Nam June Peik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with an early usage of the term “electronic super highway” in application to telecommunications. Naim June Peik was influenced by John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Arnold Schoenberg. In this post I would like to further express Peik’s interest in John Cage by giving you an overview of one of his works that was based upon Cage. Naim June Peik’s film, “Tribute to John Cage: Film by Naim June Peik” was a hybrid, consisting of technological art and performance art.
The film starts by displaying an early version of a robot outside walking between cars. The film then flips to the next scene where the same robot is walking down a street sidewalk (a mechanics guy quickly tweaks some things on the robot and then moves out of scene). Now the robot is ready to begin presentation, music loudly sounds from the robot’s speakers, calling undivided attention to be geared towards it. The speaker then projects the voice of a woman (I suppose) singing for a few moments and then transitions to a bold sounding male voice. The male voice goes on to tell who John Cage was, and then goes on to further express the relationship between Naim June Peik and John Cage. The segment mentioned how Peik and Cage were good friends, meeting in the late 1950s and having a friendship for almost twenty years. Now the thing that made their friendship so strong was a deep mutual concern that a modern cybernated society might turn mankind into mindless robots (hence the robot).
After a little more eloboration on some facts, the film moves on to what I like to call a psychedelic segment. This scene is a hallucination inspired/glitch-type video that features human faces, one at a time, making extreme facial expressions while music plays in the background. The scene is edited to give that glitch-type footage “adding sprinkles to the cake” by over-casting it with a bright color film.
The next and the last scene is of an interviewer and an interviewee. The interviewer asks the interviewer “who is John Cage?”. As the interviewer attempts to explain, it is a true struggle as he repeatly stutters throughout the explaination; even-still he presses on, very determined to get his point across.The segment ends with the interview footage going on as it flickers between additional footage of John Cage performing experiments.
The film then ends with a hybrid collage of moving stills of people celebrating and relaxing in the outdoors as music plays over it.
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