Nam June Paik
«Texts on TV – Projects for Electronic Television»

I hope to open a studio for electronic color television in New York City so that I can begin more complicated technical experiments such as maximum exploitation of shadow-mask color TV picture tube, self-programming of whole video signal through TV cameras, tape-recorders (visual and audio), the combination of electronic music and electronic TV, and if possible, combining the TV with computers and self-invented 50 channel data recorders.
As an adjunct to these experiments I plan to construct a compact version of electronic TV for concerts so that it can easily be transported and demonstrated in colleges.
It will have unprecedented education effects since it bridges two cultures, appealing both to artisticallly and scientifically minded people. These two projects of experimentation and education are aimed at a third stage -- the development of an adapter with dozens of possebilities which anyone could use in his own home, using his increased leisure to transform his TV set from a passive pastime to active creation.

Flier on the occasion of the first public presentation of videotapes in the New York Cafe Au GoGo. The pope’s visit was one of the first motifs that Paik recordedThe last sentence anticipates the Videosythesizer. Paik originally wrote the text to the New School for Social Research, New York, in collaboration with Bill Wilson.
Reprinted in: catalogue «Videa ‘n’ Videology 1959–1973», Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, 1974, unpaged.




Aphorisms

TV is as mass media as Sex.
Before Kinsey beautiful lady used to whisper to her neighbour, «My husband plays only one piece on piano ... and always with one finger ...» Kinsey wiped out this frustration and made the heresy to the authodoxy. TV-culture is in the pre-Kinsey stage at this moment. As wife was just a sexmachine for her husband (before), public is just the Pavlovan dog for the network (presently). The infinite potentials of TV, such as: two-way communication, audience participation, «electronic democracy through instant referendum» (John Cage) ... is by far ignored or delicately suppressed.

*

Wall to wall carpet ... 1940.
Wall to wall TV ... 1970.
It is a reality through laser-TV and solid-state thin picture ‘tube’.
TV without a box is no longer TV, but a ‘video environment’.



Source: Aphorisms from an essay originally written for the catalogue of ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968, reprinted in: catalogue «Videa ‘n’ Videology 1959–1973», Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, 1974, unpaged