Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004

Thirty years after Global Groove was broadcast on New York public television, Nam June Paik went back to it — and the book that records the return is also the best account in print of what he thought television was for.

Published for Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004 at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 17 April to 9 July 2004, where the artist filled a single room with some sixty-five monitors and projections in an installation made for the space. The 144-page volume carries "Paik for TV and Video: Global Groove 2004" by John G. Hanhardt, "Escape from Videoland" by Caitlin Jones and a shot-by-shot analysis of the original tape by Anja Osswald, together with 111 colour and 96 black-and-white illustrations, selections from Paik's writings on the future of television, and material on the Paik-Abe video synthesiser and the tapes Suite 212, Guadalcanal Requiem and Lake Placid '80. It also reprints, in facsimile, the 1974 Everson Museum of Art catalogue Videa 'n' Videology: Nam June Paik 1959–1973.

The original Global Groove, made with John Godfrey and aired on WNET Channel 13 in 1974, remains Paik's most cited tape: a thirty-minute collage of Korean drummers, tap dancers, Allen Ginsberg and Charlotte Moorman that proposed a television schedule drawn from everywhere at once.