anthropomorphic shape. Unlike cinema, video art is less about filming and more about working with the material of the electronic image. Nam June Paik manipulates images and sounds, superimposing them, altering them, stretching them, and accelerating them until they are unrecognizable. By revealing the technical process of television, Nam June Paik unveils the simulacrum of the television image and updates its ideological and technological nature.