- Play in San Francisco the left-handed part of Fugue n°1 in C Major of The Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach
- Play in Shanghai the right handed part of Fugue n°1 in C Major of The Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach, starting at exactly midnight on March 3rd (Greenwich time) metronome tempo crotchet=80
- Broadcast at the same time on both sides of the so-called “Pacific Ocean”.

This project, published in 1963 by Nam June Paik in an almanac, prefigured his television broadcasts by satellite, the first of which, Good Morning Orwell, took place live from New York and Paris in 1984.

Bye Bye Kipling, produced in 1986, brought together events taking place in Tokyo, Seoul, and New York within a single live show. The opening credits began with Come Together by the Beatles. This popular music as an introduction attenuates the distinctions between high and low art, a bridge already crossed in this artistic project specifically designed for television.

This interplanetary encounter also provided the occasion for interdisciplinary exchanges, since this was a major gathering related to music, the fine arts, and sport.

While the presenter is situated at the “4D”, a New York nightclub, it is daytime in Asia when the famous marathon runner Takeyuki Nakayama attempts to beat his own record in Seoul. In Tokyo, the sound of the piano of Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto merges with a concert by Lou Reed, former member of the Velvet Underground, which occurs at the same time on the stage of the “4D”.

On the screen, a vast array of events and interventions follow, including an interview with the number one sumo wrestler, who is not Japanese but Hawaiian, or a performance by kabuki dancers set to classical Western music.

The clash of worlds transpires by way of rather basic special effects that are nonetheless amusing and friendly (split-screens make a feature out of both simultaneity and proximity), allowing Ryuichi Sakamoto to clink glasses from Tokyo with the presenter on the other side of the world.

The title evokes Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” [1] It is a question here of destroying this myth, which sees no conciliation possible between East and West, which can be contradicted in a time of satellites and state-of-the-art technology. Here, we see Paik’s visionary side, developed early on, thanks to new technology and methods that remove the boundaries between the various artistic disciplines, thus building bridges between cultures.

[1] In The Ballad of East and West, a poem by Rudyard Kipling published in 1889.

Patricia Maincent
Translated by Anna Knight