TV Clock TV時計

Paik came to know George Maciunas, the founder of "Fluxus", in 1961, and Joining the group, he started to engage in a series of Happenings and produce Neo-Dadaist pieces of music. He visited Japan in 1963 and, winning the assistance of electronic engineer Shuya Abe, began his pioneering work in video art. Paik's video art does not simply present video images. With the employment of the latest gadgets and technologies, he for instance distorts the images with magnets to turn them into something new, or takes the console itself into the work and presents the whole as a kind of video sculpture. In this "TV Clock," the TV displays are modified so that the picture is shown as a compressed single line, and each of the twenty-four displays presents a glowing line in darkness as it changes its angle by thirty degrees in correspondence to the width of an hour on the face of the clock. In presenting the concept of time in the twenty-four lines on the unmoving displays, the work is conceptual, but at the same time, the modification of the display is very much in the spirit of Fluxus which used destruction and creation as one of its expressive mainstays.