In this weeks class, we explored the topic of Legacy Videos with a focus on the famous Nam June Paik’s interesting work he has produced. As I was researching through his practices produced, it came to my attention how unique and abstract his work is, something that really stands out and is quite significantly different to what you would see broadcasted in today’s media.

Who is the practitioner (what is their name?) and when were they practicing?
The practitioners name I focused my research around for this week is Nam June Paik, a Korean American video artist. Paik was featured as one of The Century’s 25 Most Influential artists along with Pablo Picasso by ART News, an influential U.S. He is still, the most internationally famous Korean-born artist. He starting practicing as early as the 1960’s, where in1964 in New York he first began combining his visual and musical interests together.

With video you are examining when was it produced (date)?

The video was published in 1980, titled ‘Lace Placid’. Lake Placid‘ 80 is a metonymy for the Winter Olympic Games, created by Nam June Paik, when commissioned by the National Fine Arts Committee for the 13^th Games, in Lake Placid, in 1980.

How was the video authored?`

It was authored with the use of an expensive camera that is solely used for videography and would have most likely involved the use of tape recording rather than an SD card and a hard drive that we would use in today’s society. The video would need to be taken to a special area that had the software and equipment to edit the video, which shows the difference between the production of the legacy images and modern day production of images.

Lake Placid’ 80 is a metonymy for the Winter Olympic Games, created by Nam June Paik, when commissioned by the National Fine Arts Committee for the 13^th Games, in Lake Placid, in 1980. Sound and image unite sport and the festivities. Both the subject and the medium are endowed with the international dimension of the context, and Nam June Paik only goes beyond this with music, which he sees as a non-verbal communication between audiences of different ages cultures and countries.

How was the video distributed?

The video was presented by Paik producing this exuberant, high-speed collage as a commission for the National Fine Arts Committee of the 1980 Olympic Winter Games and was presented on Television.  In a fractured explosion of densely layered movement and action, images of Olympic sports events are mixed with Paik’s recurring visual and audio motifs.