In 1968, the godfather of video art, Nam June Paik, began a synthesized scream from the broken bits of dismantled television sets in an attempt to reach upstream of authoritarian broadcasts. As the new cathode rays blasted mono-culture traction beams into eyeholes around the globe, he scratched, soldered, mixed, and mashed wires, and light from a little studio in Boston, to dance noise back into the tv signal and try to make the world groove. Later, he pioneered the first video mixer and his lifelong work was to disrupt the isolating force of broadcasts, by feeding the signal back into itself with help from his artist friends along the way, and his art culminated into a global groove that is as relevant now as it has ever been.

Amid social isolation, Paik’s vision of crossing media streams and connecting artists around the world was more important than ever. WAVES is an effort to draw from that spirit of disruption to insert a bit of danceable noise into the signals bombarding us today. On Sunday, May 17th, artists from Singapore, the UK, and around the world broadcasted art from their homes and then mixed and mashed live for your digital pleasure.  Audiences were encouraged to rebroadcast the live stream with their own inserted danceable noise to their favourite streaming platforms.