In the summer of 1969, the Korean video artist Nam June Paik, a trained composer and pianist, collaborated with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe in Tokyo to develop a video synthesizer, the Paik/Abe Synthesizer. At the time, Paik was the artist-in-residence at WGBH Television in Boston, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. In this context, he was able to convince WGBH director David Atwood and the program directors Fred Barzyk and Olivia Tappan of the necessity of carrying out television experiments in the studio that were not subject to the technical television broadcasting standard or the control of engineers.

On September 23, 1969, Paik conducted various experiments with the Paik/Abe Synthesizer in the studio at WGBH that were recorded but not broadcast. The videotape 9/23/69: Experiment with David Atwood contains a series of experiments conducted live (in real time), with the electromagnetic manipulation of existing television material. The manipulation or deformation primarily applies to the visual image. What become visible are the line structure of the image format, horizontal drift, and the resolution of the television image in the RGB color spectrum. The work also contains examples of early electromagnetic television experiments in which wave forms are produced as image content when the course of the signal is altered during signal transmission. In addition, 9/23/69 includes image transformations and sound disruptions with the synthesizer that Paik also presented as individual works, such as the material for Beatles Electroniques, Video Commune, and McLuhan Caged, and the use of the Demagnetizer (first presented in 1965), an electromagnetic ring which externally deforms the television broadcast in wave form. At the sound level, besides electromagnetically disrupted original sounds in the television material and their dissolving into audio noise, one can also hear direct commentary by Paik and others in the studio. In this work, what is decisive for Paik for the relationship between video and television is that the existing image/sound connections are dissolved and both of them subjected to an electromagnetic massage, with the electronic medium being transformed – due to its basic audiovisual structure as variable material in the synthesizer – so that the course of the signal configured in television alters its direction.