electronic superhighway

Nam June Paik's birth year, birth city, and the geopolitical status of his homeland at the time

Born 1932 in Seoul; what became South Korea was then under the control of the Japanese Empire

The academic subjects and university where Paik studied after moving to Japan in 1952

Studied aesthetics and music theory at the University of Tokyo

The European city where Paik connected with a multimedia avant-garde art scene in the late 1950s

Munich (located in West Germany at the time)

The dual cultural influences that informed Paik's performance and installation work

Core tenets of Buddhism collided with the American popular culture that saturated his youth

The American cultural icon Paik claimed was the first person whose full name he ever knew

Child star Shirley Temple

The titles and years of Paik's two early works meditating on emptiness, silence, and visual distortion

Hommage à John Cage (1959), Zen for TV (1963)

The 1960s international avant-garde group Paik joined, and its core conceptual objective

Fluxus; focused on breaking down barriers between art and everyday life through participatory, multimedia work

Four loosely associated prominent members of the Fluxus movement listed in the text

George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Beuys

The Japanese engineer Paik partnered with to execute technically complex electronics and responsive feedback

Abe Shuya

The city where Paik relocated in 1964 and spent the vast majority of his subsequent career

New York (Paik passed away in 2006)

The title, execution year, and permanent institutional home of the selected masterpiece

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii; 1995; permanently housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.)

The physical scale and structural screen count of the Electronic Superhighway installation

Consists of more than three hundred (300+) stacked and nested TV screens; measures 40 feet long and 15 feet tall

The primary visual mediums used to map out and illuminate the borders of the United States

Brightly colored neon tubing outlines state lines; a substantial wooden framing armature supports the screens

The unique structural placement of Alaska and Hawaii within the installation

Installed off to the side, mirroring traditional printed map insets

The specific geographic bodies of water explicitly highlighted via neon illumination

The Mississippi River and the Great Lakes

The classic 1939 film looped inside the geographic boundary of the state of Kansas

The Wizard of Oz (featuring heroine Dorothy Gale's family farm)

The legislative act and presidential administration that implemented the US multi-lane freeway network

The Interstate Highway Act of 1956, passed under President Dwight Eisenhower

The standardization principles that made the interstate system an intentionally integrated network

Consistent construction principles, numbering, and signage

The dual forces presented in the artwork as drivers of American cultural unification and hegemony

The physical network of the interstate highways paired with the reach of television (TV)

The historic moniker frequently awarded to Nam June Paik due to his pioneering video installations

The "father of video art"

The title and year of the 1969 exhibition where Paik debuted a viewer-responsive microphone TV

"TV as a Creative Medium" in New York

The critique leveled against Paik's participatory technology by Village Voice critic Stephanie Harrington

Called the attempts to humanize technology "off-putting" and argued they lacked a "unifying" idea

The computer scientist and 1948 book that popularized the systems theory of cybernetics

Norbert Wiener

Two prominent conceptual artists alongside Paik who adopted cybernetics to present datasets

Dan Graham and Hans Haacke

The spiritual origin Paik explicitly attributed to the science of cybernetics

He wrote that cybernetics "has its origin in 'Karma' in Budhism [sic]."

Paik's exact 1974 quote calling for telecommunications to serve as a substitute for physical travel

"Transportation and communication are considered generally as two separate issues … What we need is an Ersatz (substitute) technology to travel, and broadband communication is the strongest candidate for it."

Paik's conceptual philosophy regarding the evolution of information over live experience

"Information is no longer a means to get something live and concrete, but has become an end in itself."

The late-20th-century cultural nickname for the internet referenced in the artwork's title

The "information superhighway" (popularized in the 1980s and early 1990s)

Paik's uncanny 1965 prediction regarding future wireless mobile tech (resembling the modern smartwatch)

Predicted that "every high-brows will have laser-phone number" to communicate wirelessly and send biometric/environmental data (audio, video, pulse, temperature, moisture, pressure, movements)

The flawed prediction Paik made regarding how virtual info networks would affect global travel habits

He suggested "the frequency of travel will reduce" and that broadband "will cut down air travel"

The explicit passenger statistics comparing global air travel in 1995 to thirty years later

Air passengers grew from 1.3 billion in 1995 to more than 4.46 billion annually thirty years later, proving virtual worlds cannot replace real travel

The specific corporate entities and years highlighted in the textbook's secondary historical imagery

President's Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program map (1955) Ford Mercury advertisement (1962)

The visual iconography of the interstate highway system used to market the 1962 family car

A multi-lane road paired with a red, white, and blue shield-shaped sign

The specific social status of the family Paik was born into in Seoul

Born into an elite family that highly prized education

The exact definition of Fluxus "scores" as outlined in the text

Instructions for performances that could be followed by anyone

The exact phrase Paik used to define the discipline of cybernetics in relation to his spiritual beliefs

The "science of pure relations" (which he connected to "Karma" in Buddhism)

The specific timeline discrepancy noted in the text regarding Paik's 1974 "Ersatz" quote

The text states 1974 was "twenty years before making Electronic Superhighway" (even though the artwork was made in 1995)

The specific activity Paik predicted broadband would replace from the postwar interstate era

"Pleasure driving"

The specific quote from Paik regarding the historical shift of information's value

"Information is no longer a means to get something live and concrete, but has become an end in itself."

The baseline number of screens assigned minimum to each individual state outline

One or more screens