This new world is composed of a collage of images and sounds, which are edited in a unique way. It mixes together elements from Asian, American, and African sources, and does not differentiate between popular or elitist cultural materials or between commercial, artistic or political content. It conveys the utopian message that there could be a world shaped by a free exchange of information, ideas and culture – a world that is not dominated by a state-guided entity or a powerful group of players with strictly commercial interests (this idea, which is easier to grasp in our Internet Generation, was completely visionary, revolutionary and hardly popular at the time).

In addition, Global Groove anticipates two major TV trends: the prominence of rock music and channel-zapping. Among the assortment of pieces included in the collage of images and sounds are performance fragments featuring avant-garde artists, poets, dancers and musicians, such as John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham and Charlotte Moorman, as well as a traditional Korean folk dance performance, an image of Richard Nixon’s distorted face, a Pepsi Cola ad, African music, rock music, tap dancing and ice skating.
G. L.

Nam June Paik – born in Korea, 1932; deceased 2006 in the United States

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