Abstract

 
 
 The article offers a broad overview of Nam-June Paik’s ideas of the expansion of video arts interpreted in the light of Zen Buddhism. His works recognized as the most significant examples of his marriage between the art theory and practice are marked by a thought-provoking vision of participatory culture, communicated in-between the networks in the post-industrial society. Our purpose is to reexamine his attitude to TV culture in the oscillation between Western and Eastern gaze considered in connection to the problems of emptiness and meditation drawn from Zen religious beliefs. In discussing his installations there is special stress to reconstruct his inner-insight into the subject of seeing and watching inscribed in a closed-circuit of the communication network.
 
 
Highlights
Amidst the most thought-provoking artists working in the area of multimedia and video-art, Nam-June Paik reexamined the possibilities of the medium shifting emphasis to reconfigure the participatory, communicative experience seen through the lenses of Zen religious beliefs.tance in-between communication networks and “variations to a theme” of Zen Buddhism.[1]
The problem of the art world in the ‘60s and ‘70s is that “the artist owns the production’s medium, such as paint or brush, even sometimes a printing press, they are excluded from the highly centralized DISTRIBUTION system of the artworld.”[22]. In line with abandoning live performances in the 1980s, Paik turned to massive, multi-monitor video constructions, such as Goodbye Mr Orwell (1984), inspired by Daniel Bell’s idea of postindustrial society and the famous futurological dystopian book written by George Orwell under the title “1984”
In Buddhism “the fundamental doctrine of the Yogachara is that of chitta-matra, or “mind-only”, meaning that since reality is apprehensible only through the mind, and all experience is made possible only by the mind, it is by purifying the mind rigorously of all polarities.”[25]. Paik had clearly shown that a window into the spectatorial inner world can be apprehended via different means of sights of seeing, With an emphasis on the multiplication of the frames in different contexts Paik combined linear time relations advocating a rapid change of telecommunication
Summary
Amidst the most thought-provoking artists working in the area of multimedia and video-art, Nam-June Paik reexamined the possibilities of the medium shifting emphasis to reconfigure the participatory, communicative experience seen through the lenses of Zen religious beliefs.tance in-between communication networks and “variations to a theme” of Zen Buddhism.[1].
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