Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, trained as a musician in Germany alongside John Cage and the Fluxus artists, and settled in New York in the 1960s, where he became the founding figure of video art. By the 1990s he was building enormous walls of monitors, and here he turned the map into a self-portrait of a country he had crossed by car many times. The neon recalls roadside motel signs and the interstate highways of the 1950s; the title borrows the phrase electronic superhighway, which Paik had coined in 1974 to describe a coming world of networked media. Look at the way the video loops are timed so that the whole map pulses like a living organism, and notice the humour, since Paik chose clips with a light touch.

Paik gave the work to the museum in 2002, and it was the anchor of the third-floor galleries when they reopened after the building's renovation in 2006 and again after the 2023 reinstallation. Keeping it alive is a task in itself: the museum's conservators maintain stocks of old cathode-ray tubes and must decide how to replace failing parts without changing the artist's intention. The walls behind it, glimpsed in the photograph here, are a forest of scaffolding, cables and players, a reminder that behind every bright screen there is a machine.

Did You Know? The screen for Washington, D.C. shows a live camera feed, so every visitor becomes part of the map for a moment.