Nam June Paik (1932-2006) is well known as the father of video art. However, this study demonstrates the importance of his earlier interactive art (1961-63), which historically has been overshadowed by his video art. At the climax of his career in interactive art, Paik introduced his two-way art to the public at his first solo exhibition in Wuppertal, West Germany, in 1963. Interactive art itself has been a peripheral area in the history of art, and it has plural pioneers across disciplinary boundaries. Among the several origins of interactive art, Nam June Paik utilized music as a fundamental approach to design the emerging art. Concentrating on Paik’s music theory and practice in West Germany, my research traces the unexplored academic area of his articles about new music in the Korean newspaper Chayushinmun(1958-59). The perspective in his articles toward new music became a significant foundation for his progressive interactive art. Based on his music background, Paik knew how to incorporate musical instruments and devices into his interactive art. Finally, this study will articulate a concrete relationship between Paik’s musical experiences and his interactive art. It argues that his interactive pieces, based on his musical experiences, make him one of the most creative pioneers of interactive art.

Since 1950s, the concept of Kongwu (空無, Emptiness, Nothingness) has migrated into American-European experimental performances, including those of John Cage and Cage-influenced artists who developed Happenings, Fluxus, and intermedia practices. This research-through-practice investigates how the concept of kongwu, an intercultural synthesis of Chinese Daoism and Indian Buddhism, may shape the principles underlying performance making and how performance may, in turn, elucidate Kongwu way of making sense the world. The installation-performance, Poem without Language contemplates Kongwu’s distrust of language by undermining the communicative purpose of writing and responds to Nam June Paik’s approach to media language. The research practice, One Street, Three Persons, Different Narratives, and Different Memories responds to John Cage’s use of silence to revise time and measurement, and exposes the habit, how we experience the ‘present’ as accumulations of the past, and how we order experiences as a linear continuity, which we call ‘time’. My performance, … is Present suggests different definitions of the ‘meditative mind’ and ‘being-here-and-now’ and critiques the relationship between embodiment and identity in Marina Abramović’s construction of ‘suchness’. Three works offer one response to the poetics and politics of intercultural encounters in the context of Chan/Zen in intermedia performance. My research-through-practice sheds light on Kongwu way of experiencing, particularly Kongwu’s attitude towards language, time, and self.

From the mid 20th century into the 21st, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked and broke audio media technologies to produce novel, unique and indeterminate sounds and performances. Artists such as John Cage, Nam June Paik, Milian Kn��k, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, Oval and Otomo Yoshihide pulled apart the technologies of music playback, both the playback devices � phonographs and CD players � and the recorded media � vinyl records and Compact Discs. Based in the sound expansion of the 20th century musical avant garde, this practice connects the interdisciplinary Fluxus movement with late 20th century sound art and experimental electronic music. Cracked and broken media techniques play a significant role in 20th century music and sound, and continue to be productive into the 21st. The primary contribution of this thesis is to provide a novel and detailed historical account of these practices. In addition it considers theoretical approaches to this work. After considering approaches through critiques of recording media, and concepts of noise, this thesis proposes novel theorisations focusing on materiality and the everyday. Ultimately it proposes that these practices can be read as precursors to contemporary new media, as music and sound art cracked open the fixed structures of �old media� technologies for their own creative purposes.

“What is Zen for Film?”, I was asked on the occasion of a preparatory meeting for Revisions, an exhibition to feature Zen for Film (1962–64), Nam June Paik’s “blank” film projection. Despite the many discussions that preceded the meeting, when it came to the question of what the main—and the only—artwork of this exhibition was, we felt as if we’d been left in the dark. Is Zen for Film an idea, a concept—or rather, an event, a performance, or a process? In its original form, Revisions: Zen for Film combined a research project, pedagogy, an exhibition, and an exhibition catalogue. Revised again in the following pages, Revisions is an exercise in slow looking. It questions the ambition of constructing the work with a fixed identity, a product that moves seamlessly from the studio to the world of dissemination, distribution, and display. Instead, Zen for Film will appear once again as an assemblage of people, things, and events, a vibrant materiality destined for a changeable future.