Shigeko Kubota presented her seminal multimedia video work Riverrun—Video Water Poem for the feminist performances of Red, White, Yellow, and Black at The Kitchen in New York in December 1972. This article outlines Kubota’s exploration of the mediated production of identity as a networked, social process through live video synthesis. Drawing from discourses surrounding James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in experimental music and video, Kubota’s distinctive use of live video synthesis and incorporation of sensorial elements in her installation attuned her audience to the multisensory nature of communication as well as the co-constitution of meaning mediated through feedback between artist, audience, and technology. In considering Riverrun as an open work, it is clearer how Kubota resisted singular interpretations, especially readings where the work is reducible to the artist’s identity.

It is early evening during the first performance of the multimedia feminist coalition’s Red, White, Yellow, and Black on 16 December 1972, and the phone rings at the experimental, artist-run space The Kitchen in Soho. Composers Phil Harmonic (Kenneth Werner) and Robert Ashley are on the line. The two musicians are calling impromptu from San Francisco to wish their New York City comrades a Happy Beethoven’s Birthday, although the conversation is intermittent given the cacophonous environment and unreliable connection. There is a large crowd. The concert marks Charlotte Warren, Mary Lucier, Shigeko Kubota, and Cecilia Sandoval’s first presentation together of performance-based works that interrogate the intersection of gender, race, and identity. Werner and Ashley’s unstable connection foreshadows the trouble that the three New York–based women will have reaching Sandoval, who intends to call The Kitchen to perform renditions of Navajo music remotely from the Diné reservation in Chinle, Arizona, but will be thwarted by a storm. Nevertheless, the transcription of Werner’s call can provide us with an image of an otherwise ephemeral event as the phone is passed among coalition members and their collaborators. Alvin Lucier connects the phone line to an amplifier and speakers so that the call from San Francisco can be heard better within the performance space. The phone is passed from Lucier to Charlotte Warren and Mary Lucier, each of whom provide some verbal description of the scene, which included a poetry performance by Warren and two performance-multimedia works: Lucier’s Red Herring Journal: The Boston Strangler Was a Woman (1972), and Kubota’s Riverrun—Video Water Poem (1972), respectively.

While issues of identity are evoked more explicitly in works by her collaborators, Kubota’s attention to the politics of color and technology with respect to the construction of identity are worth revisiting through her use of live-video processing. Riverrun involves fluid, interlinking feedback loops that engulf the audience in an autopoietic, sensorial environment. By emphasizing the interaction of bodies mediated by technology, Kubota diffused the boundary between artist and audience to highlight identity formation as an ongoing process produced through embodied interactions with other bodies, signs, and technological systems. This fluid concept of identity and meaning-making as multifaceted and iterative also inspires a search for alternative modes of using televisual technologies that resist reductive categorization of both the artists and their work. Riverruns subtitle “water poem” also alludes to the aleatory, open nature of the work, with its precedents in iterative Fluxus events and experimental music performances in which Kubota participated before taking up video.

During their phone call, Werner and Ashley were particularly interested in the details of Kubota’s Riverrun:

CW: Well, at the moment, Shigeko’s running off some videotapes of various canals, and Mary has something going on some red herring journey, journal, and I’m going to do something on voices from the Black experience.

RA: Voices in the what?

CW: The Black experience.

RA: Yes.

CW: Quite unique, hm?

RA: Now, Shigeko is running off some videotapes of what?

CW: Would you like to talk to Shigeko? [pause of 37 seconds]

CW: Hi, Ken?

KW Hello.

CW: Shigeko sends her love, but at the moment, she can’t get away from her video…

ML: Shigeko has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten TV monitors. She has a live water fountain.

RA: A live water fountain?

ML: She has orange juice in the water fountain.

RA: Yes?

ML: Ah…

RA: The water fountain is working?

ML: I can’t hear you.

RA: The water fountain is actually fountaining, work…

ML: Wait a minute, I can’t hear you, Bob.

RA: Yes.

ML: It’s a live water fountain with orange juice in it.

RA: Yes, and do people drink out of that?

ML: You can drink from it…

KW: I heard about your lovely orange juice fountain.

SK: Yes, I know, tastes good, too, and looks good, too, on color TV set, you know?

KW: Um-hm. can you describe…

SK: Ken, yes, Ken, my friend would like to talk to you, okay!

KW: Okay, come back on the line… [1]

Kubota did not return to the call, but Werner continued to have lively conversations with Kubota’s other friends and collaborators in the audience: Yasunao Tone, Nam June Paik, and Marcia Mikulak. However, the conversation about Kubota’s work is striking in setting the scene; the women’s focus on technology, interactivity, and identity politics comes to the fore through the brief exchanges. According to the artist, “Riverrun is like a strip of personal time from my long life. It is about my emotional life. It is an autobiography of running time like ‘Riverrun’ of James Joyce” [2]. Kubota only presented Riverrun on two occasions, and extant photographic documentation of the work has yet to be located. The 2023 re-realization of the work for The Kitchen’s 50th-anniversary exhibition Red, White, Yellow, and Black; 1972–1973 (Fig. 1) was made possible through preliminary sketches from the artist’s archive, program materials from The Kitchen, and written documentation by other artists such as Phil Harmonic. Following the first iteration at The Kitchen, the second was presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973. Although Kubota’s 1991 retrospective catalog, Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture, indicates that the work consists of 30 monitors showing five channels of rivers, it is more likely that the presentation at The Kitchen included only ten 12-inch monitors showing footage of five channels of rivers, as indicated by the phone call and Kubota’s preliminary sketches for the event. Accompanying the ten monitors were at least one additional color monitor and three closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, a Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer, an orange juice fountain, and audio excerpts (either recorded or performed aloud) from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The CCTV camera was focused on Kubota’s orange-juice fountain, from which the audience was invited to drink as the artist manipulated their images onscreen in real time.

Fig 1.

Installation view: Red, White, Yellow, and Black: 1972–1973, The Kitchen at Westbeth, New York, 2023. (© Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, 2024, and The Kitchen, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella.)

Fig 1.

Installation view: Red, White, Yellow, and Black: 1972–1973, The Kitchen at Westbeth, New York, 2023. (© Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, 2024, and The Kitchen, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella.)

Close modal

Riverrun is one example of the cross-pollination between experimental music and video, with their mutual interest in Joyce and synthesizers. Based in Tokyo, Kubota was enmeshed in Fluxus and experimental music circles such as Group Ongaku (Group Music), Sonic Arts Union (together with Mary Lucier, Mary Ashley, and Barbara Dilley) [3], and John Cage, Mieko Shiomi, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. Approaching Kubota’s installation during the Red, White, Yellow, and Black concert, one would have likely heard the audio excerpts from Finnegans Wake first before encountering other elements of the sculpture. Kubota’s retrospective catalog documentation of the work does include Wake’s first lines, which draw attention to its cyclical nature: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend us bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” [4]. The text excerpts’ content aside, Kubota’s invocation of Joyce in the audio thematizes ideas about the networked, open work manifested in Riverrun. This was a reference that her audience at The Kitchen would have associated with the cybernetics-informed discourses of theorists including Marshall McLuhan [5] and Umberto Eco [6], as well as artists including Kubota’s sometime close collaborators John Cage and Nam June Paik. For these thinkers, the circulatory, fluvial form of the Wake text represented a feedback loop par excellence, where the last line of the book “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” flows directly back to the first line [7]. As Andrew J. Ball has noted, experimental musicians and artists became interested in Finnegans Wake around this time as an autopoietic, complex system that is “continually . . . making new connections and relations to itself and to the archive ... making meaning unstable, reversible, and infinitely open to new possibilities” [8]. Joyce’s Wake also calls attention to the individual embodied encounter wherein each textual experience is a unique extension of the particular conditions and experiences brought to each reading.

Cages incorporation of chance operations and relinquishing of authorial control had a profound effect on Kubota, and she incorporated his work into her early installations and sculptural pieces frequently, including a performance for the Experimental Television Center (ETC) exhibition at the Everson Museum, followed by Red, White, Yellow, and Black’s performance at The Kitchen in April 1973 [9]. Kubota lived across from Cage in the Gate Hill Cooperative (also known as “The Land”) at Stony Point, NY, from 1967 to 1969. In 1968, the two collaborated on the photobook Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, which included multiple mesostics by Cage. By the mid-1970s, Cage also began to adapt his mesostic practice to a series of projects called Writing Through Finnegans Wake, in which he imposed a system similar to a score to produce poetry based upon chance operations. The conception of the work itself can be considered part of Kubota’s collaborative practice that emerged from her dialogues and collaboration with Cage, who was also captivated by the excessive signification afforded by the form of Joyce’s Wake. This interest in the open work is also evident in Kubota’s interest in Riverrun through her use of the Paik-Abe synthesizer (Fig. 2). Like Joyce, Kubota prompts the audience to engage actively with the work and attunes viewers to the continuous, relational construction of meaning. By making the image processing process transparent and collaborative, the artist enables a dialogue through the specific associations, experiences, and connections that each individual brings to the work through their engagement with the multimedia video performance. Riverrun accentuates the feedback in the production of meaning as both an embodied and a social process.

Fig 2.

Shigeko Kubota and the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer on location at Everson Museum. (Photo: Evangelos Dousmanis. Courtesy of Experimental Television Center.)

Fig 2.

Shigeko Kubota and the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer on location at Everson Museum. (Photo: Evangelos Dousmanis. Courtesy of Experimental Television Center.)

Close modal

Riverrun focuses on the dynamic interplay between artist and audience as well as live and recorded content in a multi-sensory environment. Multilayered, interconnected loops in the environment emphasize complex networks of sensory associations that shape the message. As in Joyce’s emphasis on the aural in addition to the visual, there is a recognition in Riverrun that communication and meaning-making occur not just through the audiovisual but through a haptic “community of signs” [10]. By stimulating additional senses and encouraging physical interaction with the work, Kubota demonstrates the embodied knowledge that informs audiovisual communication. By making the procedure used in video processing visible, she also proposes that television transmission and manipulation contribute to individuals and society’s co-construction. In Riverrun, five channels of single-channel video from Kubota’s diaristic practice feature the artist’s travels on five major waterways: the Rhine, Seine, and Hudson rivers, as well as the Amsterdam and Venice canals. However, drawing on Joyceian themes, the single-channel video underscores the primacy of the artist’s body in mediating her experience. It is an intimate account of individual travel wherein the camera becomes an extension of the artist’s body and captures what we imagine are her views of the rivers. The five videos contain shaky camera work of buildings, people, and objects that remind us of the social and material processes involved in constructing identity as she lugs her Portapak around the world. While Kubota does not specify which audio passages were included in any archival material except her retrospective catalogue, Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture, it is interesting to note the connection between Kubota’s diaristic components and Chapter 8 of the Wake (of which an audio recording by Joyce in 1929 was available) known as the “Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP)” chapter, wherein Anna Livia comes to embody the river Liffey:

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone. Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of Jolin or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the riv-ering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night! [11]

When considered in relation to the installation’s other components, the single-channel river footage also becomes a reference to ALP, gossiping washwomen, and the 500 rivers mentioned in Wake Chapter 8, as well as feminist identification with rivers’ fluidity. Kubota attunes us to the way our identities and reality liquify as they are mediated by the capture and reproduction of our personal lives in ways similar to Joyce’s female characters’ fluid, porous bodies. Just as ALP ebbs and flows, transforming into the river Liffey, and the two women gossiping about her also seep into their environment to fuse with trees and stones, the viewer’s body is also transformed by a television and the technological landscape that constitute one’s identity.

However, the visual backdrop of Kubota’s diaries is only one component of the artwork. Riverruns environment focuses on our embodied interaction with images, sounds, tastes, smells, materials, and other bodies in a constantly evolving system. Kubota’s “live colorized” orange juice fountain formalizes the embodied and social construction of meaning through a network of associations and relations. As in Joyce’s work, no individual associations or experiences of the work are identical. The live CCT V connected to a Paik-Abe synthesizer that was focused on the fountain allowed Kubota to manipulate the images of audience members who were invited to drink in real time. Like the puns, word play, and evocative imagery of the text in Joyce’s Wake, Kubota’s orange juice fountain opens up a multiplicity of meanings as well as references to the various artistic origins of video. In a cheeky reference to the interplay of orality and aurality in the Wake, Kubota alludes to McLu-han and Joyce’s explorations of the multisensory nature of communication. Groups of consuming bodies partaking in orange juice also reference media consumption and “the social practice through which people make themselves” [12] in collaboration with the artist. The smells, tastes, and communal consumption of the orange juice also reference artist George Maciunas [13] and Yoko Ono [14] and allude to the primacy of audience participation prevalent in the Fluxus score. It was Kubota’s distinctive live use of the synthesizer to create “networks of association” between the artist and audience that produced Riverruns aleatory environment and fluid signification.

Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe developed the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer (PAVS) in 1969 and continued to develop its capabilities into the mid-1970s [15]. SONY encoders allowed a compact model that had the same functionality to be introduced [16]. Paik and Abe developed the compact model at the California Institute of the Arts, where both artists worked in the early 1970s. This was the model with which Kubota experimented initially to produce her first video diary with Abe, A Day at the California Institute of Fine Arts (1970–1971), which was later retitled and presented as Self-Portrait and used in her sculpture Video Poem (1975). This footage of Kubota’s portrait is also a record of her first experiments with live video synthesis made in collaboration with Abe, who processed and recorded her performance for her portrait in real time. The movement of her mouth in this work and her choice to finish the piece without audio also referenced the tensions between the visual and auditory with respect to communication. The first commissioned version was produced for the New Television Workshop at the public television station WGBH-TV, Boston. A second was constructed at the ETC for the TV Lab at WNET, New York, while a third was then constructed to remain at ETC for its artist residency program [17]. As with the Rutt/Etra Video synthesizer, Abe and Paik took an open-source approach to the construction of the PAVS, and as a result, other artists duplicated the synthesizer and used it widely.

Sherry Miller Hocking has pointed out that the term synthesizer is something of a misnomer for Paik and Abe’s machine, as it is technically a video processor—a device that alters the video signals—rather than a true synthesizer, which generates signals and does not depend upon external, optically based image sources such as those from cameras [18]. The Paik-Abe synthesizer consisted of a colorizer and mixer, often paired with a scan modulator. The early version available to Kubota in 1972 could attach up to seven black-and-white video inputs (the first cameras were surveillance cameras that Paik obtained) to a standard RGB encoder, a device that transformed camera signals to color. Each respective video input was connected to its own nonlinear amplifier and passed through a matrix into an RGB-to-NTSC color encoder with a corresponding control knob. This meant that one camera corresponded to one color input and aiming the cameras at roughly the same object (Kubota’s orange juice fountain and the images that the loop itself was producing) resulted in additive, layered color combinations [19]. In her description of the synthesizer, Hocking elucidates the way that Paik and Abe achieved similar effects using recorded video signals as inputs, and added three additional inputs (cyan, magenta, and yellow). Further, they developed the synthesizer’s capacity to accept different video signals in each input. A phase shift in the entire system also changed each input’s color value. Hocking likens the process to mixing paint because it is unpredictable and difficult to reproduce [20]. The colorizer component of the Paik-Abe synthesizer enabled artists to produce wider ranges of color images that far exceeded those in commercial broadcast television. Specific knobs that corresponded to each input allowed up to seven inputs to be mixed simultaneously. They were able to adjust the final image’s color and tone from pastel, watercolor-like effects to highly saturated psychedelic colors or high-contrast black and white.

The mixer and keyer component allowed the images from multiple inputs to be superimposed. The mixer combines and compresses two or more inputs so that the resulting signal output is within the acceptable signal amplitude limitation (one volt, peak-to-peak) [21]. Keying, a technique based upon switching, creates a frame within one image where a second image may appear. A threshold voltage level between 0 and 1 is established, and video is eliminated everywhere that the camera signal voltage exceeds the threshold to initiate the key hole. This hole is then filled by a second input signal at an acceptable threshold to fill the hole [22]. Meanwhile, a prepared television scan modulator or raster manipulation unit, also known as the Wobbulator, allowed artists to apply a range of wavelike and swirling effects to video images. Paik’s raster manipulation unit added extra yokes to a conventional black-and-white receiver, where modifications can be broadcast on another monitor or on the Wobbulator monitor itself to display live or prerecorded images generated from other audio, function generators, or synthesizer signals transmitted to the yokes [23].

The synthesizer allowed the artist to manipulate existing footage with images in real time, which Paik debuted on public broadcast television on 1 August 1970 with Video Commune (Beatles Beginning to End) on WBGH and in gallery installations in collaboration with Charlotte Moorman throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The altered signals derived from a real-time feed or recorded television material were fragmented, superimposed, and altered in a collage-like processing approach that can be seen as a continuation of the artist’s connection to Fluxus and Wolf Vostell’s décollage from his earliest forays into television at Wuppertal in 1963. By simply adjusting the synthesizer knobs, Kubota performed a variety of distortions, splices, and layers to the images and color of her audiences at the orange juice fountain.

While Paik was interested in the participatory nature of synthesized video and invited pedestrians passing by the Video Commune broadcast to experiment with the new synthesizer, his experiments differed from Kubota’s with respect to the works relation to the artist and audience. Kubota’s live video synthesis opened up the work to multiplicity, movement, and mediation through interactions between the artist and audience. Unlike in previous television broadcasts by her contemporaries, such as Paik, the artist distorted and colorized images in dialogue with the participants’ actions and interactions. Kubota’s work differs from Paik by centering the relationship between viewers’ bodies in space as well as their technological images. Riverrun was an attempt to engage the audiences beyond the visual through a sensorial environment that included audio, visual, gustatory, olfactory, and haptic input to signal what is absent from televisual communication as well as the promise of what future technology could possibly bring to accompany TV sets. The audience members are not only aware of the artist’s presence but are able to react and interact with her as well as their own images on the screen. Thus, Kubota relinquishes sole authorship of the piece. It is the sounds and gestures from her collaborators’ movements that contribute the indeterminacy of a synthesized work that is in a state of constant flux and formation. Based upon her willingness to eventually step away from the work during a point in the performance to join Phil Harmonic’s phone call, it is also possible that she allowed others to manage the synthesizer, privileging nonhierarchical creation even further. The bodies’ distortion on the monitors eschews alienation to emphasize an unstable self that is reformulated continuously through feedback. The feedback loop between bodies in her installation is underscored by additional feedback from the cameras that also captures the images from the camera and processing system and is enhanced by the artist’s choice of keying and colorizing.

Caroline Kane has outlined the history of early video synthesizers and color, and she sees the novelty of the video synthesizer’s color palette as contributing to utopian claims about the new medium and its democratic nature and transformative potential [24]. In particular, Paik and Abe envisioned their synthesizer as an alternative to psychedelic drugs to achieve a transcendent state of mind. Kubota’s writing in the Japanese art journal Bijutsu Techō demonstrates that she was aware of the connections between video synthesis and the utopian dreams of self-realization that Paik, Eric Siegel, Dan Sandin, and others promoted. While Paik and Abe’s intention in developing synthesized video was to disrupt the electronic signal itself and provide alternatives to corporate mass media communication networks, Kubota’s work makes participant-viewers more aware of the continuous feedback loop between body and media that contributes to the co-construction of the self and wider identity groups in society. Kubota embraced what Paik identified as the Paik-Abe synthesizer’s “sloppy” nature and welcomed the additional indeterminacy that it afforded to the image in real time. She used the synthesizer in River-run to distort image transmissions and destabilize colors, as well as to call attention to the feedback loop between the individual, technology, and society that produces a sense of self. Her playful use of various iterations of color displayed on television also established a tension between the immediate experience of color and that which is displayed on screen. The color orange was also known to produce wild distortion on the synthesizer, which emphasized the embodied experience of the orange juice consumption with its display on the television. The experience of the work is a reminder of the way that color on television was not actually a direct index of reality, but was capable of more expansive signification. Moreover, the overlay of psychedelic colors on the bodies destabilized the four traditional ethnic categories and used the synthesizer to indicate new possibilities and elicit a visceral embodied response to reality’s shifting nature and the role that technology can play in altering that reality.

In the context of the Red, White, Yellow, and Black performances, Riverrun becomes a meditation not just on the nature of communication but also on the construction of identity. Through Kubota’s use of the synthesizer, the installation insists on the unfixed multiplicity of identity as co-constituted between technology, artists, and their audiences. This multifaceted, shifting concept of identity was critical to the project of Red, White, Yellow, and Black, in which the four women sought a platform that would queer and diversify the boy’s club of the avant-garde. This engagement with, and manipulation of, the audiences’ bodies on screen in collaboration with the artist in Kubota’s work ultimately pushes back against the singular reading of an artwork, particularly one in which the work is reducible to the artist’s identity. Considering Joyce’s lines, “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!” [25] Television may replace the telephone, but it too will soon be supplanted. Riverrun thus identifies an approaching juncture where the bodies demand their turn to be recognized among a wider, increasingly immersive community of signs.

1
Kenneth Werner, Transcription of Phone Call to The Kitchen New York, 16 December 1972. The Kitchen, NYC Archive.
2
Mary Jane
Jacob
, ed.,
Shigeko Kubota: Video Sculpture
(
New York
:
American Museum of the Moving Image
;
1991
) pp.
21
23
.
3
“Mary Lucier with Phong Bui,”
The Brooklyn Rail
(
2007
): https://brooklynrail.org/2007/03/art/mary-lucier (accessed 8 March 2024).
4
Jacob [2] p. 23.
5
For a detailed analysis of McLuhans reading of Joyce see
Donald
and
Joan
Theall
,
“Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media.”
Canadian Journal of Communication
14
, No.
4
(
2021
).
6
Umberto
Eco
,
The Open Work
(
Cambridge, MA
:
Harvard Univ. Press
,
1989
).
7
James
Joyce
,
Finnegans Wake
(
New York
:
Viking Press
,
1947
) p.
628
.
8
Andrew J.
Ball
,
“The Dance of the Semantic Phoenix: Autopoietic Systems of Meaning in Finnegans Wake,”
Philosophy and Literature
45
, No.
1
(
2021
) p.
174
.
9
“The Experimental Television Center at the Everson,”
Everson Museum of Art: https://everson.org/from-the-archives/experimental-television-center-at-the-everson/ (accessed 10 March 2024). For the second RWYB concert, Kubota performed
Video Fortune Telling
(
1973
), which included video documentation of John Cage’s
Bird Cage
(
1972
), another aleatory work involving the distribution of 12 tapes by a single performer determined using the I-Ching in a space where the audience and birds are allowed to move freely.
10
John
Cage
,
Writing through Finnegans Wake
(
Tulsa
:
University of Tulsa
,
1978
) p.
51
.
11
James
Joyce
,
Finnegans Wake
(
New York
:
Viking Press
,
1947
) p.
222
. For Joyce’s full recording of pages
213
216
, see “James Joyce Reading Finnegans Wake (w/Subtitles): https://youtu.be/M8kFqiv8Vww?feature=shared (accessed 4 March 2024).
12
Yannis
Hamilakis
,
“The Past as Oral History: Toward an Archaeology of the Senses,”
in
Yannis
Hamilakis
,
Mark
Pluciennik
, and
Sarah
Tarlow
,
Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality
(
New York
:
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
,
2002
) p.
126
.
13
George Maciunas was known for his orange refrigerator full of crates of oranges that he pressed into juice for fresh orange juice fasts. Ken Friedman, “George Maciunas: Architect”: https://fluxusfoundation.com/essays/george-maciunas-architect/.
14
The year following Kubota’s installation, Ono published an event score, “Drink an orange juice laced with sunshine and spring and you’ll see Duchamp” for the exhibition,
Marcel Duchamp,
organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art New York. See
Anne
D’Harnoncourt
and
Kynaston L.
McShine
,
Marcel Duchamp
(
Philadelphia and New York
:
Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art
,
1973
) p.
215
.
15
Kathy
Brew
,
“Sharon Grace: Prescient Presence”
: https://www.sfartistsalumni.org/2021-july-sharon-grace-by-kathy-brew.
16
Of the seven compact editions created 1970–1972, one was used by Paik and Kubota in their shared studio, and another for ETC is still housed at the Experimental TV Center. Of the remaining five units made by students of Paik and Abe, Jim Wiseman’s is now housed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sharon Grace’s is part of the collection of the Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, South Korea while those by Jack Buchan, Ed Williams, and Michael Scroggins have not yet been located. By the time of her 1972 RWYB performance, Kubota and Paik were already living and working together in Westbeth and likely would have used Paik’s version from their shared studio. For the Chicago iteration of the work, Kubota likely used Wiseman’s synthesizer, as he had moved to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after he worked with Paik, Abe, and Kubota at CalArts. For more, see The Internet Archive, Nam June Paik Art Center,
“Paik Abe Synthesizer Restoration Project”
: https://archive.org/details/ETC2840 (accessed 11 March 2024).
17
See
Kathy
High
et al.,
The Emergence of Video Processing Tools Volumen 1: Television Becoming Unglued
(
Bristol
:
Intellect, Limited
,
2014
). p.
XXV
.
18
For further differentiation between the Paik-Abe synthesizer and other early image processing systems, including the Rutt/Etra and Sandin, see High et al. [17].
19
David
Dunn
, ed.,
“Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe,”
in
Pioneers of Electronic Art
(
Linz
:
ARS Electronica
,
1992
)
129
.
20
High et al. [17] pp. 460–461.
21
High et al. [17] p. 452.
22
Kathy
High
et al.,
The Emergence of Video Processing Tools Volume 2
(
Bristol
:
Intellect, Limited
,
2014
) p.
454
.
23
High et al. [22] p. 458.
24
See
Caroline
Kane
,
“Synthetic Color in Video Synthesis,”
in
Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art and Aesthetics after Code
(
Chicago
:
University of Chicago Press
,
2014
) pp.
60
98
.
25
Joyce [7] p. 58.
Joseph
,
Branden Wayne
,
Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture.
First edition (
New York
:
Bloomsbury Academic
,
2016
).
Marks
,
Laura U
,
Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
(
Minneapolis
:
University of Minnesota Press
,
2002
).
McLuhan
,
Eric
,
The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake
(
Toronto
:
University of Toronto Press
,
1997
).
Theall
,
Donald
, and
Theall
,
Joan
, “
Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media
,”
Canadian Journal of Communication
14
, No.
4
(
2021
), pp.
46
66
.