Considered to be the pioneer of video art, Nam June Paik had an unstable childhood. Forced to flee Korea with his family as a kid due to the Korean War, he moved to Hong Kong, Tokyo and eventually Germany before ending up as an artist in the United States. Maybe it was this early introduction to travel and a variety of cultures that spurned his interest in technology and communications.  After all, he’s credited with inventing the term “electronic super highway.”

Paik was trained as a classical pianist, but in the 1960s he met all these crazy artists like John Cage and Joseph Boueys and started to get into weird sound installations with TVs. Or one time he started to play the piano during a performance only to jump off stage and attack his artist buddies with scissors and shampoo.  Don’t ask me to interpret that one, please.

Once technology started to take off though, Paik became interested in recording devices and the ways in which media is disseminated. I think his success is largely due to the way he anticipated the effects of the internet and the huge changes it brought, saying once that, “Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.”  And look at us now, Snapchatting and Facetiming and doing anything to avoid talking to a human on the phone.  Seems like Paik got it right.