Zen for Internet was conceived by the artists Marcus Gossolt (born 1969) and Johannes M. Hedinger (born 1971), who form the collective Com&Com. Using the iconography of the Internet and a digital interface, the work features an endlessly rotating “loading wheel” on a white background. Typically, the loading wheel is a temporary in-between state that occurs before the fully loaded digital image appears on a screen. Zen for Internet, however, indefinitely freezes the in-between-ness; the final image never arrives. The artists conceived of this work in a variety of media: as a website (www.zen-net.org), a thirty-minute video, a painting, and various types of merchandise, including prints and t-shirts. In addition to appropriating the themes of time and boredom from Paik’s Zen for Film, Zen for Internet reflects the multiple existences of Paik’s work. Zen for Internet can “authentically” be realized in a variety of media rather than as a single instantiation—a repercussion of the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’s theory of “exemplativist” nature of artworks (“An Exemplativist Manifesto,” 1976), according to which the objects resulting from the realization of a concept are only examples. —LH

Image: Courtesy of the artists.