ZEN FOR COMPUTER

ZEN FOR COMPUTER is an animated take on "Zen For TV" by Nam June Paik. Paik was among the first artists to experiment with video and television as mediums for art. One of his earliest works, Zen for TV consists of a television set in which the picture on the screen has been collapsed into a single line. Paik spent months learning about the construction and components of televisions so that he could better rewire them to create unexpected results. In the opening of ZEN FOR COMPUTER, the TV turns on and the compressed line expands into a glowing grid and cuts to the boot sequence for Linux. The grid then reappears with a doorway, a Light Being exiting it into thin air, a flash resulting from the failure of the TV, and the disappearance of the TV itself. This could be seen as a representation of the changing of the times, as most people have moved from consuming through TVs to consuming through computers and phones. I thought it would be interesting to mix an operating system and TV together to bend how we think about consumption; I've gotten asked if I watch TV and I've said "no" - but in actuality a computer is a television, one that is hard to escape.

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