Nam June Paik, «Exposition of Music – Electronic Television», 1963
Participation TV | Photography | Photograph: Manfred Montwé

The Fluxus artist Tomas Schmit, here seen sitting in the room full of TV sets, helped Paik set up the exhibition. Schmit's detailed description of the individual TV modifications makes it clear that the impression of chaos conveyed by the TV ensemble is deceptive insofar as the whole presentation was more like a laboratory with various experimental set-ups than a conventional exhibition. «eleven televisions in the room between the hall and garden; arranged – like the pianos – at random; one tv set is on top of another, the others are on the floor. the starting material is supplied by the normal tv programmes, but they are scarcely recognizable on most of the sets. (...): one of the tv sets shows a negative picture overlaid with a different one. the picture on another has been rolled up, so to speak, into a cylinder round the vertical centre axis of the screen. in what paik calls the most complicated case there are three independent sinusoidal oscillations attacking the image parameters. the group of two: the lower one has horizontal stripes, the upper one vertical stripes (the upper one actually shows the same picture as the bottom one, but is on its side as opposed to its feet). a single, vertical, white line runs through the middle of the screen of the zen tv. one set lies face-down and shows its pictures to the parquet floor (paik said today: «that one was broken»). in the top eight tv sets the picture composition (in television, the term picture also includes a temporal dimension) is derived from more-or-less pre-defined manipulations of the set's electronics, in the four bottom sets the manipulation is such that external influences determine the picture: one of the four is connected to a pedal switch in front of it; if you press the switch, the short-circuits of the contact procedure bring about a fireworks of instantly disappearing points of light on the screen. another set is hooked up to a microphone; anyone who speaks into the mike sees an explosion of light dots similar to the other set, but a continuous one this time. the «kuba tv» is the most extreme; it is connected to a tape recorder that feeds music to the tv (and to us): parameters of the music determine parameters of the picture. finally (on the top storey) you have the «one point tv» that is connected to a radio; in the middle of its screen is a bright point whose size is governed by the current volume of the radio; the louder the radio, the larger the point, the quieter the radio, the smaller the point becomes.» Dieter Daniels