All Star Video

“In these times when things are not “normal,” I wanted to document the sensations I’ve been feeling. I invited a few of my musician friends to do this with me. I wanted to share the results with you all,” explains Sakamoto. Incomplete pairs these new compositions with video art by Zakkubalan, with a new video released every three days.

Part of a restored collection of rare early works by Nam June Paik, Waiting for Commercials is a hilarious compendium of Japanese TV commercials. This early example of Paik's use of appropriated television imagery as pop cultural artifact was originally created for a performance piece of the same name, which featured Charlotte Moorman and her cello.

Part of the "Video-Film Concert" collection on EAI. From 1966 - 1972. Music by K. S. Narayanaswami.

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Opening with the 1972 work The Selling of New York, a series of short segments designed for WNET's late-night television schedule, Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations, and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries.

Button Happening is Nam June Paik's earliest extant tape, and possibly his first tape ever. Recorded in 1965 on the day he acquired his first Sony Portapak camera, this previously unknown work has recently been rediscovered and restored. Recorded on computer tape, this technically fragile piece documents a single performance action — Paik buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket. A spirit of conceptual Fluxus humor underlies this seminal recording.

Marked by a playful, irreverent sense of improvisation and experimentation, these experiments with image manipulation and synthesis form a link between Paik's performance and sculptural works of the 1950s and early 1960s and the celebrated video works and installations of his later years.

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

The influence of Jewish fathers on their sons and the complexity of familial relationships are explored in a witty, poignant portrait of two artists. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (whose father Louis was a poet in his own right) and performance artist/sculptor Allan Kaprow (whose father is a high-powered lawyer) are the sons who struggle with and against the influences of these patriarchal figures.

Paik produced this exuberant, high-speed collage as a commission for the National Fine Arts Committee of the 1980 Olympic Winter Games. In a fractured explosion of densely layered movement and action, images of Olympic sports events are mixed with Paik’s recurring visual and audio motifs.

This early work belongs in the company of Paik and Yalkut's classic collaborative "video-films," including Video Tape Study No. 3, Beatles Electronique, and Missa of Zen. To the accompaniment of the abrupt sonic interjections of Fluxus-affiliated composer Takehisa Kosugi, Yalkut's black and white film records brief, masked actions: an arm with clenching fist; a pair of faces, visible only about the eyes, which squint, gaze, and rest; Paik eating a slice of bread. Reminiscent of Beckett's theater, as well as the minimal movements of 1960s avant-garde dance, Cinéma Metaphysique is a study in gesture and stillness, noise and silence.

Nam June Paik’s Electronic Opera no. 1 first aired in 1969 as part of The Medium is the Medium, a special “artist transmission” commissioned by WGBH-Boston featuring experimental segments by Paik and artists Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini. Set to classical music and featuring “hippies,” a dancing model, and national political figures, Paik’s five-minute contribution is a form of what he called “participation television.” Here, he instructs you — his audience — to open or close your eyes while the hallucinatory images swirl and twist into frame. The original premiere marked Paik’s first foray into television broadcast and remains an early and ironic example of his ambition to turn inherently passive viewers into active and integral participants.

Video album by Ryuichi Sakamoto

One of Paik's most compelling and poignant tapes, Living with the Living Theatre pays tribute to Judith Malina and the late Julien Beck, founder of the Living Theatre. Reversing the theme of the earlier Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, which dealt with two artists and their relationships to their fathers, Paik explores Malina and Beck's relationship to their children. Interviews provide the memories of actual lives lived together, while Betsy Connors' animated sequences transcend the specific to suggest the universality of childhood. Garrin and Paik edit these elements into an electronic synthesis that is at times dizzyingly psychedelic and always affectionate towards its subjects. Infused with personal and cultural memories that evoke time and place — Janis Joplin concert footage, Living Theatre performances — Paik creates a haunting, deeply moving homage.

From suspected arson to illegal evictions, Paul Garrin’s documentary follows two years of police harassment of unsheltered people in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as well as acts of protests and resistance in the fight for housing justice.