100 200 STRUCTURALIZING THE FLUXUS WAY OF LIFE: THE SOCIAL NETWORK OF FLUXUS Rooni Lee, Graduate School of Culture Technology, Korea STATEMENTS Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. 50 100 Yunkyu Sohn, Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, U.S.A. Number of events (o) Wonjae Lee, Graduate School of Culture Technology, Korea Maximum component size (+) Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 0 0 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 Republic of Korea. Email: <[email protected]>. Year See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/50/1> for supplemental files Fig. 1. Change in the Fluxus’s network prosperity over time. associated with this issue. Circles (o) and cross marks (+) respectively indicate data points for the number of events and maximum component size of annual col- Submitted: 27 November 2015 laboration networks. Each corresponding line for the two variables indicates smoothened trajectories obtained using Robust LOESS. A Abstract vertical solid red line indicates the death year of Maciunas, and the dashed black line indicates the year when the second (final) regime Fluxus is often understood as an avant-garde art movement led by George Maciunas in the 1960s. Such a narrative, however, is limiting probability of each year—obtained by applying Bayesian change- as it overlooks the contribution of other prominent Fluxus artists. point detection method on the smoothened interval values for the This article aims to challenge what is referred to as the Maciunas- number of events—first exceeds 50 percent. (© Yunkyu Sohn) based paradigm in its temporal scope and ideological homogeneity through the adoption of social network analysis. 1,147 participating artists, spanning 1960 through 1996. Con- Artistic creation can be understood as an outcome of a myriad sidered the most thorough chronology currently available, it of interactions between an artist and the world. Embodying not only contains Maciunas-related events, but also consists of this concept, artists who gathered around the term “Fluxus” those that fall outside the strict definition of Fluxus [7]. in the early 1960s incorporated daily interactions into their Using this data, the social network of Fluxus is created works through communications and collaborations. Some based on artists’ co-participation; artists, as vertices in the scholars, however, argue that the study of Fluxus ironically network, are linked in pairs by an edge when appearing in tends to interpret Fluxus only in terms of the practice of the same event or publication. To put it mathematically, this weighted artist-artist network, , for artist-event matrix, , George Maciunas—the “founder” of Fluxus [1]. Despite the Wt Dt indisputable significance of Maciunas, a closer look at the is defined as follows: complex syntheses among Fluxus artists is nonnegligible. In doing so, we employed social network analysis as our methodology, which allowed us to examine complex patterns !"# = ! !"#!"# ! !"# − 1 of interconnections between individuals or groups in a social where Dikt = 1 when i participated in an event k at year t, system not unlike in the field of art history, which also adopted otherwise Dikt = 0. The network is partitioned into cohesive this method [2,3]. In fact, the discourse surrounding Fluxus communities by using the algorithm suggested by Blondel already included the concept of social network. Art historian et al. [8]. This method allows us to observe the patterns of Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt described the social network as one interaction between artists and artists’ roles in the network. of the defining characteristics of Fluxus, and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman and art critic James Lewes even conducted a Revisiting the Temporal Scope of Fluxus preliminary quantitative analysis on Fluxus’s network [4,5]. Following Higgins’s framework, we first attempt to reconsider the Maciunas-based temporal scope of Fluxus, particularly its Maciunas-based Paradigm end. Prescribed by the death of Maciunas, the Maciunas-based As it helps gain a more multidimensional and macroscopic timeframe abruptly marks the end of Fluxus in 1978, dismiss- understanding of Fluxus, social network analysis provides a ing the significance of activities nonaligned with Maciunas [9]. narrative that divorces from what is called the Maciunas-based To examine whether Maciunas’s death had a causal effect paradigm. Coined by art historian Hannah Higgins, the latter on Fluxus’s decline as a whole, we performed a change-point equates Fluxus with Maciunas, as is prevalent on an institu- detection analysis of time trends in Fluxus’s network prosperi- tional level in the United States. Supported by many artists ty. Figure 1 shows the change in network prosperity over time, and art historians, Higgins argues that the Maciunas-based inferred from the number of events (o) and maximum compo- paradigm dismisses significant Fluxus practices that occurred nent size (+). The number of events refers to the total number independently of Maciunas, failing to embrace Fluxus’s ideo- of collaborative events that took place in a given year, and logical and aesthetical multiplicity, thus being inadequate to a component refers to a subset in which any two vertices (art- Fluxus as a whole. ists) are connected directly or indirectly via chains of edges (collaboration ties). Thus, the number of events and/or the Analysis maximum component size can be an indication of a level of This article challenges two major problems of the Maciunas- prosperity or activeness of a network. Our change-point detec- based paradigm: the temporal scope prescribed by the death tion analysis of the number of events detects 1973 and 1972 as of Maciunas and the dismissal of the heterogeneity of Fluxus. the years of a significant change-point for the number of events We deployed an expansive data and a statistically rigorous and the maximum component size respectively. The network methodology based on the mathematics of networks. The data prosperity significantly drops and becomes almost extinct uses a chronology from Ken Friedman’s The Fluxus Reader [6] soon after, as the first (second) regime probability declines comprised of 1,324 Fluxus-related exhibition, performances, from 0.88 (0.12) to 0.35 (0.65) for a number of events and events, and publications along with their locations, dates and 0.84 (0.16) to 0.28 (0.72) for maximum component size [10]. 74 LEONARDO, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 74–75, 2017 doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01351 ©2017 ISAST Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_01351 by guest on 02 October 2021 Our result concludes that all statistically valid points of trend change in Fluxus’s network took place prior to Maciunas’s death. In other words, our analysis indicates statistical insignif- icance of Maciunas’s death for the overall network prosperity STATEMENTS of Fluxus, calling the Maciunas-based timeframe into question. Ideological Heterogeneity of Fluxus Another problem of the Maciunas-based paradigm lies in its failure to grasp Fluxus’s pluralism in its ideologies. It inter- prets Fluxus according to Maciunas’s political and social nar- rative, showing its adherence to the historical avant-garde, conventionally known for its political consensus [11]. In order to prove the conceptual heterogeneity of Fluxus, we examined the network structure and the roles of artists. The most intuitive way to see the pattern of connections is to look at the network diagram. Figure 2 depicts a close-up image of the aggregate network (obtained by aggregating the 37 an- nual networks Wt) of Fluxus artists from 1960 through 1996, in which artists are positioned proximally if they exchange more connections with each other either directly or through common collaborators. In the network, we noted the names of Maciunas Fig 2. The network of Fluxus artists from 1960 through 1996 and other artists, who explicitly expressed ideological disa- depicted using Force-Atlas layout. The vertex size corresponds to the frequency of appearance at events and publications. See greement with Maciunas and/or categorized as “detached” S. Fig. 1 in the supplemental file for the full image and description. or “past” members of Fluxus by Maciunas [12]. Despite their (© Yunkyu Sohn) conceptual discordance with Maciunas, they construct the network as discernibly central members, whereas Maciunas is positioned on the periphery. The size of his vertex also observation of the patterns of interactions in a wide temporal demonstrates a relatively low frequency of event and publica- and geographical scope. Divorcing from the Maciunas-based tion appearance. narrative, our research marks Fluxus as a complex synthesis of We further conducted a vertex role analysis to get a more experience and collaborations and calls further attention to the in-depth outlook on the network structure. The vertex roles roles of artists previously not associated with Fluxus. are examined based on two measures: within-community strength z-score and participation coefficient [13]. First, an References and Notes Research for this project was supported by the National Research Foundation of artist’s z-score (zi) is an indication of how centrally positioned and well-connected he or she is to other artists within his or Korea (NRF-2013S1A3A2055285; NRF-2012M3C4A7033342). 1. Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of her group (community). A vertex with a zi of 2.5 is defined as a community hub, occupying a central position in the group. California, 2002). On one hand, Maciunas is ranked seventeenth with the z-score 2. Maximilian Schich, Chaoming Song, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Alexander Mirsky, Mauro Martino, Albert-László Barabási, and Dirk Helbing, “A Network of 4.47, which makes him a community hub [14]. On the other Framework of Cultural History,” Science 345, No. 6196, pp. 558–562 (2014). hand, artists with ideologies conflicting with Maciunas are 3.