In his book Expanded Cinema (1970), Gene Youngblood referred to Nam June Paik as a “pioneer ecologist of the videosphere,” a new global-scale television and video network environment that he described humankind as having entered. The concept of the videosphere mirrors the idea of the biosphere, which encompasses the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. It refers to the spiritual and informational ecosystem created by television and video, which has become necessary for human life. The reason Youngblood describes Paik as an “ecologist” is that the artist did not simply use television and video as artistic media—he understood them as organic systems through which human beings, machines, and nature interacted in relationships of mutual influence.

This understanding was embodied in the experiment with 13 televisions that Paik staged at his first solo exhibition, the 1963 event Exposition of Music – Electronic Television in Wuppertal, Germany. The artist had reconfigured the internal circuitry of the sets in different ways so that viewers could control them directly, causing different changing patterns on the screens due to distortions in the electrons’ flow. Rather than the aspect of Paik’s complete control over the system, Youngblood focused on the point that the element of audience participation allowed for various forms of contingency. He observed that instead of the content of the monitors, the artist was attempting to configure the environment where they were located and the interactive, indeterminate state of variability that existed within it. Youngblood described this as a process of redesigning the artificial video environment into an ecosystem in harmony with humanity.

This exhibition explores Paik’s experimental televisions and other major works from a perspective of electronic ecology. Through his continuous experiments blending art with technology, Nam June Paik contemplated and redefined the relationship among human beings, machines, and nature. He predicted that these three elements—which were previously viewed as disparate realms—would become increasingly entangled as the boundaries between them broke down and emerge from a process of mutual permeation and expansion to operate as a single environment. He also offered the insight that these altered structures would eventually percolate into everyday lives throughout the world. From the vantage point of 2026—a time when we encounter events across the world in real time and freely blur the boundaries between the real and virtual—the exhibition reexamines how Paik’s ideas are embodied in his work.

1) Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 260.

2) Ibid., 260.

3) Ibid., 303-308.