1. art and entertainment
2. visual art and design
3. art museums and galleries

Choco Drink TV
Kota Ezawa
2012
mixed media
Kota Ezawa made this playful mechanical television in homage to his one-time teacher, Nam June Paik,
and presented it during the museum’s 2012 celebration of Paik’s birthday. Turning the wooden
spoons changes the “channel,” one scene giving way to the next. It is a modest gesture invoking Nam
June Paik’s presence and influence on television, on Ezawa himself, and on contemporary art.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist 2013.35
Art Make-Up
Bruce Nauman
1967-68
single-channel video, 16mm film on video, color, sound; 40:00 minutes
Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential pioneers of film, video, and media art. Art Make-up,
Nauman’s first “film environment,” examines the physical exertion, anxieties, and transformations of
art making. The artist sits in front of the camera and proceeds to paint his body in white, pink, green,
and black makeup. The moving image is synchronized and projected on four screens intended to
surround the viewer and complicate the relationship between the performance and the spectator,
investing the viewer with the anxiety of transformation.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company
2008.21.3a--d
The Fall into Paradise
Bill Viola
2005
single-channel video installation, high definition, color, sound; 9:58 minutes
Performers: John Hay, Sarah Steben
Bill Viola explores themes of transformation and transcendence from emotional, philosophical, and
spiritual perspectives. In The Fall into Paradise, a single pixel appears in the void, then slowly expands
to reveal two figures entwined in an embrace. Just at the instant the figures become clear, they explode
through the surface in a spectacular display of color and light. The performers’ experience represents
a moment of transcendental and spiritual breakthrough, tracing Viola’s continuing search for
consciousness and empirical knowledge through art.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2012.56
Painted Projection
Buky Schwartz
1977
closed-circuit video installation
Painted Projection is a playful, closed-circuit television (CCTV) installation. Abstract geometric shapes
are painted directly onto the floor and wall, confusing the televisual space and distorting the
architectural perspective. The artist’s intent is resolved as the camera presents a perfect cube on the
monitor. Schwarz subverts the authority of the camera through the simplest of painted graffiti. The
viewer’s participation---standing inside the box, aware or not---critically completes the spatial illusion.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2014.10.1
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Two Cubes on a Striped Surface
Hans Breder
1964
plastic, stainless steel, and aluminum
With every movement of the observer’s body, the spatial impression of Two Cubes on a Striped Surface
changes. Hans Breder’s use of minimal geometric forms and mirrored, reflective surfaces unites virtual
and real space and, in his words, “breaks down the barrier between the real and the illusory.” The
work presents a continuously shifting image that touches on the importance of perspective and the
body when we view art and, more broadly, the world around us.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. Barbara Welch Breder 2014.41a--d
Quanta
Hans Breder
1967
single-channel video, color, silent; 3:46 minutes
Breder’s single-channel videotape Quanta expands the dimensions of height, width, and depth
explored in his earlier work to include the added dimension of duration. A modest stop-motion
animation, Quanta shifts bodies in time and space; real and illusory dimensions are compounded yet
again through the spatial collage of the television set, uniting interdisciplinary artistic practices that
Breder calls “intermedia.”
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist 2013.50.4
T.V. Clock
Nam June Paik
1963/1981
eleven fixed-image televisions
Nam June Paik’s TV Clock transforms time into a sculptural electronic object. In this seminal work of
art, Paik rendered the hours through a single line drawn in electric light on a modified TV screen.
Paik’s minimal electronic mark, which is tethered to the sophisticated and global apparatus of TV,
unleashes a host of ideas about our shared experience of time, through technology, space, cultures, and
connectivity. Nam June Paik exhibited many versions of TV Clock. This early rendition of the artwork
has been restored from the Nam June Paik Archive.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive; Gift of the Nam June Paik Estate
NJP.1.TV.42.1--.11
Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come On Petunia)
Gary Hill
1984
single-channel video, color, sound; 33:09 minutes
Gary Hill’s first scripted screenplay, Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come On Petunia), is a complex
theatrical essay on the ordering principles of language. The script is adapted from Gregory Bateson's
book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Hill recorded portions of the video with the performers speaking the
text phonetically backward and similarly, performing their actions backward. These sequences are
played from beginning to end in reverse, betraying an uncanny physical movement and muddled
speech that is nearly intelligible, and revealing the inverted logic of the video.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company
2007.33.15
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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LYAM 3D
Kota Ezawa
2008
digital animation, color, silent; 4:00 minutes
Kota Ezawa samples imagery from a broad range of sources, including news media, popular cinema,
and the history of art, which he then distills into flattened landscapes of pure form. LYAM 3D refigures
Alain Resnais's French New Wave film, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), released
in 1961. Here, the animated actors are divorced from texture and the camera’s presence is replaced by
Ezawa’s hand, rendering only the essential shapes. Resnais’s cinematic masterpiece is stripped clean of any
romance or narrative arc, but Ezawa adds the American “oomph of 3D,” updating it for a contemporary
audience.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible through Deaccession Funds 2010.23
Gun Play
Rico Gatson
2001
single-channel video, color, sound; 2:35 minutes
Rico Gatson appropriates the familiar imagery of pop-culture cinema in his 2001 video, Gunplay. It is
an arresting collage that mixes sequences from Jack Hill’s 1974 blaxploitation film Foxy Brown and
Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, from 1966. Here, Gatson composes a kaleidoscope of cult references
and Hollywood clichés that confront the mesmerizing power of mainstream cinema.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2015.7.1
Yuri’s Office
Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation
2009-10
movie set installation
At once an artwork and an artifact from the Rufus Corporation’s larger whiteonwhite project, Yuri’s
Office is a film set recreating the office of Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey to outer space. A
centerpiece that references the making of a film, this set was constructed from Sussman’s photograph
taken of the original. Its fabrication betrays the fictions of cinema by expanding geographic and
conceptual ambitions portrayed in the movie’s story. The office’s preserved status (its placement in a
museum in Star City, Russia, as well as its recreation here) evokes a desire to freeze time in a space
that was once occupied by this notable figure. In effect, Yuri’s Office is a monument and a stage that
inspires both pragmatism and poetry.
Courtesy of the artist
About The whiteonwhite Project
In 2009, filmmaker Eve Sussman and her film collective, Rufus Corporation, embarked on “an
expedition to unravel utopian promise.” Sussman titled the project after Kasimir Malevich’s seminal
painting, White on White (1918), invoking the Russian painter’s utopian reflections on transcendence.
The resulting production follows the narrative arc of utopian idealism---from Malevich’s Suprematist
manifestos through Yuri Gagarin’s arrival in space---two moments that defined humanity, each
tethered by anticipation, progress, and fulfillment, yet now abandoned to the annals of history.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir
Eve Sussman
2010-11
two-channel digital cinema installation
The core of the Rufus Corporation’s “expedition to unravel utopian promise” would become this digital
cinema installation whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir. It is an experimental film composed from two
screens: one reflecting the “movie” and one depicting the computer program behind the movie. In
making the film, the collective traveled between Moscow and the Caspian Sea, compiling a cinematic
record of the landscape, environment, and architecture while filming in local cafés, apartment blocks,
and industrial plants. An extensive audio/visual library comprised of 3,000 film clips, 80 voice-overs,
and 150 pieces of music forms the basis of an improvised film noir.
A non-linear narrative unfolds through the observations and surveillance of the central protagonist,
Holz, who finds himself living in a dystopian futuropolis. Further provoking cinematic form, the film’s
presentation is edited in real time by a custom-programmed computer that Sussman has labeled the
“serendipity machine.” The artwork is driven by key words that appear on the secondary screen and
delivers a changing narrative that runs indefinitely, never playing the same sequence twice. The
unexpected juxtapositions of voice, image, and sound create a sense of unyielding suspense that
continuously divorces the protagonist from the full course of his own narrative.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2014.43
Contrathemis
Dwinell Grant
1941
16mm film, color, silent; 8:00 minutes
Dwinell Grant’s pioneering film Contrathemis is a stop-motion animation made from more than 4,000
colored-pencil drawings and paper collages that were individually photographed and sequenced on
16mm film. Geometric shapes swim across pulsating hues of rich color in a stylistic progression Grant
labeled “organized field.” A dynamic lighting sequence was constructed using automobile headlights
covered with colored gels to backlight each frame. Eager to break free from the margins of the page,
Grant drove static compositions into motion, celebrating the infinite potential of shape, color, and
time.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost 1986.92.36
9/23/69: Experiment with David Atwood
Nam June Paik
1969
single-channel video, color, sound; 80:00 minutes
9/23/69: Experiment with David Atwood was created while Nam June Paik was artist-in-residence at
WGBH, a public-television station in Boston. The title refers to the date Paik orchestrated this
spontaneous performance in which he composed a myriad of televisual and musical sources into a
stunning electronic display. The production was broadcast live as Paik collaborated with engineers,
musicians, video technicians and fellow artists to mix television signals with sound, fusing electronic
abstractions of moving color and imagery that had never before been seen or experienced in the
medium of television.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive;
Gift of the Nam June Paik Estate NJP.1.VID.1
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Golf
Raphael Montañez Ortiz
1957
16mm film, black and white, sound; 1:59 minutes
Raphael Montañez Ortiz appropriates 16mm “newsreel” footage describing, as the title indicates, the
game of golf. Whereas golfers are encouraged to sink a small white ball into a hole, the artist
intervenes in the game, punching large holes directly into the film stock. The result presents bold,
white circular voids in the image and asserts the artist’s presence.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2011.30.1
Monster Movie
Takeshi Murata
2005
single-channel video, color, sound; 4:19 minutes
Monster Movie is a mesmerizing digital video projection with an aggressive audio track. Murata
sourced video from the 1981 B movie, Caveman and, beginning with a process called datamoshing,
mixed the video’s compression into a kind of digital liquid. Much as Ortiz punched holes in 16mm film
stock, Murata punched virtual holes through the compressed video file, disrupting the video’s logic
and revealing a monster beneath the surface of the image.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2013.71
Cross Reference
Bill Beirne
1976
two-channel video installation, color, sound; 32:00 minutes
Cross Reference, which directly confronts systems of surveillance and power, was produced as a live
performance simultaneously broadcast on two public-access television stations in New York City.
Beirne directed two camera operators to film the street from separate vantage points in their
respective studios. They chose their subjects at will and communicated with one another by walkietalkie (Channel C and Channel D). As the cameramen described the physical appearances of
unknowing passers-by, Beirne located them on the street and assumed their personal attributes in an
attempt to infiltrate the system. His street performance echoes the subjective nature of surveillance
and its limitations in cataloguing either public space or an individual’s presence in it.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Gene Davis Memorial Fund 2015.6.2
Cross Reference (storyboards)
Bill Beirne
1976
charcoal and colored pencil on paper
The live performance and complex, multi-channel broadcast production for Cross Reference required a
great deal of advance planning. The artist’s hand-drawn storyboards, created before the performance,
organized viewing angles between locations and prescribed actions for the camera operators. The
drawings convey both the logic and concept for a live production while providing some insight into the
resulting work of art.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Gene Davis Memorial Fund
2015.6.5a--e
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Grand Central Station #2
Jim Campbell
2009
custom electronics, LEDs, and mounted photo-transparency
Jim Campbell’s Grand Central Station #2 consists of a grid of LED lights that illuminate an image of the
main terminal at Grand Central Station in New York City. The point of view, hovering above the marble
floor as shadows pass through the terminal, mimics that of contemporary surveillance systems. The
artwork functions as a layered schematic diagram of the structures of human psychology and memory,
and challenges technology’s ability to accurately represent the human experience.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum
2010.22a--c
Living Inside
1989
single-channel video, black and white, sound; 5:10 minutes
Me and Rubyfruit
1989
single-channel video, black and white, sound; 5:30 minutes
If Every Girl Had a Diary
1989
Sadie Benning
single-channel video, black and white, sound; 8:00 minutes
Sadie Benning recorded personal video diaries in the late 1980s and early 1990s while she was in high
school. Using a toy PixelVision camera made by Fisher Price, Benning speaks to the machine as if she
could make it understand. Her camera’s intimate field of view contrasts that of a cold and impersonal
surveillance system, as she describes her feelings of alienation and the experience of self-discovery.
These are prescient works that portend YouTube and youthful digital culture with an extraordinary
eloquence.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchases through the Blanche Koffler Acquisition Fund
2015.8.4, .5, .2
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Martha Rosler
1975
single-channel video, black and white, sound; 6:09 minutes
In Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler performs for the camera as a culinary hostess introducing
various kitchen utensils. She progresses through the alphabet, demonstrating a different cooking
utensil for each letter. Her physical interaction with the objects is unapologetically sudden and violent.
Each display is a thinly veiled gesture of frustration with the language of domesticity as the kitchen
becomes grounds for resistance and change. Rosler describes the performance by saying that “as she
speaks, she names her own oppression,” identifying a loaded, ordered language as an object to be
interrogated. Created in 1975, Semiotics of the Kitchen remains one of the most influential works of
both feminist and conceptual art.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company
2008.21.7
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Teaching a Plant the Alphabet
John Baldessari
1972
single-channel video, black and white, sound; 18:40 minutes
One of John Baldessari’s primary interests as a conceptual artist is to explore how images acquire
meaning, and therefore probing the boundaries of how we define art. In Teaching a Plant the Alphabet,
the artist patiently gives an elementary lesson in the English alphabet to a potted banana plant. The
absurdist exercise, with its futile, monotonous repetition and deadpan delivery, confronts our
expectations of what art is supposed to look like. This video is also Baldessari’s response to the
popularity of the academic disciplines of linguistics and semiotics that influenced many conceptual
artists during the 1970s.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company
2007.33.7
Text Rain
Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv
1999
interactive digital installation
Text Rain is a ground breaking interactive artwork that explores the correspondence between
language and the body. The projection activates a living space of simultaneous reflection and
activation as participants engage with animated type from the poem “Talk, You” by Evan Zimroth.
Jumbling the language of visual representation with the dynamics of spectatorship and interactivity,
Text Rain draws attention to the symbolic codes embedded in our machines, further compounding the
spaces we inhabit both virtually and physically. Reading the text places viewers in unusual positions
and creates figures of speech that locate the sensation of a work of art within one’s physical
experience.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum
2015.14
Documentation of Selected Works 1971--74
Chris Burden
1971--75
video, color and black and white, sound; 34:38 minutes
The relative domestic peace of the 1950s was shattered in the wake of the Watts Riots and the
escalation of the Vietnam War, as national television broadcast protests, rage, wounded veterans, and
body bags directly into American living rooms. Chris Burden's radical “performance pieces” of the
early 1970s were provocative and monstrously raw physical responses to the social and political
moment. He placed himself in ”absolute” danger of incarceration, physical torment, or possibly death
by isolating himself in solitary confinement, lying down in traffic, encircling himself with fire, allowing
himself to be shot, dragging himself across shards of glass, and attempting to breath water. These
actions were performed live, in front of spectator-participants, but they were also captured through
still photographs, video, and film, the primary languages of mass media. Documentation of Selected
Works 1971--74 compiles Burden’s deliberate struggles to repossess his own body in relation to
exercises of power and self-determination.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company
2007.33.11
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Griot's Trilogy
Ulysses Jenkins
1989--91
single-channel video, color, sound; 36:20 min
In West African tradition, a griot is a traveling poet and storyteller who carries the oral histories and
genealogy of his people. Ulysses Jenkins composed Griot’s Trilogy as three meditations on the AfricanAmerican experience that seek to repossess a history and culture. The first video essay, “SelfDivination,” explores identity and self-worth through the lens of the black experience. The second
essay, “Mutual Native Duplex,” aligns Native and African-American experiences to celebrate the
potential of an emerging "neo-American” cultural model. The trilogy concludes with “The Nomadics,”
which charts a shared cultural and ancestral heritage through the migration of Africans across the
Americas, the Middle East, Asia, and into the South Pacific and offers people of color a sense of
geographic and communal identity.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, NEA Artists Archive; Transfer from the National Endowment for the
Arts; digitally remastered exhibition copy courtesy of the artist NEAVID.2903.95.01
Halo 2600
Ed Fries
2010
video game for Atari VCS, color, sound
The engineer, programmer, and gamer Ed Fries was inspired by the idea that severe limitations
precede creativity. Using the popular video game HALO as a departure point, Fries retooled the game’s
mechanics and narrative to play on an Atari VCS, the vintage 1977 gaming console. HALO2600 contorts
the boundaries of technological constraint by using the deprecated programming language of an
obsolete system and rendering a contemporary video game in conversation with its techno-linguistic
past. This “home brew” game cartridge---affectionately referred to among gamers as a “de-make”--acts as an update for a classic system that at once highlights video gaming’s prescience, obsolescence,
and creative incitement.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mike Mika and Ed Fries 2013.73
ETUDE 1
Nam June Paik
1967--68
computer printout with additions in ink
ETUDE 1
Nam June Paik
1967-68
FORTRAN computer program on continuous-feed paper
Nam June Paik Archive; Gift to the Nam June Paik Archive; Gift of the Nam
June Paik Estate NJP.1.PAPERS.25
In 1966, Paik was introduced to computer programming when he was invited to be an artist in
residence at Bell Labs, the renowned experimental research venture between the Western Electric
Company and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Paik’s ambition was to
compose the first “computer opera in music history.” From early 1967 through 1968, Paik’s research
produced images, video, computer punch cards, negatives, and continuous-feed printouts written in a
programming language called FORTRAN. In ETUDE 1, Paik composed four concentric, intersecting
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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circles displaying the somewhat irreverent text LOVE, HATE, GOD, DOG, each repeating word
rendering its own diameter.
This work corresponds with his desire for a poetic alternative to the ordered structure of the
programming language itself. Emotional binaries such as “love” and “hate,” or disparate phonetic
games like “god”’ and “dog,” while they may be Fluxus absurdities, also input a human-ness to the
machine. Though Paik would abandon FORTRAN shortly after these works were realized, his interest
in the human natures of technology remained key threads throughout his artistic practice.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Nam June Paik Archive; Gift to the Nam June Paik Archive; Gift of the Nam
June Paik Estate NJP.1.PAPERS.26
Photoshop CS: 50 by 50 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Blue, Yellow, Blue”,
mousedown y=2000 x=1500, mouseup y=9350 x=1650; tool “Wand”, select y=5000, x=2000,
tolerance=32, contiguous= off; default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=8050 x=8700,
mouseup y=3600 x=5050
Cory Arcangel
2013
chromogenic print
In this image from the artist’s series of Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations, Cory Arcangel toys with
the novelties of consumer technology and how fantastically they age. The title of this unique print lists
the step-by-step instructions for its creation using the popular computer software program,
Photoshop. When brand new, consumer electronics generally include a set of basic instructions. Their
application is pre-determined. Arcangel, too, provides a finite number of step-by-step instructions, in
this case for making a work of contemporary art. The instructions themselves are rendered as a
conceptual element. His demonstration folds easily accessible consumer technologies into the often
inaccessible nature of contemporary art, both of which progress toward an eventual clumsiness and
obsolescence.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2014.8
Violin Power
Steina Vasulka
1970--78
single-channel video, black and white, sound; 10:04 minutes
Steina, who was trained as a classical violinist, describes this work as "a demo tape on how to play
video on the violin." Violin Power weaves the audio signal into the video image, linking sight with
sound and outlining a new electronic aural-imaging “syntax.” The video ties the two senses together in
a single signal and demonstrates natural assumptions about what is seen and what is simultaneously
heard. As the tape progresses through three performances, audio wave forms produced by the musical
instrument begin to affect the video image and eventually, become the video generator itself.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company
2008.21.12
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Record Players
Christian Marclay
1985
video, color, sound; 3:50 minutes
Christian Marclay is an interdisciplinary visual artist, musician, composer, and “turntablist.” In Record
Players, Marclay videotaped a group of performers instructed to “play” vinyl records by hand,
scratching, rubbing, shaking, breaking and finally stomping them to pieces. The result shamelessly
fashions sound through physical destruction. Marclay’s reverberating visual and acoustic performance
both celebrates and critiques music’s role in contemporary culture.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, NEA Artists Archive; Transfer from the National Endowment for the
Arts; digitally remastered exhibition copy courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London, UK
NEAVID.4492.85.01
Yellow Sound
Igor Kopystiansky and Svetlana Kopystiansky
2005
single-channel video, black and white, silent; 4:33 minutes
Svetlana and Igor Kopystiansky titled this work after Wassily Kandinsky’s theater production of the
same name, linking it to a larger history of experimental art forms and invoking the significance of
musical performance to the visual arts. The running time of four minutes and thirty-three seconds
references the radical composition 4’33” (1952), in which the avant-garde composer John Cage
approached a piano, lifted the lid, and sat motionless in silence for the full duration, allowing ambient
sounds in the performance hall to determine the listening experience. Here, Yellow Sound displays
found film of a stylus silently playing a record on a turntable. Its rotation is almost imperceptible. The
only instance of change is the intermittent appearance and disappearance of imperfections layered on
the surface of the original film. Extending Cage’s provocative suggestion, chance is visually rendered
here through light and dust.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of an anonymous donor 2009.43
Cloud Music
Robert Watts, David Behrman and Bob Diamond
1974--79
hybrid sound/video installation with custom electronics
Cloud Music is a synthesis of sound and image, the result of a collaboration between three artists:
Robert Watts, David Berhman, and Bob Diamond. A closed-circuit video camera is directed through a
window to the sky. A video analyzer and audio synthesizer read the image on a TV monitor,
transforming the movement of clouds and changing light into an original score of music that
transports the natural environment into the gallery for a new and immersive audio-visual experience.
The result is an electronic score that fills the space with subtly shifting harmonics. Visitors listen to
video as a nature-driven event unfolding in real-time. As sound is composed from light, Cloud Music is
at once a conceptual homage to “chance” and a technological triumph that inspires a new means to
experience the world.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment 2013.64
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Cloud Music (auxiliary and archival materials)
Robert Watts, David Behrman and Bob Diamond about 1974--79
documents, schematics, and vintage materials from historic installations
Cloud Music is the result of a combined effort among three important artists: Robert Watts, David
Berhman, and Bob Diamond. Introduced to one another by fellow WNET artist-in-residence Nam June
Paik, the three worked collaboratively to create a landmark work in the history of contemporary art
and music. An enthusiastic champion of non-traditional materials, Robert Watts was the conceptual
instigator for Cloud Music and a leading artist within Fluxus. David Behrman is an internationally
recognized and influential experimental music composer. Bob Diamond is an electronics engineer and
mathematician turned artist who had been employed by NASA to work on Saturn booster rockets (so
his work is also represented at the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall).
Together, Watts, Behrman, and Diamond invented new electronic devices that could actively weave
visual, tactile, and aural sensations with movement, time, and space. Their progress is charted through
personal correspondence over many years, from frenetic electronic experimentations into precision
technical configurations, revealing the evolution of a radical concept for “cloud-driven music” through
which the passage of clouds offers a new experience for the sky-gazer.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H.
Denghausen Endowment TL.25.2013.1--.63
Flower
Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago
2007
video game for Sony PS3, color, sound
The videogame Flower places participants in the role of the wind as they traverse a vast landscape and
touch their surroundings. Choice and physical motion in play affect both color and sound as the
environment responds in kind. Creators Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago render an unexplored land
for the player to feel and transform. Flower was conceived as an “interactive poem” in response to
tensions between urban and rural space, encouraging participants to weave aural, visual, and tactile
sensations into an emotional arc, rather than a narrative one.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of thatgamecompany 2013.70
Smithsonian American Art Museum
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