> So the myth of Paik's first work of video art appears to pre-date its own > possibility. While Paik undoubtedly was a pioneer user of portable video > equipment, he probably shared the original moments of video art with other > artists, including Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Les Levine, and Juan > Downey. The mythic story of Nam June Paik shooting the first > Portapak-generated video art out of the back of a taxi in 1965 is > apparently just that, a myth.
This could be a case in which the vehicle of a metaphor has changed its tenor (and our collective memory): Paik is regarded as a pioneer and we generally think of pioneers as people who plunged ahead of the rest, surviving with bare essentials and without reliable connections back to civilization. I guess conceiving someone filming from a window with a camera firmly plugged into the wall is too dissonant with our notions of "the pioneer" :-) --or perhaps there's some other perfectly logical and clear explanation of the discrepancy, but what fun is that? ;-) Kim De Vries # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
