Nam June Paik, cybernetics and machines at play

Nam June Paik’s playful, imperfect and often

ambiguous use of cybernetics has left an

important legacy for contemporary media art.

Paik’s works demonstrate that it is essential to

temper aesthetics with ethics in order to question

the utopian dreams of the very materials

electronic artists work with. Paik’s works also

suggest a new way to think about the machine in

art. This paper focuses on the impacts of

communication and control in the machine (and

subsequently the network) in Paik’s Robot K-

456 and suggests a reconceptualization of Paik’s

cybernetic machine as a machinic process

enmeshed in communication systems.