GLOBAL GROOVE

"This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book." So begins Global Groove, a seminal tape in the history of video art. This radical manifesto on global communications in a media-saturated world is rendered as a frenetic electronic collage, a sound and image pastiche that subverts the language of television. With surreal visual wit and an antic neo-Dada sensibility, Paik (1932 - 2006) manipulates an emblematic pastiche of multicultural elements, art world figures (John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, ..) and Pop iconography. Paik subjects this transcultural, intertextual content to an exuberant, stream-of-consciousness onslaught of disruptive editing and technological devices - a controlled chaos that suggests a hallucinatory romp through the channels of a global TV.