Work Overview
Megatron/Matrix is a monumental video wall consisting of two arrays side-by-side, displaying ten channels of video accompanied by stereo audio. The arrays are “Megatron,” a 150-monitor array arranged ten monitors high by fifteen across, and “Matrix,” a 65-monitor configuration made up of four 4x4 arrays with a single monitor anchored in the middle. Altogether, there are 215 cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors in the piece. The artwork also features stereo audio.
Artist Biography
Nam June Paik (1932–2006), internationally recognized as the "Father of Video Art," created a large body of work including video sculptures, installations, performances, videotapes and television productions. He had a global presence and influence, and his innovative art and visionary ideas continue to inspire a new generation of artists.
Born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, to a wealthy industrial family, Paik and his family fled Korea in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, then to Japan. Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956, and then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition and performance. There he met John Cage and George Maciunas and became a member of the neo-dada Fluxus movement. In 1963, Paik had his legendary one-artist exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, that featured his prepared television sets, which radically altered the look and content of television.
After immigrating to the United States in 1964, he settled in New York City where he expanded his engagement with video and television, and had exhibitions of his work at the New School, Galerie Bonino and the Howard Wise Gallery. In 1965, Paik was one of the first artists to use a portable video camcorder. In 1969, he worked with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe to construct an early video-synthesizer that allowed Paik to combine and manipulate images from different sources. The Paik-Abe video synthesizer transformed electronic moving-image making. Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and video, creating an astonishing range of artworks, from his seminal videotape Global Groove (1973) that broke new ground, to his sculptures TV Buddha (1974), and TV Cello (1971); to installations such as TV Garden (1974), Video Fish (1975) and Fin de Siecle II (1989); videotapes Living with the Living Theatre (1989) and Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979); and global satellite television productions such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell, which broadcast from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a WNET-TV studio in New York City Jan. 1, 1984.
Paik has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, and has been featured in major international art exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea, in 2008.
Video Sources
There are altogether ten video signals in the piece; animations originating from a PC and a reference black video signal originating from the Megatron processing system, as well as eight channels of video played on standalone players. Originally played back on LaserDisc using eight LaserDisc players, SAAM migrated the standalone channels in 2007 to DVD played through eight DVD players, and then to digital files played with eight solid-state digital media players in 2011.
Video Processing
The key behavior across all the video processing is rasterization, also known as spanning or mapping. All these words carry multiple meanings in image processing, but in this context, they should be read as the ability to spread a single video signal across multiple monitors. All the programming in this piece plays with this effect in some way. Each processing system determines the precise behavior, so each array presents different challenges.
The Matrix array has three components that achieve its effects. First, a time-base corrector (TBC) stabilizes a single channel of video. The TBC sends the stabilized video signal to a processor that produces a raster for 16 monitors arranged in a 4x4 array. That device sends the rasterized 16 outputs to a third processor. The third processor quadruples the outputs so that the rasterized signal can feed four separate 16-monitor arrays. It is also a sequencer, and it sequences an animation across all its 64 outputs by commanding each monitor either to show its portion of the rasterized signal (i.e. one sixteenth of the total image), or to show the complete signal.
A large rack unit, roughly the size of a refrigerator, houses the twenty-one components that govern the Megatron array’s complex behaviors. The PC animations are sent to a unit that rasterizes and distributes the image across the entire array. The system receives the video signals sent from the standalone players, and overlays those signals on top of the rasterized animations according to instructions encoded in the PC animations themselves. Decoding this editing logic has been the most challenging part of documenting the piece, and those ongoing efforts are discussed in more detail below.
Conservation challenges
SAAM de-installed the work in March 2018 after 12 years of exhibition. Before de-installation, staff worked for months documenting the significant behaviors of the artwork in order to have a reference in the event of hardware failure when SAAM next attempts to exhibit the piece. Conservation envisioned this reference information as a tool for future migration, if the museum deems such a treatment option necessary and appropriate. As one of the most technically complex works of Paik’s career, it bears ample consideration whether and to what extent migration adversely affects the identity of Megatron/Matrix. It is also the case that several elements of the piece have already migrated to new technologies. Ultimately, conservation decided it was optimal to document the behaviors as precisely as possible to allow for migration to remain an option for the future, and to provide a more comprehensive technical description of the artwork than yet existed.
The essential challenges come from the variety of technologies used in the piece; cathode-ray tube televisions, analog video sources, digital video animations, reference video, complex custom video processing hardware, digital audio, and demanding power requirements. Given the number of custom and obsolete technologies, it is difficult to predict all the ways behaviors in the piece might change when one or several of those technologies break down or require replacement.
Exhibition & Installation details
See linked Identity Report and Iteration Report for in-depth documentation of the installation details, as the piece existed in 2018.
Artist Biography
Nam June Paik (1932–2006), internationally recognized as the "Father of Video Art," created a large body of work including video sculptures, installations, performances, videotapes and television productions. He had a global presence and influence, and his innovative art and visionary ideas continue to inspire a new generation of artists.
Born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, to a wealthy industrial family, Paik and his family fled Korea in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, then to Japan. Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956, and then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition and performance. There he met John Cage and George Maciunas and became a member of the neo-dada Fluxus movement. In 1963, Paik had his legendary one-artist exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, that featured his prepared television sets, which radically altered the look and content of television.
After immigrating to the United States in 1964, he settled in New York City where he expanded his engagement with video and television, and had exhibitions of his work at the New School, Galerie Bonino and the Howard Wise Gallery. In 1965, Paik was one of the first artists to use a portable video camcorder. In 1969, he worked with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe to construct an early video-synthesizer that allowed Paik to combine and manipulate images from different sources. The Paik-Abe video synthesizer transformed electronic moving-image making. Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and video, creating an astonishing range of artworks, from his seminal videotape Global Groove (1973) that broke new ground, to his sculptures TV Buddha (1974), and TV Cello (1971); to installations such as TV Garden (1974), Video Fish (1975) and Fin de Siecle II (1989); videotapes Living with the Living Theatre (1989) and Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979); and global satellite television productions such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell, which broadcast from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a WNET-TV studio in New York City Jan. 1, 1984.
Paik has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, and has been featured in major international art exhibitions including Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in a suburb of Seoul, South Korea, in 2008.