Nam June Paik’s Etude and the Indeterminate Origins of Digital Media Art

This talk 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, analog and digital, and film and music—this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of the nature of the archive, cinema’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media.