Celebrating Nam June Paik’s 78th birthday in 2010, Benjamin Patterson created Message to Nam June Paik and visited the Nam June Paik Art Center in July to perform the piece with the audience. Participants were led to leave a message to Paik through a recorder. The message, however, was composed of words allocated randomly according to the alphabet initials of the participant’s name, thus sounding like an incantation. Patterson wrote “RADIO NJP” on a drawing panel and used the cover image of the Beatles’ eighth album for the score’s cover. The cover had been designed by pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, in which Beatles members posed in front of historical and contemporary celebrities. Patterson and Paik worked together in various Fluxus events from the 1960s, sharing their thoughts on the participation of audiences in art. In an introduction to his solo show, Exposition of Music — Electronic Television, Paik acknowledged a few of his fellow artists; one of them was Patterson from whom Paik learned about the theremin circuits and the approach to electronics.
