Global Groove

Paik believed that television would bring to the world a new advent of culture mixing and the degradation of racial barriers. No project of his is more indicative of his optimism than “Global Groove”. The artwork begins with a brief monologue from an unknow narrator who states “This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” What follows is a video of two dancers, both from different parts of the world, dancing to the music from the video. In the middle of the video, the dancers lose their respective outlines and become formless shapes mixing together. What results of the two bodies merging is a fabulous display

The first thing that may come to an audience’s mind with regards to this piece is the deconstruction of the dancer’s form and their apparent rebirth into shapes that blended together harmoniously with the music. One may argue that this reshaping of the subjects in the art piece represents the destruction of social, racial, and political barriers, moreover the rhythmic motion of the shapeless dancers could be interpreted as the beauty that would arise from a world without the artificial divides stated earlier. Another theme that might be articulated from this video is the neon highlighting of the dancers. This can be symbolic of the television and its potential impact it may have for ending bigotry and uniting the world. Professor Jun Okada at SUNY Geneseo elaborates on this idea by stating, “Paik’s Fluxus vision inclined itself to crossing borders and dissolving difference through the power of televisual flow. By comparison, Asian American film 2 Sau-ling C. Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1–2 (1995):