After moving to New York in the 1960s, Paik met the cellist Charlotte Moorman, a central figure of the city’s avant-garde, and the two began a collaboration that would last until her death in 1991. Some of Paik’s most well known works were created for Moorman, including TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV-Cello (1971). In 1967, Moorman’s notoriety centered on her arrest for going topless while performing in Paik's Opera Sextronique. 

Paik envisioned transcending the traditional concept of television manipulation to enable two-way interaction, aiming to create a device that anyone could engage with as intuitively as playing the piano. This vision led to the development of the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, a collaboration with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe that first came to life in 1969. The synthesizer allows for real-time alteration of video images, adjusting their color and shape based on input from external sources like cameras.