Contemporary Art in a Global, Digital Age

Installation art abandons the single, self-contained object in favor of an entire environment the viewer physically enters and moves through, often combining sculpture, sound, projection, and architecture into one immersive spatial experience; the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, begun in the 1960s and continually reworked since, surround visitors with repeating fields of lights or polka-dotted forms reflected to apparent infinity by mirrored walls. Video art emerged as a closely related but distinct new medium once portable video cameras became available in the mid-1960s, and the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik is widely credited as its pioneer, using the moving electronic image itself, rather than film or television broadcasting, as raw artistic material. Paik's TV Buddha (1974), in which a video camera captures a seated Buddha statue and feeds the live image back to a television screen the statue appears to contemplate, and his later multi-monitor installations such as Electronic Superhighway treated banks of television sets as both sculpture and a commentary on media saturation.