It was in March of 1963 that Nam June Paik, in the "of
Music/Electronic Television" exhibition at the Parnass gallery in
Wuppertal, presented, for the first time in the history of the visual
arts, a work whose materiality was the electronic image: thirteen
television sets prepared according to thirteen different modalities.
For Paik, it was a question of attempting to create a new kind of
painting,abstract and in movement, by the use of electronic
procedures. This work opened up the field of art, in a manifest way, to
the electronic image.
In May 1963, at the Smolin gallery in New York, Wolf Vostell exhibited the environment entitled "6 TV Dé-collages". This work, in which each of six television sets presented a form of anomaly, extended the medium to directly sociological goals. Since 1958 he had made television a symbol to be subverted.