Category: WRITINGS
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Stefanie Manthey: ‘The common arts of Fluxus’
Stefanie Manthey, one of our associated researchers in the Activating Fluxus network, has contributed an article to the first HKB newspaper of 2023. Stefanie’s article, ‘The common arts of Fluxus’, highlights the playful agency of Fluxus objects, performances, and events created in the 1960s-70s, and additionally considers the methodological potential of Fluxus play for contemporary…
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Loss as Creation’s Companion, with Eric Andersen
Our research team recently spoke with Intermedia artist, Eric Andersen, to reflect on the Fluxus network and some questions posed by Intermedia works of the recent historical past. Our conversation broadly touched on the notions of continuity and change, loss and preservation, and crucially, how Intermedia works might endure both through and as a form…
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Artivation #2 : Happy New/Old Year
On the New Year’s eve of 2022, Com&Com performed an “Artivation” of Ken Friedman’s work “In One Year and Out the Other” (1975). The work asks significant questions about time and space, and what do artificial, political and temporal zones mean in a world connected via digital media.
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Artivation #1: Zen for Internet, 2014
Com&Com’s Zen for Internet (2014) references Nam June Paik’s canonical Zen for Film (1962-64). Using the iconography of the internet and computer, the work features an endlessly rotating “loading wheel” on a white background. Typically, the “loading wheel” would be a temporary, in-between state before seeing the fully loaded image. Zen for Internet, however, indefinitely freezes…
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Can We Talk Post-Preservation? A Letter to Nam June Paik
This is an excerpt from an invited lecture delivered on November 15 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea, which addresses the positive value of obsolescence and posits post-preservation as an alternative to traditional conservation not only in Nam June Paik’s work but in artworks in general.
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About Fish, or Toward Radical Affinity in Paik’s Scores
In this essay, I discuss the material intricacies of Liberation Sonata for Fish cretaed by Nam June Paik in 1969 and distributed free of charge to the attendees at Charlotte Moorman’s 7th Annual New York Festival of Avant-Garde, Ward Island, New York. How to understand the work and appreciate decay as a positive value?
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Ecart as Fluxus: Get Inspired and Inspire
In Geneva, Fluxus found fertile ground and gave rise to what is known today as Ecart Group. Founded by John M. Armleder, Claude Rychner, and Patrick Lucchini during an Ecart Happening Festival in 1969 and active until the begging of the 1980s, the group became known predominantly as organizers of events including performance recitals and…
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The Same Lunch? Thinking about Continuity of Fluxus over a Çiğ Köfte wrap
The Institute Materiality in Art and Culture (IMIKUK) at the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB) organizes a lunch for employees and friends at the Buffet Nord, the school’s iconic canteen. Activating Fluxus project team decided to use the June edition of the lunch as an occasion to experiment with enacting one of the classical…
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Unpacking the Score: Notes on the Material Legacy of Intermediality
What does it mean that a work of art is score or notation-based? How does a score-based work challenge the established categories of a self-contained artwork, existent in one defined materiality? And how does it fit within the category of collectable artifacts conceived to last in their intended, authentic and completed states? This is an…
Activating Fluxus 