This Artwork Changed My Life: Nam June Paik’s “Modulation in Sync”

By Shannon Lee

I threw a lot of great, indignant tantrums as a kid, but my favorite, easily, is the time my parents demanded I turn off the television when I was five. My head whipped around, and I shouted, “I’m watching this for us! For our family!”

At the time, my dad was the master control engineer for a public television station in New York City, a job he’d hold for over 25 years. I spent countless after-school hours at the station’s Downtown Brooklyn studio, sitting on the grey particle-board floors doodling, smelling the cool static scent of electricity and air conditioning. Often, my dad or one of his coworkers would pop in a VHS tape of a kid’s drawing program like Pappyland or Mark Kistler’s Imagination Station.

Installation view of “The Worlds of Nam June Paik” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2000. Photo by David Head. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Crayola markers at the ready, I stared transfixed by a wall of hundreds of analog monitors radiating my shows in every shape, size, and aspect ratio imaginable. There was big Pappy; little Pappy; wide Pappy; narrow Pappy; red, green, and blue Pappy. Before every program started, the obligatory public broadcasting credit aired: “Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and from contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.”...READ MORE