Fish (also) Flies on Sky

In 1997, I clipped an article from The New York Times, “Spectacular Shudders of Dying Stars.” I wasn’t sure why, but it always made me think of Paik (it was actually an article about stars). Paik was often looking to the sky. There were numerous TV Moon variations, including one with Nancy Graves’ footage of birds flying against the backdrop of a full moon. Paik loved Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – I recorded him playing it and Jud Yalkut used the tape for screenings of Electronic Moon. It wasn’t just the moon but there was also Fish Flies on Sky as well as the satellite broadcasts in the 1980s.

In a conversation with Merce Cunningham and others, Paik once theorized that Nureyev could jump higher on the moon but also sex would be “four times hard” because of anti-gravity. He was looking where the rest of us were looking in the age of the moon landing but he was also seeing differently.

Paik’s images are vibrant. The glow of cathode-ray tubes is not film light, it is more. I remember bringing Paik’s videos to be transferred to laser disc and he’d warn that the lab would want to reduce the chroma (vibrancy) but to tell them to increase it. I have to believe if he had lived long enough and gathered enough televisions, the light from his work would have been visible in space. Late in life, he turned to lasers - a brighter light that can travel that much further.