(15 Oct 2019) LEAD IN:
London's Tate Modern is staging what's thought to be the first retrospective on South Korean-born artist Nam June Paik.
Paik - who died in 2006 - is credited with inventing video art, collaborated with pop culture icons including David Bowie, and even coined the phrase "electronic superhighway".

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Tune in to the world of Nam June Paik.
London's Tate Modern has gathered over 200 works by the late South Korean-born artist. It's the largest ever UK exhibit dedicated to the artist.
Paik played a pivotal role in using video as a form of artistic expression. A member of the Fluxus art movement, he combined the use of music, video images and sculpture.
"He was an interesting artist in terms of making any sort of unusual and artistic medium into artistic realm," says senior curator Sook-Kyung Lee.
"So for instance, when he first used TV as an artistic medium in (19)63, TVs were expensive electronic machines and it was never really meant to be (an) artistic medium.
"But he thought that they could be used for his new art, because he started in sound and music and he thought like experimental in sound and music, it can also happen with something like TV and video."
Paik made his artistic debut in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in 1963 with a solo art exhibition titled "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television."
He scattered 12 television sets throughout the exhibit space and used them to create unexpected effects in the images being received.
Later exhibits included the use of magnets to manipulate or alter the image on TV sets and create patterns of light.
"He was a bit worried about one-way communication by television. So, becoming just an audience rather than (a) participant," says Sook-Kyung Lee.
"So, he wanted us to think about what we are watching, but also one day we should make our channels as well.
"So, he was really thinking about something like YouTube at the very middle of (the) 20th century, saying everyone will have their own TV channel."
Paik completed degrees in music and aesthetics in Japan before pursuing graduate work in philosophy.
Some of his experiments were in radio and television, and he's thought to have coined the terms "electronic superhighway" and "the future is now".
"He kind of predicted today's technology," says 69-year-old Ken Hakuta, Paik's nephew.
"When he said, for example, that someday the TV guide would be ten times thicker than the New York City telephone directory. But he was wrong, it's not ten times, it's one million times because you have YouTube, where everybody has a TV station.
"He said everybody will have a TV station. He said every artist will have their own TV station. And he coined the term information superhighway in 1974."
Paik also incorporated television sets into a series of robots.
The early robots were constructed largely of bits and pieces of wire and metal, later ones were built from vintage radio and television sets.
The exhibit features Paik's first robot sculpture, named "Robot K-456" from 1964.
"I think this will resonate with a lot of young people because some of these technology works are 40-years-old, 50-years-old, but I think they resonate with really young, with the Z Generation people even, because they are so cool. The technology that's used, you know," says Hakuta.
"And to, I would say, slightly older people, they look very retro probably, you know, there's something very cool about this and timeless."
As part of the exhibit, Tate has restaged Paik's "Sistine Chapel" work. It was originally unveiled in 1993 and hasn't been reconstructed since.

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