Nam June Paik in front of a video art wall displaying his face. Photograph: EPA Photo AFP/Guggenheim Museum/Ranier Rosenow
The antidote to the internet is... composer and video artist Nam June Paik's Zen for Film. Eight minutes of unadulterated, blissed-out, soundless, grainy Fluxus whiteness: worth anybody's ascetic concentration, and a perfect corrective to our hyper-stimulated media lives.
This 1962 piece is from the same, visionary artist who went on to conceive pieces like Danger Music for Dick Higgins, one of the most arresting contributions in John Cage's 1972 Notations anthology, which consists only of the instruction, scrawled on a piece of paper: Creep into the vagina of a living whale. As far as I'm aware, it's still awaiting a first performance.
Influenced by Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, both of whom he worked with, Paik's work was usually visually saturating, like his sculptures made from 1003 TV screens. He dreamed of video art walls in your home, which would be fed by a continually changing feast of imagery, and made visual art from lasers, before his death a couple of years ago. His official site tells you more.
