Since the early 1960s, Nam June Paik has continued to explore the potential of television as an art object and an expressive medium. Taking the physical technology of television as his source material -- picture tubes, video signals, etc. -- Paik began to construct a series of sculptures and installations that commented upon the increasing ubiquity as well as the psychological and sociological power of the television within the increasingly globalized world culture of the 1960s. One of the first artists to use the Sony Portapak (the world's first portable video recorder) as an artistic tool, Paik embarked on a career as a visual artist that would mirror the work of the media critic Marshall McLuhan, who's 1964 book Understanding Media would coin such well-known phrases as the "global village" and "the medium is the message." Working at exactly the same historical moment, both McLuhan and Paik shared a deeply felt apprehension about the new electronic age as well as an almost paradoxical optimism as to its positive possibilities.

While McLuhan is often seen as the chief evangelist of the electronic age (he is listed on Wired magazine's masthead as their patron saint), his book Understanding Media also pointed to a pathological diagnosis of our electronic culture. McLuhan used the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to dramatize the effects of our technological extensions of ourselves on the social and psychic structure of civilization. In his account, Narcissus (who's name derives from the Greek word narcosis) was caught up in an electronic feedback loop in which even Echo's pleas came back to him as fragments of his own voice. Like Narcissus, who was unable to take himself away from his own image, McLuhan suggests that we too have developed a narcissistic numbness in the face of the hyper stimulation of our electronic culture. This numbness becomes a kind of defense mechanism that fights the overwhelming effects of a hyper stimulated media culture on our central nervous systems. It is precisely this kind of problem that Nam June Paik points to in the passage above when he suggested that technological progress was occurring too rapidly. Paik's response was to attempt to humanize the technological, which he argued was a central goal of his work TV Bra For Living Sculpture (1969).

TV Bra For Living Sculpture (1969) is a crucial work within Nam June Paik's career. Consisting of two miniature televisions attached to a set of vinyl straps so that the screens functioned as the cups of a woman's bra, this sculpture was designed to be worn by Paik's collaborator Charlotte Moorman as she performed on the cello. An object which conflates the use value of technology with the exchange value of fashion, Paik saw his TV Bra as a way of humanizing the technological by forcing it into a hybrid relationship with the body as well as other artistic media such as performance. Originally, when this work was used in performances, the sound played by Moorman on her cello was filtered through a processor which would change, modulate, disrupt, and regenerate the live television images playing on the video screens of her TV Bra. By conflating sexuality (Moorman performed clothed only by the TV Bra), performance art, corporate entertainment media (the live signal on the two televisions), classical music, and sculpture, Paik used this technology to subvert the numbing effects of the electronic age that McLuhan alluded to. As Paik suggested in a 1965 essay, "if Pasteur and Robespierre are right that we can resist poison only through certain built-in poison, then some specific frustrations caused by cybernated life, require accordingly cybernated shock and catharsis. My everyday work with video tape and the cathode-ray tube convinces me of this." In Understanding Media McLuhan suggested the possibility of a similar moment of resistance within the technological realm which he located at the moment when two different media come together to form a hybrid. As he put it:

"The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses."

TV Bra For Living Sculpture raises a number of relevant questions about the notion of hybridity as we move down the path towards the possibilities of a Y2K apocalypse or a coming virtual nirvana. The object itself, a piece of technology meant to be worn during a musical performance, was itself a radical hybrid in the sense that McLuhan was suggesting. As a work of art it was rigorously intermedial, combining performance, sculpture, and video within the context of an art gallery structure traditionally focused on painting and sculpture. As a pioneering work of video sculpture that transgressed the various traditional boundaries of art, but also the boundaries of conventional science and engineering, Paik and Moorman's TV Bra For Living Sculpture provides an important historical antecedent and antidote to the numbing, ahistorical hysteria that often swirls around the explosion of the digital revolution.