Movies: Nam June Paik

One of Nam June Paik’s most iconic works, TV Buddha expresses the contrasts and parallels between East and West and between technology and spirituality in a very simple and direct way. A CCTV camera films a Buddha statue, which Paik bought from an an...

Part of the "Video-Film Concert" collection on EAI. From 1966 - 1972. Music by K. S. Narayanaswami....

Part of the "Video-Film Concert" collection released by EAI. From 1966 - 1972....

The exuberant irreverence and wit of Butterfly characterizes Paik's stream-of-consciousness visual and conceptual techniques. In a vibrant image/music collage, he ironically juxtaposes high-cultural artifacts (the aria from Madame Butterfly), contemp...

This early work belongs in the company of Paik and Yalkut's classic collaborative "video-films," including Video Tape Study No. 3, Beatles Electronique, and Missa of Zen. To the accompaniment of the abrupt sonic interjections of Fluxus-affiliated com...

In Missa of Zen, a TV screen, filmed from an extremely oblique angle, appears as a ghostly, flickering sliver at the side of a darkened frame. The images playing across its surface are rendered abstract by the perspective: we witness the transmission...

This tape is Jud Yalkut's video realization of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's concert performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player. In this extraordinary performance, which is manipulated and synthesized by Yalkut, Paik ...

Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations and the...

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One of Paik's most compelling and poignant tapes, Living with the Living Theatre pays tribute to Judith Malina and the late Julien Beck, founder of the Living Theatre. Reversing the theme of the earlier Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, which dealt with t...

Collaboration with Nam June Paik and Dimitri Devyatkin, combining footage from the US and Russia: Brezhnev on TV, a May Day parade, veterans in the park. The film was shown internationally in New York....

Button Happening is Nam June Paik's earliest extant tape, and possibly his first tape ever. Recorded in 1965 on the day he acquired his first Sony Portapak camera, this previously unknown work has recently been rediscovered and restored. Recorded on ...

Part of a restored collection of rare early works by Nam June Paik, Electronic Fables is an example of Paik's early improvisations and experiments with electronic image manipulation, prior to his invention of the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer. This piec...

Video Commune is Jud Yalkut's free-form documentation of Nam June Paik's first interactive television "performance" at the public television station WGBH in Boston. Subtitled "Beatles from Beginning to End," this was a live broadcast in which Paik cr...

1966, 16mm film on video, black-and-white and color; 10 minutes...

One Candle, One Projection...

Single channel video (color; sound; 1984)...

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Beuys Projection, 1990...

Nam June Paik’s Electronic Opera no. 1 first aired in 1969 as part of The Medium is the Medium, a special “artist transmission” commissioned by WGBH-Boston featuring experimental segments by Paik and artists Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, James Seawright,...