Nam June Paik’s Fingerprints

In the 1970's, Nam June Paik recorded TV commercials on several reels of AV videotape. He pressed “record” when a TV commercial was starting and “Stop” when the program started creating “deck edits”. Our piece is from these reels. We removed the complete ads and left only his deck edits.

Using his footage, we have removed content leaving only the actual parts of him. We used only the deck edits, start ups and artifacts made with the AV decks. On these tapes he recorded TV ads leaving out the TV shows. We now have removed the rest and left only Paik.

Leaving only the human input time-- condensing the tape and expanding the Paik. Expanding his time.

We started working on this video in early January in tribute to Paik. In a mystic twist as we happily finished seeing his portrait emerge so clearly, we sadly learned that Nam June Paik had just passed away. Paik once wrote “Once on videotape, you are not allowed to die...” and as we watched this footage we could not deny that we had recovered a portrait (or self-portrait) ...The fingerprints of Paik that had been captured in the 70’s. Long live Nam June Paik!