Created in the early sixties by Korean-American artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006), Zen for Film is a prototypical Fluxus film, originally a linear projection on a screen of a clear 16mm film leader. In Zen for Film, Paik literally put the screening of his film on display, where pure electric light meets the flatness of the screen and where the artwork manifests its material qualities by collecting traces of its own projection. As such, Zen for Film is a cinematic event that cannot be experienced twice in the same form. Placed somewhere between the cultures of avant-garde cinematic and visual arts, the film addresses its own material condition by turning the innards of a cinematic apparatus outward and exposing the commonly unexposed to the viewer.

The investigation into the genesis, transitions, and ongoing interpretations of Zen for Film reveals an artwork that has a rich history of display and is a complex sum of its transformations rather than a static entity. Its existence as a film projection (linear or looped), as a film strip encased in multiple Fluxkits, as the first in a series in the Fluxfilm Anthology, as a linear, canned filmic remnant from the 1960s, and as various digitally transfigured versions undermine any assumption that the artwork is unchanging and hence subject to a single interpretation. Notoriously impossible to pin down, Zen for Film invites the viewer to explore the significance of an artwork in a state of constant transition, and to ask precisely what—and when—that artwork might be.