Nam June Paik quotes

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist, often called the “father of video art.” His pioneering work combined technology, music, and performance to redefine the possibilities of contemporary art. He remains a major influence on media and experimental art worldwide. Here are 12 of his quotes:

Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.

Nam June Paik

Without electricity, there can be no art.

Nam June Paik

The future is now.

Nam June Paik

Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated.... Cybernetics, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself, has its origin in karma... The Buddhists also say Karma is samsara Relationship is metempsychosis.

Nam June Paik

I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colorfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.

Nam June Paik

I am a poor man from a poor country, so I have to be entertaining every second.

Nam June Paik

I make technology ridiculous.

Nam June Paik

By using TV as a bra... the most intimate belonging of a human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and also stimulate viewers... to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology.

Nam June Paik

It is the historical necessity, if there is a historical necessity in history, that a new decade of electronic television should follow to the past decade of electronic music.

Nam June Paik

As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one television screen, just think of the variety of images you can get. It's so cool. It's like going to the moon.

Nam June Paik