Nam June Paik - Moon Is The Oldest TV
The George Washington of Video Art” … “Cultural Terrorist” … “Citizen Zero of the Electronic Superhighway” … But who really was Nam June Paik, pillar of the American avant-garde in the 20th century and arguably the most famous Korean artist in modern history? Director Amanda Kim tells, for the first time, the story of Paik’s meteoric rise in the New York art scene and his Nostradamus-like visions of a future in which “everybody will have his own TV channel.” Thanks to social media, Paik’s future is now our present, and 'Nam June Paik - Moon Is The Oldest TV' shows us how we got here.
Amanda Kim’s documentary charts Paik’s artistic evolution by tracing his formative education in Munich and his life-changing encounter with avant-garde musician John Cage, through his immigration to New York City and collaboration with the seminal experimental Fluxus movement, into his revolutionary work with video art—including his radical public television broadcasts of “Global Groove” in 1973 and “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell'' in
1984—and beyond into Paik’s lasting influence on the art world and his predictions of our technological future.
Featuring an extensive archive of performance footage, original interviews from Paik’s contemporaries and collaborators, and a voiceover narration of Nam
June Paik’s writings read by Executive Producer Steven Yeun (Minari, Nope), 'Nam June Paik - Moon Is The Oldest TV' is a timely meditation on the contradictory ways in which technology elicits both fascist tendencies and
intercultural understanding.
Amanda Kim
Amanda Kim is a Tokyo-raised, Korean American director and producer. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Comparative Literature, she worked odd jobs in music, fashion, and design, before landing a job at Vice Media. A former creative director at Vice Media, she led U.S. video direction for i-D, Creators, and Garage magazine. Kim also worked on Viceland, Vice's TV channel, as a creative producer in an experimental incubator where she directed a nimble production crew to evaluate pilots and innovative content formats.