Paik's Virtual Archive: Time, Change, and Materiality in Media Art

A conservator-turned-historian's argument that Nam June Paik's television works are less objects to be frozen than scores to be re-performed, and that the archive holding them has to change shape accordingly.

Hanna B. Hölling trained and worked as a conservator before taking a doctorate in art history, and the book draws on both careers. Close studies of works including Zen for Film, TV Buddha and Sistine Chapel trace how cathode-ray tubes fail, formats fall out of manufacture and installations are rebuilt, then ask what identity a work retains across those substitutions. Published by the University of California Press in 2017 in 264 pages with colour and black-and-white illustrations, it develops out of Hölling's dissertation on time, changeability and identity in the conservation of Paik's multimedia installations, and sits alongside her earlier Revisions — Zen for Film (Bard Graduate Center, 2015).

Paik (1932–2006) left behind an unusually fragile body of work: hundreds of installations dependent on broadcast equipment, magnetic tape and analogue synthesis, much of it now held in the Nam June Paik Archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which acquired it from the estate in 2009.