Media Recursions: Nam June Paik’s Digital Art
Professor Gregory Zinman, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Lecture, April 14, 2pm, Wells B243
This paper 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—between image and code, opera and intermedia, analog and digital, and archive and meaning—this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of media art’s digital past, film’s place in computational media, and the nature of the archive.
Gregory Zinman is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently finishing his first book, Handmade: The Moving Image Without Photography, and is editing, with John Hanhardt, Nam June Paik: Selected Writings, forthcoming from the MIT Press. He serves as a curatorial consultant to the Yale University Art Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and has programmed film and media art at the Film-makers’ Co-op, the Museum of the Moving Image, Asia Society New York, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, as well as a number of venues in Atlanta.
Professor Zinman is also curating the program, “Space in the Brain,” at the Broad Underground screening series on Saturday, April 15, 4pm at the Abrams Planetarium.