Metropolis Completes DVD For Guggenheim

Metropolis DVD has completed work on the DVD-based portion of the Guggenheim Museum's groundbreaking Nam June Paik exhibit. Scheduled to run from February 11-April 26, 2000, ""The Worlds Of Nam June Paik"" is the first American retrospective for the Korean-born multimedia artist since 1982. The Guggenheim installation features laser projections passing through a seven-story waterfall cascading from the top of the museum to the Rotunda floor, and hundreds of monitors displaying Paik's video imagery. Seminal video installations from the 1960s and 1970s line the Guggenheim's ramps, including ""The Moon is the Oldest TV,"" ""TV Garden,"" and ""Video Fish."" For the first time, these installations will be seen using DVDs, with Metropolis DVD having crafted the work into the DVD format. ""We're extremely happy to be involved in the first major Nam June Paik exhibition to utilize DVD technology,"" said David Anthony, a Co-founder of Metropolis DVD. ""We believe that DVD is destined to become the format of choice for more and more video based artists as an exhibition format as well as a distribution and an archival medium."" The Nam June Paik exhibit includes ten DVD-Rs and approximately six hours of material crafted from the original video footage. Metropolis went to extraordinary lengths to ensure fidelity to the artist's work, often running two monitors side-by-side, one with the original video and the other showing the digital video, to allow for real time comparisons as the art work was being converted to digital format. With some Nam June Paik works dating from the 1960s, Chief Engineer James Moore compared the process to restoring a canvas. In addition to the age of some of the materials, Metropolis also had to contend with the number formats in which the original material was conceived, including three-quarter inch video, Beta, and various archival materials. ""Our mandate was to be as true as humanly possible to the original artwork in crafting the material to DVD,"" stated Anthony, who noted that the company utilized many of the same tools it employs in high-end feature films on the project and put in more than 300 hours of studio time. ""Throughout the project, we were extremely cognizant of the fact that we were creating a permanent record of Nam June Paik's works.""