Nam June Paik’s Etude 1 and the Indeterminate origins of Digital Media Art
GrEGory ZINMAN
You dig up ruins after ruins to understand the past, as if you know something about the present. But we know about the present as little as about the past. —Nam June Paik, “Archaeology,” undated1
A stack of punch cards. A printout of fortrAN 66 computer code. An image on thermofax paper. An experimental film. Each of these is Etude 1 (1967), a digital artwork by pioneering media artist Nam June Paik that I recently discov- ered in the archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum—and yet, Etude 1 is none of them. Paik is best known for his treated televisions, such as Magnet TV (1965); his single-channel videotapes, such as Global Groove (1973); his multi-channel room- sized installations, such as Electronic Superhighway (1995); and his anthropomorphic media assemblages, such as the Family of Robot series (1986). for these works, Paik is credited with establishing video as an artistic medium—and rightly so; his work transformed the landscape of twentieth-century art, and even anticipated a num- ber of developments in the twenty-first. Etude 1 does not fit into any of these cate- gories, however. In fact, it is not a work of video art at all. Etude 1 is an early digital artwork, one of the first ever made. But more than its primacy, its indeterminate status—both as an artwork and as an artifact—helps us rethink the nature of the archive, art’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media. In the early 1960s, a small group of engineers at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey—already an epicenter of technological innovation—began to explore how computer graphics might be employed to enhance human-computer interac- tion, and started to experiment with making digital art.2 the engineers were not
1. Nam June Paik, “Archaeology,” n.d. Nam June Paik Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, box 12, folder 2. Paik also used this phrase in “random Access Information,” Artforum 19, no. 1 (September 1980), p. 49. 2. At the time, Bell Labs was one of the premier communications research-and-development facilities in the United States. owned jointly by At&t and the Western Electric Company, the institu- tion was primarily interested in the display of scientific data, and worked with the US government on many projects, including Project Nike, an anti-aircraft-missile system, and NASA’s Apollo program. for
OCTOBER 164, Spring 2018, pp. 3–28. © 2018 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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trained as artists, however, so they invited practicing painters and filmmakers, including Stan VanDerBeek and Lillian Schwartz, to take up residence at the com- pany.3 Paik was invited to be an artist at Bell Labs from early 1967 to 1968. there, he produced the film now known as Digital Experiment at Bell Labs (ca. 1967) and the Dada-inspired print Confused Rain (1967).4 Such artworks, forged in a corpo- rate r&D lab with close ties to American military and space programs that never- theless fostered an environment in which artists and engineers could conduct con- ceptual and aesthetic investigations into technology, serve as the unlikely seeds from which our current digital mediascape has emerged. While it may be easy, from our present vantage, to trace the emergence of the digital arts and digital filmmaking back to Bell Labs, it was not true that the artists—or, for that matter, the engineers—perceived the shift from analog to digi- tal in this way. Etude 1 endures as one of the very first digital artworks produced by an artist who was not first trained as a computer engineer. But in spite of the musi- cal reference in its title, it is not at all clear if Etude 1 was part of the “computer opera” that Paik mentioned throughout his correspondence at the time, nor is it evident if the final work was intended to be the single image preserved in the Smithsonian archive, or if Paik planned to film the image as it was being plotted, thereby producing an animation. By digging through the “ruins” of Etude 1 as it exists in the archive, as well as by exploring how its traces linger outside of that site, I will chart a conceptual history of the digital arts that productively compli- cates our notions of digital and computational media as being teleological pro- gressions from earlier, analog sources. With this assertion, I bear in mind thomas Elsaesser’s framing of the digital “as the chance to rethink the idea of historical change itself, and what we mean by inclusion and exclusion, horizons and boundaries, but also by emergence, trans- formation, appropriation, i.e., the opposite of rupture.”5 As I see it, rethinking the history of the digital arts, and of digital media more generally, requires less a map- ping of boundaries than a tracing of the passage of objects and individuals across zones of media practices, and an exploration of how artists imagined their own
more on this history, see Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New york: Penguin Press, 2012). 3. VanDerBeek began working with programmer Kenneth Knowlton in 1965; next, robert rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver approached the facility about collaborating on the series of multimedia events known as 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, out of which developed Experiments in Art and technology (E.A.t.), an organization dedicated to fostering collaborations between artists and engineers. the practice was quickly adopted by other computer-research labs, including MIt’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and IBM, which began an artist-in-residence pro- gram in 1966, when animator John Whitney Sr. began working with digital computers for the first time. 4. While the date given for Digital Experiment is 1966, it is unlikely that it was made that early. A. Michael Noll has suggested that the two portions of the film have different dates, although the work’s resolution makes it difficult to confirm this. A. Michael Noll, email to the author, May 16, 2015. 5. thomas Elsaesser, “the New film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinemas 14, no. 2/3 (Spring 2004), p. 78.
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paths across such areas. In many ways, the course charted by Paik resists conven- tional mapping entirely. He was emphatically in favor of blurring boundaries whenever possible, or redrawing them to suit his own objectives—not only concep- tually, as in Etude 1, but also literally, as in his 1963 drawing Fluxus Island in Décollage Ocean, a work of creative cartography that maps artists, concepts, associ- ates, and in-jokes across an imaginary landmass. Paik’s intermedial art therefore enables a generative dismantling of the familiar media history that moves from film to video to the digital in favor of examples—rooted in the art itself—of how intentions and practices can exist prior to specific technologies, be informed and modified by their encounters with those technologies, and then be further employed in and reconfigured by other mediatic expressions.
Four Indeterminacies I found Etude 1 just over four years ago, while conducting research at the Smithsonian’s Nam June Paik Archive. the archive, which was acquired in 2009— three years after Paik died at the age of seventy-three—consists of the contents of the artist’s three Manhattan studios. the materials include robots, toys, paintings, works on paper, scores of antique radios and televisions, over two hundred video- tapes, and hundreds of books, as well as fifty-five linear feet of Paik’s writings and correspondence. It was in this paper archive that I came across a series of folders relating to Paik’s time at Bell Labs. I first greeted the contents of the folders—stacks of computer punch cards and reams of printouts of code—with pleasant surprise. Some of these printouts, which I later determined to be authored in fortrAN 66, were labeled “Paik Study,” and were numbered 1 through 12. Another printout, labeled “Etude 1,” was placed directly on top of a piece of thermal paper, yellowed with age, depicting an image of four concentric circles, each created by a set of overlapping capital let- ters. Breaks in the circular forms revealed the words that composed the image: LoVE, HAtE, GoD, and DoG. I suspected that the printout of code corresponded to the image, but there was no way to put this hypothesis to the test; fortrAN 66, unlike later versions of the programming language, could only be compiled—that is, translated from human-generated code to machine-readable format—to run on the mainframes of that era; no fortrAN 66 compilers currently exist. All I could do was learn to read the code.6 the printout bears a date in the upper-left-hand corner of the page: october 24, 1967. the code features a repeated command, CALL tSP, which, as I later learned, is a function that plots a point on a grid. the tSP is the name of a sub- routine found in a shared code library that would have been used by the program-
6. Many thanks to my colleagues Eamon Johnson, Jacob Eisenstein, Mike Epstein, and Lauren Klein for their help in deciphering Etude 1’s code.
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mers at Bell Labs. the subroutine requires four arguments: an x-position, a y-posi- tion, the character to be drawn, and the number 1—evidently, some sort of counter. the x and y positions are computed from the equation for a circle. As the radius of the circle changes, the program cycles through the letters of each word, resulting in a single letter at a time—for instance, the L of LoVE—being beamed to a screen at a designated position. the code enclosed in each Do command is intended to loop. As the program runs, it loops within each section—100, 200, 300, and 400—each time creating one of the four circles that constitute the image. the code’s structure is therefore both linear and iterative, literally circling back on itself as it completes its ultimate design. And yet, Paik’s handwritten notes on the printout indicate that the code wasn’t quite right. It either only partially ran or it may have failed entirely. As I later learned, it certainly wasn’t the version of the code that produced that completed image of four circles. taking inspiration from the structure of Paik’s code, I have structured this essay in four sections: “Between Code and Concept,” “Between opera and Intermedia,” “Between Analog and Digital,” and “Between Archive and Meaning.” Each of these four sections, like the Do functions in the code, describes a process of recursion that, when they are considered together, productively complicates our sense of the digital arts as emerging from earlier analog sources in a linear and teleological fashion. I characterize these recursions as indeterminacies, as each section probes the indeter- minate and irresolvable position occupied by Etude 1 between two conceptual poles.
Paik. Etude 1. 1967. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive.
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Between Code and Concept While Paik is best known as a video artist, he arrived at this practice through an intense engagement with other art forms, including music, dance, and happen- ings. Born in Korea, Paik studied art history, philosophy, and music at the University of tokyo; upon graduation, he continued his studies in Germany, where he took courses at the freiburg Conservatory of Music. It was during this time that he met John Cage and worked with electronic-music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. He also met Lithuanian-born New york artist George Maciunas, one of the orchestrators of fluxus. At the invitation of Maciunas, Paik composed and participated in numerous fluxus happenings throughout Europe, often playing and/or destroying instruments such as pianos and violins.7 for his first solo show, he exhibited a series of modified and altered television sets in 1963 at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, West Germany, and after moving to New york in 1964, he embarked on a series of multimedia pieces and performances with classical and avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman. By the time he began experimenting with video in 1965, Paik was already an established member of the international art- world vanguard. When Paik reached out to Max Mathews, the director of the Behavioral research Laboratory at Bell Labs, in 1966 to inquire about the possibility of con- ducting an “electronic art experiment” with computers, he did not envision his work there as conscribed to a single medium.8 Mathews, who had been working with James tenney in the field of computer music, suggested that Paik get in touch with Michael Noll, a technician whose work involved visual displays. Noll had begun making computer art after seeing the Stromberg-Carlson 4020 micro- film plotter—a precursor to today’s computer printers—malfunction while render- ing a colleague’s program.9 Struck by the visual aesthetics of the error, Noll was inspired to experiment with his own designs. Noll and his Bell Labs colleague Béla Julesz showed their work at the first public exhibition of computer-generated art in the US, which took place at the Howard Wise Gallery in New york in April 1965.10 Paik wrote to Noll at the end of 1966, and Mathews and Noll then paid a
7. Somewhat paradoxically, Paik favored destruction as a means of building communication. Just as Paik tore open the insides of pianos in his Klavier Integral (1963), or radically altered televisions to produce hitherto unseen images in pieces like Magnet TV (1965) and TV Clock (1965), destruction carries literal and metaphoric roles in Paik’s work as the site of renewal and regeneration. “My job,” Paik explained to the New Yorker in 1975, “is to see how the establishment is working and to look for lit- tle holes where I can get my fingers in and tear away walls.” Calvin tompkins, “Profiles: Video Visionary,” The New Yorker, May 5, 1975, p. 79. Nevertheless, Paik’s use of parody and electronic brico- lage seems purposeful, even utopian. 8. Letter from Nam June Paik to Max Mathews, November 15, 1966. Nam June Paik Estate. 9. See Zabet Patterson’s illuminating recent book on the subject, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (Cambridge, MA: MIt Press, 2015). 10. Letter from Max Mathews to Nam June Paik, November 23, 1966. Nam June Paik Estate. Grant taylor describes Noll’s development as an artist in When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (New york: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 31.
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visit to Paik’s cluttered second-floor studio on Canal Street.11 While they failed to find a logic in the mass of torn-apart televisions and the seemingly endless tangle of wires and electronics, they nevertheless invited Paik to come to Bell Labs. there, Noll taught Paik the fundamentals of fortrAN, gave him an account to use the computer facilities, and more or less let him be.12 It is telling that the most legible work that Paik created while at Bell Labs, Confused Rain (1967), has illegibility at its conceptual center. During his time in Murray Hill, Paik was forced to contend with the notoriously buggy GE-600 series mainframe. In making Confused Rain, he was explicit about his desire to “protest the lack of common sense in the computer,” and indicated that the piece was intended to voice his frustration—which he would more clearly articulate later— with the working methods of computational media. Confused Rain depicts a jum- bled array of the letters that compose the word confuse, printed in black plotter ink on a white sheet of paper.13 At the top of the piece is a note in Paik’s hand: “Confused rain (computer graphic). Simulation of rain falling through the letters of C-o-N-f-U-S-E.” the studies for Confused Rain—those papers in the archive labeled “Paik Study 1–12”—show that Paik employed a random-number generator to select the x and y coordinates that positioned the individual letters on the page, allowing the computer to determine the overall shape of the piece.14 further study of the fortrAN code for Confused Rain revealed that Paik output multiple versions of the piece as moving images on 35mm film, though these works have since been lost, and it is impossible to know whether Paik thought they were successful. Paik’s interest in randomness and chance came from his mentor John Cage, who employed similar concepts in his musical compositions. In Confused Rain, Paik also seems to embrace a version of Marcel Duchamp’s “irony of indifference” in advocating for an aesthetic of “machine-realized” art.15 Such indifference repre- sents a prescient instantiation of speculative realism in its embrace of automatic writing by a nonhuman entity, at the same time as it looks back to Dadaist art and
11. Letter from Nam June Paik to Michael Noll, November 30, 1966. Nam June Paik Estate. 12. See A. Michael Noll, “flashback: the Story Behind Nam June Paik’s ‘Digital Experiment’ at Bell Labs,” october 30, 2014, available at: http:asiasociety.org/blog/asia/flashback-story-behind-nam- june-paiks-digital-experiment-bell-labs. Nevertheless, in an undated letter to John Cage, Paik writes, “I finished my frist [sic] computer movie . . . pas mal . . . I think I fulfilled my promise to you and Max Mathews . . . Jim tenney helped me every step, although it had to be titled as ‘collaboration with Noll.’” It is not clear to which film he is referring. Nam June Paik letter to John Cage, Northwestern University, John Cage Archives, Series II, Correspondence, box 10, folder 6. 13. A number of versions of the studies indicated that Paik made a two-minute film of the piece, perhaps as it registered. these have been lost and have never been seen by the public, while the static image was reproduced in Judson rosebush, ed., Nam June Paik: Videa ’n’ Videology 1959–1973 (Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974). 14. Interestingly, many of these printouts are festooned with preliminary sketches for Etude 1, indicating that Paik was working on the two projects in parallel. 15. John and James Whitney, “Audio Visual Music,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New york: NyU Press, 1978), pp. 83–86.
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Paik. Study Number 11. 1967. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive.
poetry. And yet, we also know that a computer requires step-by-step programming by a human actor to achieve the effect of randomness.16 Paik’s process in making Confused Rain demonstrates this tension between intention and chance, and illumi- nates the ways early digital computation provoked artists to explore indeterminacy and multiplicity in new ways, producing series of unforeseen images from minor adjustments to code. the only other previously known work from Paik’s time at Bell Labs, the starkly Minimalist film referred to as Digital Experiment at Bell Labs (1966), pits ran- domness against its conceptual opposite, repetition. Paik called these concepts “two poles of human artistic materials,” and Digital Experiment explores both, although it does not necessarily synthesize them. In the film, a single pixel moves
16. As William Kaizen, one of the only scholars to have published on the subject of Paik’s work at Bell Labs, writes, “randomness was available for human use only when embedded in a repetitive, itera- tive, programmed structure.” William Kaizen, “Computer Participator: Situating Nam June Paik’s Work in Computing,” in Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, ed. Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 231.
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randomly along a diagonal line, its movement having been programmed by Paik.17 the second part of the film features a single line of quickly changing white text— letters and symbols—on a black background. this section is most likely not the result of programming by Paik but rather a display of a data dump generated by the computer.18 It is entirely possible that Paik had been intrigued by this output of “waste” by the computer, found it of aesthetic interest (or found the association of the computer with the scatological amusing), and thus wanted to record it. It is also unclear whether Paik considered these fragments two separate works or a uni- fied piece. In either case, Paik’s exploration of the potential of computer moviemaking can nonetheless be counted alongside the work of VanDerBeek and John Whitney as being among the earliest attempts by artists to make digital films. Paik transposes the stuff of code first into digital computation’s foundational image—the pixel—before turning that process back on itself, making the charac- ters of programming into an abstracted visual image. the building block is thus followed by its detritus, a canny visualization not only of the arduous process of early digital computation but also of the new visual possibilities emerging from the relationship between code and image. Etude 1 was made at the same time as these other previously known works. the mandala-like image, created by sets of overlapping words, brings to mind a number of additional intermedial precedents, from the Dadaists whipping up “word salads” with experimental typography to Jack Kirby’s drawn comic-book sound effects (e.g., “WHAM!!!”), which conflate sound, action, and language.19 A key antecedent, Duchamp’s Anémic cinéma (1926), underscores the interplay of language, music, and form that is evident in the title Paik chose for his work. Duchamp filmed Anémic cinéma in Man ray’s studio, where he festooned a series of spinning phonograph records with letters that spelled out sexual puns and non- sense rhymes. Duchamp’s appropriation of the phonograph in the service of the silent moving image frustrates the putative use-value of the technology, as well as of the work’s various linguistic elements. As is the case with the densely nested let- ters of Etude 1, Duchamp’s quickly rotating text—intended to be read from the outside of the spiral to the inside—also transforms language into pure visual form. Paik’s use of language in conjunction with chance operations, evident in Etude 1 as well as in works like Confused Rain, was also part of a contemporaneous surge of interest in the intersection of language and computation. As Zabet Patterson writes, “to be concerned with the computer at this point in time was to be concerned with the particularities of language—or languages.”20 this concep-
17. I recently found Paik’s handwritten fortrAN code for the film in a notebook located at the Nam June Paik Estate in Woodside, California. 18. See Noll, “flashback: the Story Behind Nam June Paik’s ‘Digital Experiment’ at Bell Labs.” 19. Consider, for instance, Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligram Il pleut (1918), which challenged conventional reading and writing practices. 20. Patterson, Peripheral Vision, p. 76.
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tual synthesis was spurred by mathematician theo Lutz, who created some of the first works of computer-generated poetry, and writer and philosopher Max Bense, who sought to mine the cognitive similarities between mathematics and language as modes of expression. Bense eventually developed the formalist and prescriptive concept of “Programming of Beauty,” which could be achieved through the ratio- nal application of mathematics and scientific principles, or what he termed “infor- mation aesthetics.”21 Also around that time, artist and philosopher Henry flynt posited a neo-Dadaist counterpoint to Bense, a “concept art” that critiqued mathe- matical logic even as it borrowed and exploited its form. flynt asked artists to con- sider making up “aesthetic theorems” that relied not on truth but on the potency of their ideas. In this way, Paik’s work at Bell Labs could be said to represent an unlikely synthesis of these two perspectives on mathematics and aesthetics— Bense’s pursuit of formal beauty and flynt’s overthrowing of convention. Paik pro- vides a tightly arrayed construction that nevertheless seeks to insert language into code and to shape words into geometry. Paik’s interest in combining elements of mathematics and language dove- tailed with several contemporaneous developments at the intersection of art and technology. At Bell Labs, Max Mathews had written code for a graphical lan- guage for composing and playing sounds on the computer; Alison Knowles and tenney had employed the Siemens System 4004 computer to randomly generate A House of Dust (1967), a collection of poems; and VanDerBeek had begun pro- ducing Poemfields (1966–1971), a series of eight films created with programmer Kenneth Knowlton, shortly before Paik’s arrival in Murray Hill. But Paik’s choice to base his composition on words, rather than symbols or lines, distinguishes it from these other early attempts at making art with the computer.22 His choice of words speaks to a lifelong interest in exploring and dismantling oppositions and binaries: DoG/GoD, LoVE/HAtE. While the resulting geometric abstraction is nearly illegible as a text, the image is perhaps best interpreted through the lens of Paik’s repeated insistence that his goal in his art was to humanize technology. In his use of “imagetext,” W. J. t. Mitchell’s term for a pictorial mode in which word and image do not necessarily support one another to synthesize meaning but instead operate dialectically or even in opposition to one another, Paik presents
21. See Christoph Klütsch, “Information Aesthetics and the Stuttgart School,” in Higgins and Kahn, Mainframe Experimentalism, pp. 65–89. 22. As early as 1965, Noll created computer-derived variations of abstract paintings by Bridget riley and Piet Mondrian. Noll’s Bell Labs colleague Kenneth Knowlton, who had made the Poemfield films with VanDerBeek, created Studies in Perception I (1966) with cyberneticist Leon Harmon. the piece was a computer-generated photomosaic—imagery created from smaller images or symbols—of dancer Deborah Hay in the nude. the artists used technology that bridged the analog and the digital, scanning a photograph and converting analog signals to binary code, which was subsequently paired with symbols that produced the same halftone effects seen in the original photo.
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an artwork that, in its interpretation, defies the binary logic of the machine that helped to create it.23 Indeed, language might be considered the key to understanding Etude 1, as it is constituted by language on multiple levels: by the words that constitute the image, and by the code used to compose the work. As is the case with so many of Paik’s works, Etude 1 is inherently dialogic. It rests on the ability of the program- mer to communicate an idea to a machine, which will in turn produce an image to communicate to a viewer. But unlike his other work, which was primarily con- cerned with reconceiving the social sphere by rethinking the use of technology, Paik’s computer art lacked the human trace. At Bell Labs, where he primarily worked alone, his interactions with the computer’s technicians were of a funda- mentally different nature than the collaborations that characterized his previous projects. His primary interlocutor was the computer, and that conversation was unidirectional and faltering. Even the computer’s failure wasn’t as productive as Paik had hoped. In 1968, Paik described the problem of working with computers to a frequent collaborator, filmmaker Jud yalkut: According to my past experience, the best results were achieved through accident and error. As you see, the transistor was discovered by accident. this means that the present computer age was the product of chance to a high degree. therefore, if I give an order to an engineer, and if I don’t go through all the experiments myself (that is, the com- plicated process of trial and error), I will lose all these precious errors, I will only get what I want, and miss all the disappointment and surprises. I have found that the by-product is often more valuable than the first envisioned aim.24 Instead of stumbling upon happy accidents, Paik faced a steep learning curve with regards to programming. rather than producing “precious errors” that would gen- erate a conceptual or aesthetic breakthrough, the laborious process of computer programming was prone to bugs and glitches that failed either to produce intrigu- ing by-products or to realize “the first envisioned aim.” the creative logic of ran- domness and chance that underpinned so much of his work did not easily trans- late to the digital, even if the terms did. Paik’s frustrations arose from the potential he saw in computer art to foster communication and new audiovisual forms, and his inability to realize that potential in that particular technological moment.
23. See W. J. t. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 94. Curator Michael Mansfield has suggested that Etude 1 can be understood as the “desire for a poetic alternative to the ordered structure of the programming lan- guage.” Wall text for Watch This! Revelations in Media Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, April 24–September 7, 2015. 24. Jud yalkut interview with Nam June Paik, Arts Magazine 42, no. 6 (April 1968), p. 51.
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Between Opera and Intermedia In a letter to his rockefeller fund benefactor Norman Lloyd at the end of May 1967, Paik acknowledged his struggle to create meaningful art via the com- puter, but appeared undaunted: I have had several sessions at Bell Labs for electronic opera. Although there are tremendous difficulties owing partially to my own inexperience and partially owing to GE 600 itself (this is a mammoth computer, which arrived very recently to Bell Labs. therefore this computer makes some mysterious mistakes, which even the computer cannot find out), I am con- fident more than ever about the artistic merit of this endeavor. It is my ambition to compose the first computer-opera in music history.25 But what was the “first computer-opera in music history” that Paik envisioned? And what was his motivation for its creation? for Paik, the interplay between music and media was first an outgrowth of his training and, later, a mutually informing relation- ship. opera, for Paik, was the site where media came together to create speculative audiovisual potentialities. Instead of Wagner’s totalizing synthesis of the Gesamtkunstwerk and against Greenberg’s notion of intermedia as the aesthetic recourse to “artistic dishonesty which consists in the attempt to escape from the prob- lems of the medium of one art by taking refuge in the effects of another,”26 Paik saw the combinatory possibilities of opera as a flowering of cross-media expressions. older aesthetic ideas could gain purchase through new technologies and thereby open up the conceptual and technological spaces for new forms and meanings. Paik had articulated his vision a few weeks before his letter to Lloyd, explaining in an essay that the “reformation” of opera would be brought about through the com- position of “a ‘totAL ELECtroNIC oPErA,’ which uses only electronic sound and image as compositional material, and employs only computer technology as the material form, and uses only generators and video tape recorders as the performing characters and instruments, and finally uses only tV as the distribution media.”27 Here are a series of substitutions: media instead of musicians and players, and a broadcast instead of a theatrical presentation. the sole human element of the opera would be the composer, and the work would operate intermedially, bringing together music, video art, and computer art into a new audiovisual assemblage. But this synthe- sis is not necessarily the final product—or even the goal. the ramifications of this opera, Paik argued, would spur further artistic and scientific exploration relating to the development of optical recognition, character recognition, the video telephone,
25. Nam June Paik letter to Norman Lloyd, May 29, 1967. rockefeller Archive Center, Collection SUNy–Stony Brook, Nam June Paik, group 1.2, series 200r, box 423, folder 3648. 26. Clement Greenberg, “towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John o’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 23–38. 27. Draft of “Computer Programming for Visual Arts and Electronic opera,” dated April 18, 1967. Nam June Paik Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, box 14, folder 4.
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medical electronics, and eventually the production of synthetic faces and bodies. Here, “opera” simultaneously operates as a literal descriptor of Paik’s immediate aims and as a metonym for the horizons opened up by the technology being discussed, a way of signaling the radical ambition of his new media art in language that could be understood within a historically circumscribed set of practices, some—but not all—of them computational.
Paik. Electronic opera. 1967. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive.
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By the end of June, Paik had written Porter McCray of the JDr 3rd fund: “It is a pleasure to be able to write you that my electronic opera (film) with computer at Bell Labs at last begins to go well. And now I am confident that I will have artistically responsible work after a while.”28 Here the opera is characterized specifically as a film, but it seems nearly impossible that Digital Experiment, which, among other things, is silent, represents the electronic opera that Paik describes here.29 An étude, of course, is also not an opera. Was there another film he made at Bell Labs? In another 1969 letter to Lloyd, Paik wrote, “the programming for my second and third movie is at least proceeding in my head.”30 Could he have been referring to Etude 1? Paik consistently explored how concepts or practices developed in one media form would find expression in another. Etude 1’s precisely rendered geo- metric form, for example, shares a morphological likeness with a number of painterly circles, from Malevich’s Black Circle (1913) to contemporaneous graphic expressions such as Jasper John’s Target paintings and Kenneth Noland’s Minimalist circle paintings of the late 1950s and early ’60s. Paik had himself recently explored circular shapes in other media, most notably in Electronic Moon #2 (1966), a video-film collaboration with Jud yalkut, and his treated-television installation Moon Is the Oldest TV (1965). though he would become better known for the colorful efflorescence and sensory overload of his multi-channel displays, Paik had also already thought through Conceptualism and Minimalism in his own ways —even if he did not use those exact terms to describe his art. His Zen for Film (1964), for example, is a work of clear film leader that accumulates dirt and scratches over the course of its life as a media object. Paik once told curator John Hanhardt to throw the film on the floor and kick it around before a screening. Projected onto a wall or screen, the image first registers as whiteness or blank- ness—until, that is, one begins to take note of the speckled play of detritus that makes up the film’s “image.” Because Zen for Film changes every time it is project- ed, it carries a material irony in that its mechanical copies are nevertheless unique in their individual markings. Paik’s Zen for TV, on the other hand, was born of contingency. In 1963, one of a dozen television sets was damaged en route to the Galerie Parnass, which host- ed Exhibition of Television, Paik’s first solo show. the resulting image was a single line of light running horizontally across the screen. Paik turned the set on its side, and the line became vertical. Having literally and figuratively “flatlined,” the failed apparatus was resurrected by the artist into a meditation device, transforming the television into an object of contemplation rather than reception and replacing the
28. Nam June Paik, letter to Porter McCray, June 29, 1967. Nam June Paik Estate. 29. Even though the program for the 1973 International Computer Arts festival, held at the Kitchen in New york City, states that on April 10 and 11, Nam June Paik “will show a film he made with Michael Noll, James tenney, of Bell Laboratories,” Noll has no recollection of working on a film with Paik. 30. Nam June Paik letter to Norman Lloyd, february 24, 1969. rockefeller Archive Center, Collection SUNy–Stony Brook, Nam June Paik, group 1.5, series 200r, box 352, folder 2190.
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televisual flow of transmission into a moment frozen in time. Zen for TV not only speaks to Paik’s playful resignation to technical failure as a consequence of work- ing with media but, perhaps more importantly, helps illustrate the way he seized the aesthetic and conceptual opportunities that such failures engendered in order to rethink the normative use and communicative potential of media forms. Zen for TV and Paik’s other treated televisions rethink the ready-made images of Pop, capitalizing on the appearance and familiarity of the apparatus itself over its image, and fuse it with Minimalism’s fascination with the reduction of form. Paik playfully turned household furniture—the television set—into a Minimalist object while rejecting the movement’s familiar solidity in favor of an indetermina- cy based on the chance operations of the piece’s working parts or malfunction. By contrast, Etude 1’s Minimalism was likely largely determined by the complications and restrictions of computation, even as it took other conceptual cues from Minimalist works in other media. With these conceptual commonalities in mind, a further examination of how Etude 1 might be interpreted according to its intermedial aspirations, however unrealized they might have been in the artwork itself, is in order. Consider the function that Etude 1 names in its title: an exercise intended “to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill.”31 It follows, then, that the work might be more fully understood as “practice material” for Paik himself, who con- tinually sought to perfect his ability—his “skill”—to rethink the putative use and function of a particular media form. In point of fact, Paik composed many “études” over the course of his career—as well as many “operas”—in a variety of media forms.32 In Etude Platonique (1961), a work of “action music,” Paik provides a short set of instructions: “Play Beethiven’s [sic] Krutzer [sic] Sonata very sincerely with violin woithput srtring [sic] and piano without hammer.”33 this is music made silent, transformed from
31. Another action composition playfully demonstrates Paik’s interest in combining math with conceptual music. In Hommage à John Cage (1958), a piece for prerecorded tapes and piano, Paik expressed the first movement as a mathematical equation: “first set is <
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an auditory experience into a visual one, as the performers “sincerely” go through the motions of playing the piece. the work is at once an appropriation—the com- position is based on the Kreutzer Sonata—and an iconoclastic intervention. Paik takes the opportunity to suppress the music that audiences would only hear in their minds, the title’s Platonic imaginary surpassing any possible performance of the work.34 Paik’s rethinking of the material basis and function of classical instru- ments is of a piece with his treated television sets, but it also aligns with Etude 1: Etude Platonique No. 1 is programmatic and rule-based, a set of instructions to be executed by actants who are not the author. Like Etude 1, it explores the distinc- tion between interpretation and actualization, a distinction that collapses in digital computing, in which interpretation gives way to inscription and what textual histo- rian randall McLeod refers to as “transformission,” the simultaneous transforma- tion of code into language, symbol, or image, and its transmission of information from the computer to other devices and viewers.35 Perhaps Etude 1’s desired perfection of a skill set—making computational art—was intended as a training exercise toward the ultimate development of the opera that would use computers alongside other new media. In Paik’s “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society,” written in 1968 and published in the inau- gural issue of Radical Software in 1970, he explicitly connected opera to intermedia, saying: “All opera, and all non-European music are mix-media pieces.”36 the year before, Paik had, in fact, completed a “mix-media” opera, but it had nothing to do with computers. In 1969, he was invited by WGBH Boston to partici- pate in the first American television broadcast of video-based art, a program called The Medium Is the Medium. Paik was one of six artists selected, and his contribution was titled Electronic Opera #1. He combined a number of elements, including a cou- ple of nude dancers, a dozen of his prepared televisions, and multiple color video cameras, into a heady audiovisual stew comprising twisted images of richard Nixon, snippets of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the electronically solarized faces of bemused hippies, and Paik’s own somnolent voice, which directed viewers to engage in “Participation tV” by closing their eyes to the colorful chaos onscreen. Paik explained his intentions in intermedial terms, invoking painting, music, tradi- tional television, and even light artist thomas Wilfred’s term “lumia,” in order to describe an art form that would be available in every home, one that, he said, would “simply be there, not intruding on other activities, and will be looked at exactly like a landscape or a beautiful bathing nude of renoir.”37 Here is a vision of a genuinely populist art, one that anticipates the ubiquity of anodyne digital
34. Philip Auslander, “fluxus Art-Amusement,” in Contours of the Theatrical Avant-garde: Performance and Textuality, ed. James Martin Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 119. 35. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIt Press, 2008), p. 218. 36. Nam June Paik, “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society,” Radical Software 1, no. 1 (1970), pp. 7–8. 37. Gene youngblood, Expanded Cinema (Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1970), p. 308.
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geometric abstractions such as screen savers and itunes visualizers. And while they have not yet been afforded the same cultural status as a “beautiful bathing nude of renoir,” the ability to pattern such abstractions is increasingly in the hands of any computer or mobile-phone user. And yet, this is not the “total electronic opera” that Paik had prophesied less than two years prior in his letter to Lloyd. As evinced by Electronic Opera #1, he did not limit himself to the affordances of any particular medium. for Paik, the medi- um is only the medium, not the message. opera was a concept that exceeded expression in any one particular form. the significance of the digital, at least in the case of Etude 1, was only insofar as it marked the possibilities for new interac- tions, both between technologies and between humans and technology. So what happened to the computer, and what are we to make of Paik’s abandonment of the digital? Perhaps, rather than “abandonment,” it was simply a move away from the computer, a strategic distancing that can be found throughout Paik’s artistic prac- tice. there is a way to recuperate Paik’s willingness to move quickly between media, and from one work of art to another, tearing apart and rewiring a piece of one work in order to serve the mechanical or electronic needs of another.
Between Analog and Digital Writing in the early 1990s, Paik recalled his time at Bell Labs in terms of a medium in its infancy: I thought digital technology, at its enfance [sic], was too slow for me. It took three months to run my first computer generated movie BUG frEE. I thought, what if I work for a year for a program and if the result does not please me??? . . . However the good old analogue way the real time thing I could quickly modify, hijack and crush . . . and rise again . . . it was more human.38 Even as he was investigating the possibilities of computational media, Paik had, in fact, been developing an analog tool that could “modify, hijack and crush”: the video synthesizer. He began discussing the project with engineer Shuya Abe as early as 1964, saying that he wanted a piano-style keyboard to edit different sources in real time. the Paik-Abe video synthesizer was an instrument that reconfigured existing parts from other televisual consoles as a seven-channel mixer and colorizer. the synthesizer allowed the user to create images with sev- eral layers of visual information, to abstract those images along the vertical and horizontal axes, and to add bursting, psychedelic color patterns to existing images or empty space.
38. Nam June Paik, “for a Deer,” in Charles Hirsch, Het Binaire Tijdperk: Nieuwe Interacties (Ghent: Ludion, 1992), n.p.
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Paik brought a prototype to the WGBH television lab in 1969, where he was able to finally construct a version of the synthesizer, thanks to a station grant of $10,000.39 Even though the instrument was a sophisticated piece of engineering, Paik’s stated aim was to combat the clarity and sharpness touted as video’s ultimate goals with nonrepresentational imagery informed by a populist outlook. He claimed that he wanted the video synthesizer “to make low fidelity” as a means of pushing back against a media teleology of image sharpness associated with surveil- lance and other forms of hegemonic control. His statements indicate his oscillat- ing technophobia and technophilia, or, as he said elsewhere, “Ironically a huge Machine (WGBH, Boston) helped me to create my antimachine machine.”40 furthermore, the real-time capabilities of the video synthesizer to bend and distort images likely appealed to Paik’s self-described “clumsy” approach to art, one that he said “smears” results in a way that might demonstrate how “extreme sloppiness may show a new aesthetic sensibility.”41 Digital computer programming at that time required patience and meticulous attention to detail. fortrAN, it turns out, was difficult to smear. Bell Labs’ research into ballistic- and anti-ballistic- missile systems was predicated upon harnessing the power of computers—first ana- log, then digital—to more precisely plot and direct missile strikes and intercepts. the programs, which included Nike Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel, and Safeguard, relied on increasingly sophisticated combinations of radar and computation to predict and calibrate launches, flight paths, and impact. that much of the earliest digital computer art also wrestled with randomness and precision, but embraced it as an aesthetic strategy rather than as a problem to be overcome, demonstrates the way technology can be reenvisioned away from its putative uses and positioned toward the kind of literal and figurative counterprogramming favored by Paik. trained engineers, according to Paik, were too adept at achieving desired outcomes, and this precision upset his aleatory process. What was called for in computer art was not the collaboration between artist and engineer but rather a fusing of the two in a single person; the artist must become an engineer. there is a way to imagine the analog video synthesizer, then, as the valuable “by-product,” to recall the quote above, that Paik wanted to achieve with the digital computer. What is of particular relevance to Etude 1, and to the story we tell of the emergence of the digital, is how Paik’s design and use of his “anti-machine machine” resulted from his frustration with the digital, even as the art he made with the video synthe- sizer provided a template for today’s remix culture and glitch art. In other words,
39. taehi Kang, “Nam June Paik: the Early years (1958–1973)” (PhD diss., florida State University, 1988), p. 139. 40. Nam June Paik, “the Video Synthesizer and Beyond,” in The New Television: A Public/Private Art: Essays, Statements, and Videotapes, ed. Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons (New york: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1977), p. 44. 41. Nancy Miller, interview with Nam June Paik, in The Color of Time: Video Sculpture by Nam June Paik (Waltham, MA: rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1984).
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Paik passed into and out of the digital, as did his ideas. His work therefore obstructs any account of a linear progression in favor of recursion: analog to digi- tal to analog; digital to analog; and back to digital again. Paik later claimed that he didn’t incorporate the digital computer into the video synthesizer owing to its enormous size and lack of mobility. the widespread success of computer-assisted and -generated video, however, led him to forecast “a new chain reaction for more diverse designs of computer-video synthesizer.”42 It is thus by tracing conceptual approaches to materiality and then applying them across media—let’s call it an archeology of techniques—that we can better understand the relationships between artists and the technology they employed. our present-day usage of the term digital, especially as it appears in cinema stud- ies, betrays an unwitting teleology that requires rethinking. It is not clear to what degree, if any, Paik was thinking of the difference between analog and digital, during his time at Bell Labs, so much as the differences between working with the computer and working with video. for Paik, the computer was neither intuitive nor fast, and the unpredictability of the computer was not of the same nature as the unpredictability that had generated so many happy accidents in his treated televisions and that would enhance his video work. furthermore, as indicated earlier, Paik did not seem to respond well to his “collaboration” with the computer, a working-together that lacked the kind of responsiveness and feedback he found inspiring. Shortly before starting his work at Bell Labs, Paik produced a lithograph, The First “Snapshots” of Mars (1966), that was his first artwork to engage with the digital.
42. Undated essay by Nam June Paik. Nam June Paik Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, box 15, folder 9.
Bell Laboratories punch card, ca. 1965. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive.
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the image is a hybrid, taking as its source the binary data from the Mariner IV spacecraft, which was used to produce the first photographs of Mars. Here, Paik reverses the process, taking a photograph of the code, thereby drawing viewers’ attention to the issues of translation and representation that cut across the analog and the digital in both directions. the digital code becomes the basis for the image in the analog lithograph, even as the code simultaneously “produces” the photography that is seen elsewhere, and that we can only imagine in our mind’s eye. Paik thus produces a “snapshot” not only of a place but also of a historic cross- roads in technological imaging, where we begin to understand images as literal assemblages of information. But it was not merely Paik’s artwork that engaged the interplay between the analog and digital at this particular historical moment—so did the very technology of computing. take, for example, the SC-4020 plotter, which printed the image we see in Etude 1. A room-sized machine, the plotter was itself a digital-analog hybrid, a lighttight box containing a cathode ray alongside a 35mm microfilm camera. the SC-4020 was designed as a high-speed printer, in which the electron beam was passed through a character mask and the subsequently shaped beam was posi- tioned on the screen while the shutter of the camera remained open. (In later ver- sions of the machine, a 16mm film camera was added.) Quite literally, both televi- sion and cinema were embedded within the computer. As Gene youngblood wrote in Expanded Cinema, “Users of microfilm plotters have found . . . that their movie- producing capability is at least as valuable as their storage-and-retrieval capability.”43 Etude 1 encourages us to see how the analog does not give way to the digital, just as the digital does not unfold along a clear path from the analog; rather, they are inextricably bound together, both materially and conceptually. Not only in terms of its process but also in terms of its ultimate form, Etude 1 complicates the binary between analog and digital. We think of a computer pro- gram as being infinitely executable—indeed, this is the core of concern in debates about free- and open-source software—and yet Etude 1’s code is impossi- ble to execute. the complex assemblage of hardware and software involved in Etude 1’s making, including but not limited to the SC-4020, cannot be recon- structed without a tremendous investment of time and money (not to mention the tracking down of fifty-year-old parts). Unlike most computer programs, which can be run on newer machines through software that emulates earlier compilers and operating systems, Etude 1’s dependence on its hybrid computational plat- form, unique to Bell Labs in the late 1960s, means that its code cannot even be run in emulation. It can, however, be ported, or rewritten, so that the program can be run on another operating system. I worked with Eamon Johnson, a colleague in computer science, to translate Paik’s fortrAN 66 code into JavaScript and HtML5 so that it could be run and viewed online. this new version allows viewers to see both the fractured image produced by the code found in the Etude 1 printout and a fully realized image
43. youngblood, Expanded Cinema, p. 196.
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Eamon Johnson. HTML5 version of Etude 1. 2015.
based on what the completed fortrAN code might have looked like. In addition, the input-based aspect of the HtML version allows users to view the work as a stat- ic image or as an animation. the screenshot of the HtML version of Etude 1 does not adequately repre- sent the time-based nature of image, but it is important to understand that all images produced by computers at that moment were time-based, whether inten- tionally or not. Because of the slow speed of computation, each individual step in an image-generating program was visible to the human eye. In the case of Etude 1, Paik likely watched as each letter was “printed” on the page, morphing from lan- guage to form over a series of hours and sometimes days. Upon viewing the ani- mated digital re-creation, in which the circles unfurl like a flower in bloom, we can begin to understand how Paik might have wanted to capture this program as it was being plotted, thereby producing a moving image. Here is visible evidence of how
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the history of the moving image relates more closely than one might expect to dig- ital image-making as a whole. In the course of reviving Etude 1, however, other aspects of early digital com- puting are lost—the long walks Paik reportedly took between Building 2, where he programmed and key-punched cards, and Building 3, where the computer center was located; the physicality of the machines and the abundant mechanical noises they made; their incredibly slow operation. furthermore, this moving image is no longer Paik’s program; it is Johnson’s. to engage an analogy that Paik might have admired, one might think of this re-creation as akin to the cover version of a song in which both the instrumentation and the form of delivery have changed; piano to keyboard, and vinyl record to MP3. In other words, Etude 1 as it exists in HtML5 is not a copy, it’s a version of an artwork lost to time.
Between Archive and Meaning Nearly a year passed between my discovery of the stack of computer printouts and the re-creation of Etude 1 as a digital animation. In many ways, the delay was a result of the indeterminacies of the artwork itself. Because the Smithsonian American Art Museum is a government institution, all computer code—even the antiquated and not entirely functional code found in Etude 1—is subjected to the same legal restrictions that would be applied to, say, military software. According to procedure, all computer code must be examined and vetted by security before it is disseminated. further complicating the matter was the fact that the code was also classified as art, and artworks—even an artwork like Etude 1 that could not be seen—are subject to another set of restrictions about dissemination, duplication, and use. Paik, whose aesthetics and practice revolved around ideas of media interven- tion and disruption, would be pleased that Etude 1’s status within the archive remains unsettled and continues to stymie the Smithsonian’s archivists and cura- tors. Michael Mansfield, the Smithsonian’s former curator of media art, contem- plated these issues in an email: I do believe that if we have an operational program and license to run it, then it can be seen as an “object” for the collection . . . but does that give us authority to produce its output for exhibition? or more interestingly, for publication and distribution? I suppose the bottom line might be that we have a responsibility to do so, if only to salvage the art historical record.44 for the museum’s curator, questions of permission, dissemination, and even ontol- ogy become part of the conversation. there are rules regarding how and under
44. Email from Michael Mansfield to the author, July 25, 2014.
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what conditions a digital artifact can be seen, and how that positioning is to be understood within a governmental sphere that is also public.45 More than legality or even ontology, these challenges speak to the nature of the archive as a system of power, as well as to the distance between archival objects and their scholarly significance. While the artifacts themselves require care and preservation, in other words, what scholars care about is what they mean. Jacques Derrida famously conceived of the archive in terms of two performative acts: com- mandment and commencement. for Derrida, the archive is the site where the record of history is preserved, and where the telling of history begins. But as an archival document, Etude 1 evokes a more computational interpretation of Derrida’s terms—after all, code is initiated and sustained through a series of com- mandments. A final interpretation of Etude 1, then, might point to the archive as a kind of computational technology in itself, one that must be created, compiled, and then output for interpretation and use. What, then, is the ultimate interpretation or use of Etude 1, and what does it tell us about our role as scholars in the archive? As is the case with early comput- ing, the archive is limited. It cannot tell us what Etude 1 is or how it originally worked. our communication with the object situated in the archive results in a stunted dialogue that resembles a halting translation between speakers of two dif- ferent languages, similar to the difficulties that Paik encountered with the comput- er while composing Etude 1. Pieces are left out, and idiomatic expressions are deployed without explanation; think, for instance, of the call to the tSP subrou- tine in Etude 1’s code, which referred to a software library—an archive of sorts— located on another machine altogether. Dialogues about archives, their contents, and their use, including but not limited to the dialogue prompted by Etude 1, teach us as scholars the necessity of understanding the archive in relation to other archives or repositories that escape inscription—those of individual memory, affect, inspiration, everyday conversations, and influence, to name only a few.46 there has recently been renewed interest in theorizing the archive with respect to new media. Wolfgang Ernst, perhaps the best-known theorist of the archive in the digital age, insists that scholars treat media artifacts as the archive in order to determine how actual mechanisms, codes, and transmissions have regu- lated discourse and shifted our notion of time and, consequently, history. this
45. this exchange brings to mind foucault’s writing on archaeology and the archive, and the ways in which the archive lays out the rules for the system that governs the enunciability and modifica- tion of statements. for foucault, the archive is emblematic of the ways a discursive formation can be recognized as “a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions” (Michel foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [New york: Pantheon Books, 1972], pp. 118–19, 216). 46. Hanna Hölling has recently extended this idea through her discussion of “microarchives,” reservoirs of practical and applied knowledge dispersed over institutions and individuals. See Hanna B. Hölling, Paik’s Virtual Archive: Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), p. 145.
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process, Ernst says, allows us to see “what has remained from the past in the present like archaeological layers, operatively embedded in technologies.”47 And yet, as Etude 1 demonstrates, those actual objects and technologies cannot reveal the totality of their use, nor can they tell us about the people who used them. the arti- fact is only as important as the energies, ideas, and contexts that surround it. the task of the media scholar, then, is not simply to recover the object as it is situated in its particular technological specificity, but also to seek to identify the origin and dispersal of energy that gave rise to its making in the first place—as well as its sub- sequent effects across media. Ideas and practices precede technologies, but then they are rethought in the process of their encounter with technology. Moreover, there remains a question of responsibility to the idea of an “art his- torical record.” What Etude 1 offers, then, is a corrective to the conception of the “historical record” as a reified thing, one that can be made manifest within and rescued by a material archive.48 Instead, Etude 1, and Paik’s work more generally, offer an example of an imaginative and perpetual relational redrawing of media territories that are continually reoriented by whoever (or whatever) is holding the pen at a specific moment in time. And so Paik’s drawing would look different from the Smithsonian’s, which would look different from the SC-4020 plotter’s, which would look different from its digital re-creation. this redrawing accounts not only for media’s diachronic production and use across people and institutions and things, but also within media’s imagined potential as well as their unforeseen effects and limitations—both before and after their technological iterations. to return once again to this essay’s epigraph, the reason we know so little about the present is that it is always waiting to be understood—and reshaped—by our future.
47. Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus the History and Narrative of Media,” in Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 57. 48. Archivists, library scientists, and scholars of the archive have long been aware of the hazards of considering archives as totalities. Kate theimer provides an overview of how archivists deal with gaps in the archive in Well, What Came Next?: Selections from ArchivesNext, 2007–2017 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017); Jeannette A. Bastian examines how postcolonial archives have dealt with collective memory and history in Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (Westport, Ct: Libraries Unlimited, 2003); and Lauren Klein addresses archival silences through a combination of long media history and archival theory in “the Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (December 2013), pp. 661–88.
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