Two works -- Conceptual and material aspects of media art -- Musical roots of performed and performative media -- Zen for film -- Changeability and multimedia art -- Time and conservation -- Heterotemporalities -- The material and the immaterial archive -- Archival implications -- Conclusion: the many archai of conservation and curation

In Paik's Virtual Archive, Hanna B. Hölling contemplates the identity of multimedia artworks by reconsidering the role of conservation in our understanding of what the artwork is and how it functions within and beyond a specific historical moment. In Hölling's discussion of works by Nam June Paik (1932-2006), the hugely influential Korean American artist who is considered the progenitor of video art, she explores the relation between the artworks' concept and material, theories of musical performance and performativity, and the Bergsonian concept of duration, as well as the parts these elements play in the conceptualization of multimedia artworks. Hölling combines her astute assessment of artistic technologies with ideas from art theory, philosophy, and aesthetics to probe questions related to materials and materiality, not just in Paik's work but in contemporary art in general. Ultimately, she proposes that the archive-the physical and virtual realm that encompasses all that is known about an artwork-is the foundation for the identity and continuity of every work of art.

This volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present. A rich balance of theoretical and practical discussion brings authority to this collection, which lays the foundations for timely responses to challenges ranging from the concept of the musical work, and the colonial values within Western musical culture, to unsustainable models of orchestral touring. The authors highlight how labour to meet the demands of particular futures for classical music might impact its creation and consumption, presenting case studies to capture the mediating roles of technology and community engagement. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of musicology and the sociology of music, as well as a general audience of practitioners, freelance musicians, music administrators and educators.

Participatory art practices allow members of an audience to actively contribute to the creation of art. Annemarie Kok provides a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of participatory strategies in art in the so-called ›long sixties‹ (starting around 1958 and ending around 1974) in Western Europe. Drawing on extensive archival materials and with the help of the toolbox of the actor-network theory, she maps out the various actors of three case studies of participatory projects by John Dugger and David Medalla, Piotr Kowalski, and telewissen, all of which were part of documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972).

The Explicit Material gathers varied perspectives from the discourses of conservation, curation and humanities disciplines to focus on aspects of heritage transmission and material transitions. The authors observe and explicate the myriad transformations that works of different kinds - manuscripts, archaeological artefacts, video art, installations, performances, film, and built heritage - may undergo: changing contexts, changing matter, changing interpretations and display. Focusing on the vibrant materiality of artworks and artefacts, The Explicit Material puts an emphasis on objects as complex constructs of material relations. By so doing, it announces a shift in sensibilities and understandings of the significance of objects and the materials they are made of, and on the increasingly blurred boundaries between the practices of conservation and curation.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’, it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture.

How do works of art endure over time despite their material and conceptual alteration? How do decay, technological obsolescence and remediation affect what the artwork is and what it may become? How might the observation of change in artworks teach us something about their nature and behavior? How do changeable artworks induce a rethinking of those museological paradigms that assume fixity and stasis? The intellectual aim of this project is to come up with answers to these questions. "Revisions Zen for Film" which is accompanied by an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center on display from September 18, 2015 January 10, 2016 focuses on "Zen for Film" (also known as Fluxfilm no.1), one of the most evocative film works created by the Korean-American artist, Nam June Paik in 1962-64. Rather than being a compilation of objects presented for inspection in support of a curatorial argument, this project zooms into the microcosm of a singular artwork in order to unfold some of the inspirations, transitions, remediations, and residues that have occurred in the course of that artwork s existence. It also seeks to examine how the firsthand awareness of materiality enhances visual knowledge. "Revisions Zen for Film" strives to revise standard notions about an artwork that has undergone a rich history of display. The project reveals what often remains undisclosed an artwork that is a complex sum of its transitions rather than a product of the visual analysis and interpretation of that thing as a static entity. The project undermines any assumption that the artwork is unchanging, and hence subject to a single interpretation. "Zen for Film Revisions" aims to explore the significance of the artwork in its constant transitions, proposing a new art historical narrative. By putting "Zen for Film" on display and inviting an interdisciplinary dialogue, it asks precisely what and when the artwork might be. "

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed. This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.

Online television streaming has radically changed the ways in which programs are produced, disseminated and watched. While the market is largely globalized with some platforms streaming in multiple countries, audiences are fragmented, due to a large number of choices and often solitary viewing. However, streaming gives new life to old series and innovates conventions in genre, narrative and characterization. This edited collection is dedicated to the study of the streaming platforms and the future of television. It includes a plethora of carefully organized and similarly structured chapters in order to provide in-depth yet easily accessible readings of major changes in television. Enriching a growing body of literature on the future of television, essays thoroughly assess the effects new television media have on institutions, audiences and content.