Category: WRITINGS
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Public Panel Reflections: Long Live Fluxus!
This panel brought together experts from a variety of Fluxus archives based to discuss the notion of activation within the archival space. Amongst the main questions posed were: How might Fluxus be activated from the archive? What actually is a Fluxus archive, and how do archival infrastructures impact the afterlife of Fluxus? What might activation…
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Fluxus Study Day #1. The Fondazione Bonotto: A Visual Essay
Our extended Activating Fluxus network was recently hosted by the Fondazione Bonotto in Molvena, Italy, for our very first Fluxus Study Day and public panel “Activating Fluxus: In and out of the Archive,” the latter jointly organized by our project team and the Fondazione. This post, the first of two, is a visual essay reflecting…
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On Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch at Forschungsapéro 2023
On one of the late spring evenings of May 2023, a sense of anticipation filled the air as we gathered around a longish table in a spacious room at Progr, an elegant auditorium and artistic center in Bern. The room was abuzz with people, their curious eyes fixed on our activities. We were part of…
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Sally Kawamura: Towards Infinity: Mieko Shiomi’s “Transmedia”
Associated researcher Sally Kawamura explores the idea of “transmedia,” a term first coined by artist Mieko Shiomi in 2012. This concept refers to the process of creating new works or responses to existing pieces or concepts. Shiomi’s ideas resonate with other artistic attempts to build upon pre-existing work, particularly within Fluxus.
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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?
Activating Fluxus 