Paik and Novak, Icons in the Multimedia World...

After the death of Nam June Paik, the father of multimedia, I realized how much he benifited the field of multimedia and as a multimedia student I should be thankful to him. He carried the concept of multimedia through his inventions through the decades to give new meanings and new functionalities to the field. His style is known for its dystopic vision to media that accompanied with the sense of humour and beauty. His work seems beautiful and objective, but a lot of criticism lies beneath for example in a lot of his work where he replaces the human with the machine. For example in his SYS Cop robots that look like traffic lights and replace the function of a human in that specific job. In Paik's work, there's a seductive element in the media that's why we have to have self concious and be aware of the capabilities of technology. He shows how each communication medium of each time period is affecting the consumer and the public views. Paik created things for the consumer that could have useful funcionality and make life easier. He made the Burn Calories Bike, Online Shopping, Web Catalogs, Magnet TV, Moon TV, and Buddha TV. The Buddha TV was very conteversial in the idea of suggsting how the media plays with our inner selves and makes us think how how it affects our inner selves in this digital world, that even the most sacred religious icon is affected by it. This concept is very similar to Novak's views of "self" and how the different concepts of the digital world makes us discover not only the space surrounding us, but also our inner selves. Also, Paik and Novak are similar in the idea that technology and multimedia will not only expand and advance, but it will also create different useful functions for the public to make their life easier. Paik dicussed media propoganda and the political issues in a humourous and funny approach. Also Novak emphasizes on concepts such as space, speed, and physical architecture. Novak offered a new perception to technology and the digital world similar to what Paik was doing all his life with the idea of liqiud architecture especially in his film "Electronic Super Highway" in the mid 90s. They both created different communities by joining different moving visuals. They both emphasized on the visuals vs text to convey a message they liked to reach their audience with. In conclusin, Paik's work is very ambigous. To me it seems very dadaist with all the humour and sarcasm that is joined with his futuristic style and thinking.

Related links:
http://www.paikstudios.com/
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/paik/paik_top.html
http://www.dashsys.com/products/paik.html
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