Bard Graduate Center - Cultural Histories of the Material World, 2022
Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on n... more Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms—such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components—that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved.
This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.
Making Images Move: Handmade Film and the Other Arts, 2020
Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media a... more Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.
We Are in Open Circuits: Writings By Nam June Paik, 2019
Summary
Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it p... more Summary Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it previously out of print or unpublished.
Nam June Paik (1932–2006) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. Arguably the most important video artist of all time, and certainly among the most influential and prolific, Paik was a legendary innovator who transformed the electronic moving image into an artist's medium. He wrote incessantly—corresponding with friends, composing performance scores, making production notes for television projects, drafting plans for video installations, writing essays and articles. Celebrated for his visionary development of new artistic tools and for his pioneering work in video and television, Paik often wrote to sharpen his thinking and hone his ideas. He used the typewriter to fashion sentences that broke apart and reassembled themselves as he wrote, producing both poetic texts and aesthetic objects on the page. This first extensive collection of Paik's writings includes many previously unpublished and out-of-print texts.
Drawing on materials from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Nam June Paik Archive and from a range of international publications, We Are in Open Circuits offers important but long-unavailable essays, including “Global Groove and Video Common Market”; unpublished writings on such topics as his creative partnership with the cellist Charlotte Moorman and the role of public television; a substantial part of his compilation “Scrutable Chinese”; and detailed plans for some of his groundbreaking broadcast works, including the trio Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988). It also includes nearly 150 pages that reproduce Paik's original typed and handwritten pages, letting readers see his writing in various stages of inspiration and execution.
Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, 2019
Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neg... more Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neglected. Process Cinema is the first book to trace the development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global perspective.
Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema - unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film - with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States.
Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.
The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 2018
Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not bee... more Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking.
Lumia presents a long-overdue reevaluation of the groundbreaking artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968... more Lumia presents a long-overdue reevaluation of the groundbreaking artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968), whose unprecedented works prefigured light art in America. As early as 1919, many years before the advent of consumer television and video technology, Wilfred began experimenting with light as his primary artistic medium, developing the means to control and project unique compositions of colorful, undulating light forms, which he referred to collectively as lumia. Manifested as both live performances on a cinematic scale and self-contained structures, Wilfred’s innovative displays captivated audiences and influenced generations of artists to come. This publication, the first dedicated to Wilfred in over forty years, draws on the artist’s personal archives and includes a number of insightful essays that trace the development of his work and its relation to his cultural milieu. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated artist James Turrell, Lumia helps to secure Wilfred’s rightful place within the canon of modern art.
Book chapter in Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Gabrielle Jennings (Uni... more Book chapter in Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Gabrielle Jennings (University of California Press, 2015), 98-115.
This essay seeks to examine artworks by Lynn Marie Kirby, Jennifer West, and Takeshi Murata—works that exist between media and whose creators explore the collisions, slippages, and juxtapositions produced by the admixture of analog and digital technologies, allowing chance operations to inform both their methods and their creative output. Borrowing from poet Charles Bernstein, I locate these works on a sliding scale of “clean” to “messy” abstraction, both in the artists’ approaches and in their resulting imagery. A “clean” abstraction might involve blocks of color and hard-edged geometric forms, while a “messy” abstraction may appear as a seemingly random array of fleeting flecks and sprawling lines skipping across the screen. These terms may also be applied to the methods that produce these abstractions: a “messy” artist may stain a filmstrip with her own bodily fluids; expose her film to the elements, thereby letting chance operations and the environment determine the ensuing patterns caused by wind and rain; or rely on the kinesthetic scratching of the film emulsion to achieve a jittery, dancing line. An artist’s “clean” methodology, on the other hand, might involve the precise manipulation of code or the strategic disruption of a video codec’s ability to decode a data stream. And yet it is easy to see how these methods and outcomes may not necessarily exist only as binaries but also as mutually informing ideas regarding the nature of abstraction. Those “messy” stains and specks may be the performative offspring of a meticulous conceptual plan that would otherwise be considered “clean,” and that careful application of lossy data compression may similarly result in a continuously fractured image that manifests as total chaos.
Book chapter in Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, eds. Bob Rehak, Dan North, an... more Book chapter in Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, eds. Bob Rehak, Dan North, and Michael Duffy. (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 224-240.
In 1983, Jordan Belson undertook a job requiring him to construct film sequences that brought together various formal and thematic motifs from his thirty-five-year career as an independent artisanal film-maker. Working with the purposefully rudimentary apparatus of his optical bench—a ‘plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights’—Belson built upon the techniques with which he had conjured the shimmering starfields of his Allures (1961), the celestial terrascapes featured in Samadhi (1967), and the flickering particles of Light (1973). Yet this particular film was not intended to be another short contemplative work steeped in the director’s hallucinatory drug experiences or Eastern religious practices, nor was it another grant-financed exploration of filmic materials and inner consciousness. Instead, it was a big-budget studio production: The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account of the origins of the United States space program. Already familiar with Belson’s cosmic cinema, Kaufman wanted the avant-garde film-maker to lend his unique sensibilities to creating special effects for the film. Belson shot over 20,000 feet of film for The Right Stuff—enough for an entire feature—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. ‘Jordan is a true artist’, said Kaufman at the time, ‘His studio is like a monastery for film creation. Very few people are ever allowed inside [...] From there, he creates skies and universes and strange light effects, using his own techniques’.
But what happens when others are ‘allowed inside’ a deeply personal practice so different in scale and intention from commercial or industrial filmmaking? That is to say, if the means and ends of artisanal avant-garde film production—as practiced by Jordan Belson, Len Lye, and John Whitney, Sr.—are usually pitted ideologically against those of conventional, commercial film productions, how are we to best understand their intersection? And why do ‘handmade’ effects, such as those seen alongside their digital counterparts in The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006), and The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011), persist in the contemporary filmmaking landscape?
Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art
Edited by Gabrielle Jennings
Foreword by Kat... more Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art Edited by Gabrielle Jennings Foreword by Kate Mondloch
Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive source book on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, interactive art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings—a video artist herself—reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, “pictures of nothing,” but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. Featuring well known artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume offers fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.
Contributing Authors: Tilman Baumgärtel Philip Brophy Michael Connor Sarah Cook Trinie Dalton Charlotte Frost Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Johanna Gosse John G. Hanhardt Caitlin Jones Stanya Kahn Cindy Keefer Katja Kwastek Christine Ross Lumi Tan Maria-Christina Villaseñor John C. Welchman Siona Wilson Gregory Zinman
Online video has reached escape velocity: at present, video traffic accounts for over threequarte... more Online video has reached escape velocity: at present, video traffic accounts for over threequarters of U.S. internet bandwidth; YouTube counts over one billion people as users; and three hundred hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute—only three years ago, it was only 60 hours per minute (Boris 2014). The figure will be higher by the time you read this. Now, more than ever, there is quite literally too much to see. Digital humanities have long been concerned with issues of scale, but, save for some important exceptions (Burgess & Green 2009; Snickars & Vonderau 2009), scholars have yet to fully contend with a medium—online video—that commands an attention to scale as one of its fundamental characteristics. Nevertheless, the experience of online video is nearly always one of overabundance and, concomitantly, loss. ICYMI, the acronym for the internet/txt slang “in case you missed it,” may thus be the defining impression of online video. Relent lessly hashtagged and rep...
This essay describes the discovery and significance of Etude 1 (1967), a previously unknown work ... more This essay describes the discovery and significance of Etude 1 (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik. Composed at Bell Labs and written in an early version of the computer-programming language FORTRAN, Etude 1 stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—though whether Etude 1 was intended to be a film, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or some other kind of art work altogether. By exploring Etude 1's uncertain status, as well as more conceptual indeterminacies concerning the relationship between image and code, music and media, and the analog and the digital, this essay demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of cinema's digital past, film's place in computational media, and the nature of the archive.
This article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cine... more This article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cinematic means expanded the aesthetic and affective possibilities of both mediums. These approaches include ‘painted films’ wherein the artist applies paint directly onto the celluloid in an exploration of an alternative material support for painting, as well as ‘filmed paintings’, films that display the act of a painting being made. The article surveys the historical development of these intermedial concepts and methods before offering close readings of films by José Antonio Sistiaga, Francis Lee, David Haxton, in order to demonstrate how these works simultaneously complicate the notion of medium specific- ity as they present new modes of, and encounters with, painting.
Question the signal. Attack the apparatus. Embrace noise. Let mistakes guide creation. The origin... more Question the signal. Attack the apparatus. Embrace noise. Let mistakes guide creation. The origins of Nam June Paik's installation, TV Crown (1965/1998-99), stretch back before the scope of this anniversary issue, yet the artworks high-profile restagings have resulted in a piece whose later iterations have been seen by a far greater number of viewers than its earliest one. Indeed, TV Crown raises a number of issues at the heart of contemporary experimental media practice. It presents TV without video, sound that is only silence, and an idea whose material manifestation changes over time. TV Crown also provokes us to consider how today's experimental mediascape, one characterized by remix, glitch, and data-moshing, among a host of digital techniques, emerges from a long line of works that demonstrate how artists' interventions into media processes forces us to rethink media's meaning. Furthermore, it points toward contemporary media aesthetics - and ethics - at the sa...
In Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts, Gregory Zinman explores the history of... more In Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts, Gregory Zinman explores the history of camera-less filmmaking in an exciting intervention that ennobles an underdiscussed mode of film pro...
Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek ... more Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images. This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be m...
Bard Graduate Center - Cultural Histories of the Material World, 2022
Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on n... more Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms—such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components—that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved.
This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.
Making Images Move: Handmade Film and the Other Arts, 2020
Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media a... more Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.
We Are in Open Circuits: Writings By Nam June Paik, 2019
Summary
Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it p... more Summary Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it previously out of print or unpublished.
Nam June Paik (1932–2006) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. Arguably the most important video artist of all time, and certainly among the most influential and prolific, Paik was a legendary innovator who transformed the electronic moving image into an artist's medium. He wrote incessantly—corresponding with friends, composing performance scores, making production notes for television projects, drafting plans for video installations, writing essays and articles. Celebrated for his visionary development of new artistic tools and for his pioneering work in video and television, Paik often wrote to sharpen his thinking and hone his ideas. He used the typewriter to fashion sentences that broke apart and reassembled themselves as he wrote, producing both poetic texts and aesthetic objects on the page. This first extensive collection of Paik's writings includes many previously unpublished and out-of-print texts.
Drawing on materials from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Nam June Paik Archive and from a range of international publications, We Are in Open Circuits offers important but long-unavailable essays, including “Global Groove and Video Common Market”; unpublished writings on such topics as his creative partnership with the cellist Charlotte Moorman and the role of public television; a substantial part of his compilation “Scrutable Chinese”; and detailed plans for some of his groundbreaking broadcast works, including the trio Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988). It also includes nearly 150 pages that reproduce Paik's original typed and handwritten pages, letting readers see his writing in various stages of inspiration and execution.
Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, 2019
Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neg... more Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neglected. Process Cinema is the first book to trace the development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global perspective.
Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema - unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film - with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States.
Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.
The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 2018
Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not bee... more Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking.
Lumia presents a long-overdue reevaluation of the groundbreaking artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968... more Lumia presents a long-overdue reevaluation of the groundbreaking artist Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968), whose unprecedented works prefigured light art in America. As early as 1919, many years before the advent of consumer television and video technology, Wilfred began experimenting with light as his primary artistic medium, developing the means to control and project unique compositions of colorful, undulating light forms, which he referred to collectively as lumia. Manifested as both live performances on a cinematic scale and self-contained structures, Wilfred’s innovative displays captivated audiences and influenced generations of artists to come. This publication, the first dedicated to Wilfred in over forty years, draws on the artist’s personal archives and includes a number of insightful essays that trace the development of his work and its relation to his cultural milieu. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated artist James Turrell, Lumia helps to secure Wilfred’s rightful place within the canon of modern art.
Book chapter in Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Gabrielle Jennings (Uni... more Book chapter in Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Gabrielle Jennings (University of California Press, 2015), 98-115.
This essay seeks to examine artworks by Lynn Marie Kirby, Jennifer West, and Takeshi Murata—works that exist between media and whose creators explore the collisions, slippages, and juxtapositions produced by the admixture of analog and digital technologies, allowing chance operations to inform both their methods and their creative output. Borrowing from poet Charles Bernstein, I locate these works on a sliding scale of “clean” to “messy” abstraction, both in the artists’ approaches and in their resulting imagery. A “clean” abstraction might involve blocks of color and hard-edged geometric forms, while a “messy” abstraction may appear as a seemingly random array of fleeting flecks and sprawling lines skipping across the screen. These terms may also be applied to the methods that produce these abstractions: a “messy” artist may stain a filmstrip with her own bodily fluids; expose her film to the elements, thereby letting chance operations and the environment determine the ensuing patterns caused by wind and rain; or rely on the kinesthetic scratching of the film emulsion to achieve a jittery, dancing line. An artist’s “clean” methodology, on the other hand, might involve the precise manipulation of code or the strategic disruption of a video codec’s ability to decode a data stream. And yet it is easy to see how these methods and outcomes may not necessarily exist only as binaries but also as mutually informing ideas regarding the nature of abstraction. Those “messy” stains and specks may be the performative offspring of a meticulous conceptual plan that would otherwise be considered “clean,” and that careful application of lossy data compression may similarly result in a continuously fractured image that manifests as total chaos.
Book chapter in Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, eds. Bob Rehak, Dan North, an... more Book chapter in Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, eds. Bob Rehak, Dan North, and Michael Duffy. (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 224-240.
In 1983, Jordan Belson undertook a job requiring him to construct film sequences that brought together various formal and thematic motifs from his thirty-five-year career as an independent artisanal film-maker. Working with the purposefully rudimentary apparatus of his optical bench—a ‘plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights’—Belson built upon the techniques with which he had conjured the shimmering starfields of his Allures (1961), the celestial terrascapes featured in Samadhi (1967), and the flickering particles of Light (1973). Yet this particular film was not intended to be another short contemplative work steeped in the director’s hallucinatory drug experiences or Eastern religious practices, nor was it another grant-financed exploration of filmic materials and inner consciousness. Instead, it was a big-budget studio production: The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account of the origins of the United States space program. Already familiar with Belson’s cosmic cinema, Kaufman wanted the avant-garde film-maker to lend his unique sensibilities to creating special effects for the film. Belson shot over 20,000 feet of film for The Right Stuff—enough for an entire feature—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. ‘Jordan is a true artist’, said Kaufman at the time, ‘His studio is like a monastery for film creation. Very few people are ever allowed inside [...] From there, he creates skies and universes and strange light effects, using his own techniques’.
But what happens when others are ‘allowed inside’ a deeply personal practice so different in scale and intention from commercial or industrial filmmaking? That is to say, if the means and ends of artisanal avant-garde film production—as practiced by Jordan Belson, Len Lye, and John Whitney, Sr.—are usually pitted ideologically against those of conventional, commercial film productions, how are we to best understand their intersection? And why do ‘handmade’ effects, such as those seen alongside their digital counterparts in The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006), and The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011), persist in the contemporary filmmaking landscape?
Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art
Edited by Gabrielle Jennings
Foreword by Kat... more Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art Edited by Gabrielle Jennings Foreword by Kate Mondloch
Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive source book on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, interactive art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings—a video artist herself—reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, “pictures of nothing,” but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. Featuring well known artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume offers fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.
Contributing Authors: Tilman Baumgärtel Philip Brophy Michael Connor Sarah Cook Trinie Dalton Charlotte Frost Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Johanna Gosse John G. Hanhardt Caitlin Jones Stanya Kahn Cindy Keefer Katja Kwastek Christine Ross Lumi Tan Maria-Christina Villaseñor John C. Welchman Siona Wilson Gregory Zinman
Online video has reached escape velocity: at present, video traffic accounts for over threequarte... more Online video has reached escape velocity: at present, video traffic accounts for over threequarters of U.S. internet bandwidth; YouTube counts over one billion people as users; and three hundred hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute—only three years ago, it was only 60 hours per minute (Boris 2014). The figure will be higher by the time you read this. Now, more than ever, there is quite literally too much to see. Digital humanities have long been concerned with issues of scale, but, save for some important exceptions (Burgess & Green 2009; Snickars & Vonderau 2009), scholars have yet to fully contend with a medium—online video—that commands an attention to scale as one of its fundamental characteristics. Nevertheless, the experience of online video is nearly always one of overabundance and, concomitantly, loss. ICYMI, the acronym for the internet/txt slang “in case you missed it,” may thus be the defining impression of online video. Relent lessly hashtagged and rep...
This essay describes the discovery and significance of Etude 1 (1967), a previously unknown work ... more This essay describes the discovery and significance of Etude 1 (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik. Composed at Bell Labs and written in an early version of the computer-programming language FORTRAN, Etude 1 stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—though whether Etude 1 was intended to be a film, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or some other kind of art work altogether. By exploring Etude 1's uncertain status, as well as more conceptual indeterminacies concerning the relationship between image and code, music and media, and the analog and the digital, this essay demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of cinema's digital past, film's place in computational media, and the nature of the archive.
This article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cine... more This article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cinematic means expanded the aesthetic and affective possibilities of both mediums. These approaches include ‘painted films’ wherein the artist applies paint directly onto the celluloid in an exploration of an alternative material support for painting, as well as ‘filmed paintings’, films that display the act of a painting being made. The article surveys the historical development of these intermedial concepts and methods before offering close readings of films by José Antonio Sistiaga, Francis Lee, David Haxton, in order to demonstrate how these works simultaneously complicate the notion of medium specific- ity as they present new modes of, and encounters with, painting.
Question the signal. Attack the apparatus. Embrace noise. Let mistakes guide creation. The origin... more Question the signal. Attack the apparatus. Embrace noise. Let mistakes guide creation. The origins of Nam June Paik's installation, TV Crown (1965/1998-99), stretch back before the scope of this anniversary issue, yet the artworks high-profile restagings have resulted in a piece whose later iterations have been seen by a far greater number of viewers than its earliest one. Indeed, TV Crown raises a number of issues at the heart of contemporary experimental media practice. It presents TV without video, sound that is only silence, and an idea whose material manifestation changes over time. TV Crown also provokes us to consider how today's experimental mediascape, one characterized by remix, glitch, and data-moshing, among a host of digital techniques, emerges from a long line of works that demonstrate how artists' interventions into media processes forces us to rethink media's meaning. Furthermore, it points toward contemporary media aesthetics - and ethics - at the sa...
In Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts, Gregory Zinman explores the history of... more In Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts, Gregory Zinman explores the history of camera-less filmmaking in an exciting intervention that ennobles an underdiscussed mode of film pro...
Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek ... more Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images. This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be m...
... Edwin Pouncy, Laboratories of Light: Psychedelic Light Shows, in Summer of Love:Psychedelic... more ... Edwin Pouncy, Laboratories of Light: Psychedelic Light Shows, in Summer of Love:Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2005), 156. ...
This essay describes the discovery and significance of Etude 1 (1967), a previously unknown work ... more This essay describes the discovery and significance of Etude 1 (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik. Composed at Bell Labs and written in an early version of the computer-programming language FORTRAN, Etude 1 stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—though whether Etude 1 was intended to be a film, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or some other kind of art work altogether. By exploring Etude 1's uncertain status, as well as more conceptual indeterminacies concerning the relationship between image and code, music and media, and the analog and the digital, this essay demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of cinema's digital past, film's place in computational media, and the nature of the archive.
Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 3.2, 2015
This article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cine... more This article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cinematic means expanded the aesthetic and affective possibilities of both mediums. These approaches include ‘painted films’ wherein the artist applies paint directly onto the celluloid in an exploration of an alternative material support for painting, as well as ‘filmed paintings’, films that display the act of a painting being made. The article surveys the historical development of these intermedial concepts and methods before offering close readings of films by José Antonio Sistiaga, Francis Lee, David Haxton, in order to demonstrate how these works simultaneously complicate the notion of medium specific- ity as they present new modes of, and encounters with, painting.
Edited interview of video artist Stephen (Steve) Beck (b. 1950), by John G. Hanhardt and Gregory
... more Edited interview of video artist Stephen (Steve) Beck (b. 1950), by John G. Hanhardt and Gregory
Zinman for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, conducted at artist’s home, Berkeley, California, Oct.
19, 2014. Part of the Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Presented at the Orphans X Film Symposium, Culpeper, VA, April 2016.
This talk describes the dis... more Presented at the Orphans X Film Symposium, Culpeper, VA, April 2016.
This talk describes the discovery and significance of Etude (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik identified by the author in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recently-acquired Paik archive. Composed at Bell Labs, in collaboration with engineers, and written in an early version of FORTRAN, Etude stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—although it is not entirely clear whether Etude was, in fact, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or another artwork altogether. By exploring Etude’s uncertain status, as well as the piece's more conceptual indeterminacies, this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of the nature of the archive, cinema’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media.
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Books by Gregory Zinman
This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/O/bo86883609.html
Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it previously out of print or unpublished.
Nam June Paik (1932–2006) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. Arguably the most important video artist of all time, and certainly among the most influential and prolific, Paik was a legendary innovator who transformed the electronic moving image into an artist's medium. He wrote incessantly—corresponding with friends, composing performance scores, making production notes for television projects, drafting plans for video installations, writing essays and articles. Celebrated for his visionary development of new artistic tools and for his pioneering work in video and television, Paik often wrote to sharpen his thinking and hone his ideas. He used the typewriter to fashion sentences that broke apart and reassembled themselves as he wrote, producing both poetic texts and aesthetic objects on the page. This first extensive collection of Paik's writings includes many previously unpublished and out-of-print texts.
Drawing on materials from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Nam June Paik Archive and from a range of international publications, We Are in Open Circuits offers important but long-unavailable essays, including “Global Groove and Video Common Market”; unpublished writings on such topics as his creative partnership with the cellist Charlotte Moorman and the role of public television; a substantial part of his compilation “Scrutable Chinese”; and detailed plans for some of his groundbreaking broadcast works, including the trio Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988). It also includes nearly 150 pages that reproduce Paik's original typed and handwritten pages, letting readers see his writing in various stages of inspiration and execution.
Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema - unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film - with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States.
Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.
This essay seeks to examine artworks by Lynn Marie Kirby, Jennifer West, and Takeshi Murata—works that exist between media and whose creators explore the collisions, slippages, and juxtapositions produced by the admixture of analog and digital technologies, allowing chance operations to inform both their methods and their creative output. Borrowing from poet Charles Bernstein, I locate these works on a sliding scale of “clean” to “messy” abstraction, both in the artists’ approaches and in their resulting imagery. A “clean” abstraction might involve blocks of color and hard-edged geometric forms, while a “messy” abstraction may appear as a seemingly random array of fleeting flecks and sprawling lines skipping across the screen. These terms may also be applied to the methods that produce these abstractions: a “messy” artist may stain a filmstrip with her own bodily fluids; expose her film to the elements, thereby letting chance operations and the environment determine the ensuing patterns caused by wind and rain; or rely on the kinesthetic scratching of the film emulsion to achieve a jittery, dancing line. An artist’s “clean” methodology, on the other hand, might involve the precise manipulation of code or the strategic disruption of a video codec’s ability to decode a data stream. And yet it is easy to see how these methods and outcomes may not necessarily exist only as binaries but also as mutually informing ideas regarding the nature of abstraction. Those “messy” stains and specks may be the performative offspring of a meticulous conceptual plan that would otherwise be considered “clean,” and that careful application of lossy data compression may similarly result in a continuously fractured image that manifests as total chaos.
In 1983, Jordan Belson undertook a job requiring him to construct film sequences that brought together various formal and thematic motifs from his thirty-five-year career as an independent artisanal film-maker. Working with the purposefully rudimentary apparatus of his optical bench—a ‘plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights’—Belson built upon the techniques with which he had conjured the shimmering starfields of his Allures (1961), the celestial terrascapes featured in Samadhi (1967), and the flickering particles of Light (1973). Yet this particular film was not intended to be another short contemplative work steeped in the director’s hallucinatory drug experiences or Eastern religious practices, nor was it another grant-financed exploration of filmic materials and inner consciousness. Instead, it was a big-budget studio production: The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account of the origins of the United States space program. Already familiar with Belson’s cosmic cinema, Kaufman wanted the avant-garde film-maker to lend his unique sensibilities to creating special effects for the film. Belson shot over 20,000 feet of film for The Right Stuff—enough for an entire feature—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. ‘Jordan is a true artist’, said Kaufman at the time, ‘His studio is like a monastery for film creation. Very few people are ever allowed inside [...] From there, he creates skies and universes and strange light effects, using his own techniques’.
But what happens when others are ‘allowed inside’ a deeply personal practice so different in scale and intention from commercial or industrial filmmaking? That is to say, if the means and ends of artisanal avant-garde film production—as practiced by Jordan Belson, Len Lye, and John Whitney, Sr.—are usually pitted ideologically against those of conventional, commercial film productions, how are we to best understand their intersection? And why do ‘handmade’ effects, such as those seen alongside their digital counterparts in The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006), and The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011), persist in the contemporary filmmaking landscape?
Edited by Gabrielle Jennings
Foreword by Kate Mondloch
Now available on Amazon, or from University of California Press - http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282483
SAVE 30%
Use source code 15M4426 at checkout
Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive source book on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, interactive art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings—a video artist herself—reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, “pictures of nothing,” but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. Featuring well known artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume offers fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.
Contributing Authors:
Tilman Baumgärtel
Philip Brophy
Michael Connor
Sarah Cook
Trinie Dalton
Charlotte Frost
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Johanna Gosse
John G. Hanhardt
Caitlin Jones
Stanya Kahn
Cindy Keefer
Katja Kwastek
Christine Ross
Lumi Tan
Maria-Christina Villaseñor
John C. Welchman
Siona Wilson
Gregory Zinman
Papers by Gregory Zinman
This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/O/bo86883609.html
Essays, project plans, and correspondence from across Nam Jun Paik's career, much of it previously out of print or unpublished.
Nam June Paik (1932–2006) is a pivotal figure in the history of modern art. Arguably the most important video artist of all time, and certainly among the most influential and prolific, Paik was a legendary innovator who transformed the electronic moving image into an artist's medium. He wrote incessantly—corresponding with friends, composing performance scores, making production notes for television projects, drafting plans for video installations, writing essays and articles. Celebrated for his visionary development of new artistic tools and for his pioneering work in video and television, Paik often wrote to sharpen his thinking and hone his ideas. He used the typewriter to fashion sentences that broke apart and reassembled themselves as he wrote, producing both poetic texts and aesthetic objects on the page. This first extensive collection of Paik's writings includes many previously unpublished and out-of-print texts.
Drawing on materials from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Nam June Paik Archive and from a range of international publications, We Are in Open Circuits offers important but long-unavailable essays, including “Global Groove and Video Common Market”; unpublished writings on such topics as his creative partnership with the cellist Charlotte Moorman and the role of public television; a substantial part of his compilation “Scrutable Chinese”; and detailed plans for some of his groundbreaking broadcast works, including the trio Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988). It also includes nearly 150 pages that reproduce Paik's original typed and handwritten pages, letting readers see his writing in various stages of inspiration and execution.
Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema - unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film - with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States.
Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context.
This essay seeks to examine artworks by Lynn Marie Kirby, Jennifer West, and Takeshi Murata—works that exist between media and whose creators explore the collisions, slippages, and juxtapositions produced by the admixture of analog and digital technologies, allowing chance operations to inform both their methods and their creative output. Borrowing from poet Charles Bernstein, I locate these works on a sliding scale of “clean” to “messy” abstraction, both in the artists’ approaches and in their resulting imagery. A “clean” abstraction might involve blocks of color and hard-edged geometric forms, while a “messy” abstraction may appear as a seemingly random array of fleeting flecks and sprawling lines skipping across the screen. These terms may also be applied to the methods that produce these abstractions: a “messy” artist may stain a filmstrip with her own bodily fluids; expose her film to the elements, thereby letting chance operations and the environment determine the ensuing patterns caused by wind and rain; or rely on the kinesthetic scratching of the film emulsion to achieve a jittery, dancing line. An artist’s “clean” methodology, on the other hand, might involve the precise manipulation of code or the strategic disruption of a video codec’s ability to decode a data stream. And yet it is easy to see how these methods and outcomes may not necessarily exist only as binaries but also as mutually informing ideas regarding the nature of abstraction. Those “messy” stains and specks may be the performative offspring of a meticulous conceptual plan that would otherwise be considered “clean,” and that careful application of lossy data compression may similarly result in a continuously fractured image that manifests as total chaos.
In 1983, Jordan Belson undertook a job requiring him to construct film sequences that brought together various formal and thematic motifs from his thirty-five-year career as an independent artisanal film-maker. Working with the purposefully rudimentary apparatus of his optical bench—a ‘plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights’—Belson built upon the techniques with which he had conjured the shimmering starfields of his Allures (1961), the celestial terrascapes featured in Samadhi (1967), and the flickering particles of Light (1973). Yet this particular film was not intended to be another short contemplative work steeped in the director’s hallucinatory drug experiences or Eastern religious practices, nor was it another grant-financed exploration of filmic materials and inner consciousness. Instead, it was a big-budget studio production: The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account of the origins of the United States space program. Already familiar with Belson’s cosmic cinema, Kaufman wanted the avant-garde film-maker to lend his unique sensibilities to creating special effects for the film. Belson shot over 20,000 feet of film for The Right Stuff—enough for an entire feature—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. ‘Jordan is a true artist’, said Kaufman at the time, ‘His studio is like a monastery for film creation. Very few people are ever allowed inside [...] From there, he creates skies and universes and strange light effects, using his own techniques’.
But what happens when others are ‘allowed inside’ a deeply personal practice so different in scale and intention from commercial or industrial filmmaking? That is to say, if the means and ends of artisanal avant-garde film production—as practiced by Jordan Belson, Len Lye, and John Whitney, Sr.—are usually pitted ideologically against those of conventional, commercial film productions, how are we to best understand their intersection? And why do ‘handmade’ effects, such as those seen alongside their digital counterparts in The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006), and The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011), persist in the contemporary filmmaking landscape?
Edited by Gabrielle Jennings
Foreword by Kate Mondloch
Now available on Amazon, or from University of California Press - http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282483
SAVE 30%
Use source code 15M4426 at checkout
Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive source book on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, interactive art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings—a video artist herself—reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, “pictures of nothing,” but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. Featuring well known artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume offers fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.
Contributing Authors:
Tilman Baumgärtel
Philip Brophy
Michael Connor
Sarah Cook
Trinie Dalton
Charlotte Frost
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Johanna Gosse
John G. Hanhardt
Caitlin Jones
Stanya Kahn
Cindy Keefer
Katja Kwastek
Christine Ross
Lumi Tan
Maria-Christina Villaseñor
John C. Welchman
Siona Wilson
Gregory Zinman
Zinman for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, conducted at artist’s home, Berkeley, California, Oct.
19, 2014. Part of the Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This talk describes the discovery and significance of Etude (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik identified by the author in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recently-acquired Paik archive. Composed at Bell Labs, in collaboration with engineers, and written in an early version of FORTRAN, Etude stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—although it is not entirely clear whether Etude was, in fact, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or another artwork altogether. By exploring Etude’s uncertain status, as well as the piece's more conceptual indeterminacies, this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of the nature of the archive, cinema’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media.