Nam June Paik was born in Korea, trained in music in Japan, and met John Cage in Germany at the end of the 1950s; he came to art through music and Fluxus. At his first solo exhibition in Wuppertal in 1963 he distributed thirteen television sets through the space and distorted each image — warping the magnetic field with magnets, intervening in the circuitry, driving the signal with audio. A device through which broadcast had flowed one way became, for the first time, a surface an artist could shape.

The first portable video recorder, released by Sony in 1965, broke the broadcasters' monopoly: images could now be made without a studio. Paik shot with one in New York that year and showed the tape in a café; it is the date most often cited for the beginning of video art. His later works varied the material — TV Cello (1971), a cello built of screens and played by Charlotte Moorman; TV Buddha (1974), a Buddha statue watching its own live image. The second sets up a loop in which, through a closed-circuit camera, watcher and watched exist at the same moment.

Paik's conceptual contribution is that he neither sanctifies technology nor rejects it; he treats it as equipment. In a 1974 report he used the term 'electronic superhighway' to describe images and data flowing across a global network — twenty years before the internet became general. Every work of art made with a screen today, from projection installations to generative image, operates in the field he opened.