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.