probe the boundary between the symbolic and the real, which is at the same time the boundary of art. If Burden had died in «Shoot,» or the TV hostess in «TV Hijack,» then art's so-called freedom would have been annulled and prosecution initiated. Equally, «Promo» had to have a ‹genuine› product and «C.B.T.V.» shows how television ‹really› works. All of Burden's television actions stand as appropriations of the reality of the medium, but at the same time they show that no artist is in a position to compete seriously with the industrial production of television as a technique, program and institution.

Radical cooperations—Paik

Nam June Paik must be the only artist of the pioneer generation who has never given up hope that artistic work is possible and necessary in the mass medium of television. Art historians writing about him often forget that almost all his videos were made for television. His 1973 video classic «Global Groove» is like a TV manifesto

for the future. In the opening sequence it says: «This is a glimpse of a new world when you will be able to switch on every TV channel in the world and TV guides will be as thick as the Manhattan telephone book.» Picking up McLuhan's vision of the «Global Village,» the video is an invitation to a fun journey through the whole world of television, to a party on television's global village green. Thus it is taking up the utopia of understanding between nations proclaimed by radio in the 1920s, and also anticipating the utopias of the global Internet community in the 1990s. This was the spirit in which Dziga Vertov sketched out his utopia of a combination of radio and film as early as 1925, so that all the proletarians in the world could see each other, thus creating a sense of international solidarity.[64] But the colorful surface, anticipating the effect-aesthetics of video clips, conceals a clear and committed concept that Paik formulated as early as 1970. He sees the one-sidedness of national TV reporting as a motif for forming political opinion that leads to wars and racial