We are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik

We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik is a large, illustrated monograph with no image of the iconic artworks for which Paik is most known. There are no walls of stacked televisions, no Buddha watching himself on TV. This collection of writings, from the Nam June Paik Archive (Smithsonian American Art Museum) and a range of international publications, are the reproduced formatting and facsimiles of the artist’s typewritten scores, essays, letters and handwritten journal entries, postcards and notes. The book is wonderful to browse as an aesthetic artifact but it is also a resource and record of a dynamic mind responding to a changing world from the late 1950s into the mid-1990s. The editor introductions to each of the thematic sections (Music and the Avant-garde; Transforming Video and Television; Culture and Politics; and Commentaries and Letters) provide an historical and cultural context for Paik’s writing. Paik’s writing,...