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Using the upcoming SFMOMA Nam June Paik retrospective as a springboard, curator Rudolf Frieling considers how the artist's interest in open circuits and participation propelled his response to television and subsequently the practice of an entire field called video art. He explores Paik’s pathbreaking career as one of the first global artists, one whose hybrid practice incorporated sound, electronics, text, performance, and television as both a sculptural object and a broadcast technology.

Rudolf Frieling is Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Adjunct Professor at the California College of Art and the San Francisco Art  Institute. From 1988 to 1994 he was curator of  the International VideoFest Berlin, from 1994 to 2006 curator and researcher at ZKM Karlsruhe where he also headed the Internet portal Media Art Net and the restoration and exhibition project 40yearsvideoart.de. He curated In Collaboration and The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now in 2008/2009, and site-specific exhibitions by Bill Fontana and Jim Campbell in 2010/2011, all at SFMOMA.