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Director Amanda Kim tells, for the first time, the story of Paik’s meteoric rise in the New York art scene and his Nostradamus-like visions of a future in which “everybody will have his own TV channel.” Thanks to social media, Paik’s future is now our present, and Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV shows us how we got here.
Amanda Kim’s documentary charts Paik’s artistic evolution by tracing his formative education in Munich and his life-changing encounter with avant-garde musician John Cage, through his migration to New York City and collaboration with the seminal experimental Fluxus movement, into his revolutionary work with video art—including his radical public television broadcasts of Global Groove in 1973 and Good Morning, Mr. Orwell in 1984—and beyond into Paik’s lasting influence on the art world and his predictions of our technological future.
Featuring an extensive archive of performance footage, original interviews from Paik’s contemporaries and collaborators, and a voiceover narration of Nam June Paik’s writings read by Executive Producer Steven Yeun (Minari, Nope), Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is a timely meditation on the contradictory ways in which technology elicits both fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding.
