By Hannah Serrano
Step into The Box at the Chrysler Museum of Art, and the room dissolves into a cascade of moving images. Screens flicker, sound pulses, and suddenly the world seems more alive, untamed, and unpredictable. This is Global Groove, Nam June Paik’s revolutionary 1973 video collage that is the centerpiece of Nam June Paik: Electronic Television, on view through April 2026.
In Paik’s hands, television becomes more than something you watch—it’s a portal through time and space, a cultural crossroads, and a pulse on humanity. Global Groove flips restlessly from one scene to the next: dancers, politicians, musicians, performers—all thread together in an electric rhythm that refuses to let you look away.
Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik’s life mirrored the restless, border-hopping energy of his art. He came of age amid the ruptures of the Korean War, which spurred his family to flee first to Hong Kong and settle in Japan, where he immersed himself in music, art history, and aesthetics at the University of Tokyo.
Paik’s early orbit was sound—he trained as a musician and composer—but the magnetic field of electronic media beckoned. In Munich, he befriended the artist Joseph Beuys and composer John Cage, who each created art that broke rules and crackled with a new kind of energy.
Paik followed that spirit to New York, where he joined the Fluxus movement—a community of artists who were collapsing boundaries between disciplines. There, his fascination with video and technology found its home as a radical new medium for creativity and connection.
A Noble TELEVISION
Hamlet Robot video installation by Nam June Paik (1996)
In 1963, the same year the first consumer video recorders hit the market, Paik debuted his first solo exhibition in Germany. With video suddenly in the hands of everyday people, he glimpsed a future where creativity and technology would be inseparable—a future that looks remarkably like today.
Step inside Global Groove, and the energy is fast, joyful, chaotic. Paik shunned polished perfection—he wanted media to feel like life itself: unpredictable, saturated, and wild. At the beginning, a narrator states, “This is a glimpse of a new world when you will be able to switch on every TV channel in the world…”
A prophecy of streaming culture before we even had cable.
To experience Global Groove inside The Box—a space dedicated to immersive video-art—is to inhabit that prediction. The walls pulse with imagery. The work doesn’t simply play in front of you; it moves around you and envelops you.
Paik coined the term “electronic superhighway” long before the internet rewired the world. Global Groove remains a map of where that road could take us—not just toward connection, but toward new kinds of possibility.
Upstairs in the McKinnon Modern and Contemporary Galleries, two works from the Chrysler’s permanent collection are stationed like sentinels of Paik’s playful imagination.
There’s Hamlet Robot (1996), a 12-foot-tall figure built from stacked wooden TV cabinets, its screens flickering where muscles might be—a body powered by electricity and ideas. Nearby, Dogmatic (1996), a squat robot dog with antennae for ears and a glowing screen for a belly, stands equal parts lovable and uncanny—a mechanical companion conjured from television’s dreams.
Though these sculptures live separately from Global Groove, they share its ideas. All three remind us that screen-based media doesn’t merely mirror culture—it shapes how we move, relate, think, and laugh. We are participants in its choreography.
Here in Coastal Virginia, global connection isn’t an idea—it’s our infrastructure. Signals crisscross oceans; naval communications shape the rhythm of local life. Fiber-optic cables stretch beneath the waves like underwater highways, and data centers rise across the region to handle the constant flow. Technology here is a part of our landscape, as present as the ocean.
Paik understood that screens would change how we connect with each other and with the world. He wanted us to pay attention to that transformation as it unfolds, before it fades into invisibility.
Curated by Chelsea Pierce, Ph.D., Nam June Paik: Electronic Television isn’t a history lesson or a warning, but a living conversation—a reminder that the screens we touch every day are shaping the ways we live, feel, and belong.
Paik’s message was not to run from technology but to be awake within it. To be curious. To notice what shimmers behind the black mirror.
Because if a video collage from 1973 can still feel like the future, then perhaps we still get to decide what comes next.
Hannah Serrano
Hannah Serrano is director of sales & marketing at the TASTE Family of Businesses and former marketing director at O'Connor Brewing Co. Hannah is a passionate foodie and beer nerd. Her advocacy for local culture developed as an arts editor at Port Folio Weekly, culture contributor at WVEC-13, owner of AltDaily.com, and co-organizer of Norfolk's NEON District.
