Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist.

Paik is credited with an early usage (1974) of the term "super highway" in application to telecommunications.

Born in Seoul during the period of the Japanese annexation of Korea, the youngest of five siblings, Paik had 2 older brothers and 2 older sisters. His father owned a major textile manufacturing firm. As he was growing up, he was trained as a classical pianist. In 1950, Paik and his family had to flee from their home in Korea, during the Korean War. His family first fled to Hong Kong, but later moved to Japan. Six years later he graduated from the University of Tokyo where he wrote a thesis on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Paik then moved to Germany to study music history at Munich University. While studying in Germany, Paik met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage and the conceptual artists Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell who inspired him to work in the field of electronic art.

Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside (November 18, 1933–November 8, 1991) was an American cellist and performance artist.

She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College (Shreveport, Louisiana) where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and continued on to postgraduate studies at The Juilliard School in 1957.

She began a traditional concert hall career but was soon drawn into the active mixed-media performance art scene of the 1960s. She became a close associate and collaborator of Korean avant-garde artist Nam June Paik, with whom she toured widely. In 1963 she established the New York Avant Garde Festival which played annually in various locations including Central Park and the Staten Island Ferry until 1980 (except for the years 1970, 1976 and 1979).

In 1967 she achieved notoriety for her performance of Paik's Opera Sextronique, a seminude performance which resulted in her arrest on charges of indecent exposure; she was given a suspended sentence. The incident gave her nationwide fame as the "topless cellist." She also performed Paik's TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) with two small television receivers attached to her breasts. Another memorable piece was her performance of Jim McWilliams' Sky Kiss in many locations including New York and Sydney, Australia, which involved her hanging suspended from helium-filled weather balloons or the brightly colored inflatable sculptures of Otto Piene.

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Many of his policies have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance.

Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton became both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009 and was a Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state's education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.

Ryuichi Sakamoto (坂本 龍一, Sakamoto Ryūichi^?, born January 17, 1952) is a Japanese musician, composer, record producer, writer, singer, pianist, and actor, based in Tokyo and New York. He began his career in 1978 as a member of the pioneering electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), where he played keyboards and was an occasional vocalist. The band was an international success, with worldwide hits such as "Computer Game / Firecracker" (1978) and "Behind the Mask" (1978), the latter written and sung by Sakamoto. He concurrently began pursuing a solo career, debuting with the experimental electronic fusion album The Thousand Knives of Ryūichi Sakamoto (1978), and later released the pioneering album B-2 Unit (1980), which included the electro classic "Riot in Lagos". After YMO disbanded in 1983, he produced more solo records, including collaborations with various international artists, through to the 1990s.