Nam June Paik, V-yramid, 1982

Narrator: By now you’ve probably seen a lot of sculptures, but I bet this is the first one you’ve seen made entirely out of old television sets.

Nam June Paik could have arranged these forty TVs along the floor. Instead, he stacked them so they tower over you! He called this work V-yramid—to sound like PYramid. He once said “The Egyptian pyramids are the first example of a combination of high art and high tech, because they used many of the cutting edge technologies of their time.”

When Paik was born, there was no Internet and TVs had just been invented—his parents didn’t grow up with one, and not many of his friends had one either. Now we watch TV on phones, computers, tablets—it’s all over the place. What kind of a sculpture can you imagine making with TVs today? Would it be this big?