Abstract
<jats:p> <jats:italic>Zen for Record</jats:italic> gathers five essays around Ken Friedman’s 1966 Fluxus event score instructing the production of “a phonograph record with no sound on it.” Originating as a found object, the work has migrated across six decades and multiple incarnations, from an unrealized concept to the LP edition that occasions this volume. </jats:p> <jats:p> These essays accompany Friedman’s account of the Fluxus origins of the work, but they approach the silent record from radically different angles. Craig Dworkin situates <jats:italic>Zen for Record</jats:italic> within a broader aesthetics of negation and conceptual art’s engagement with the zero-degree of content. Christof Migone spirals through the paradoxes of inscribing nothing and the impossibility of a truly soundless playback. Robin McGinley traces a remarkable counter-history of the silent record as pop artifact, from 1950s jukebox novelties and Vulfpeck’s album <jats:italic>Sleepify</jats:italic> . Finally, Hanna B. Hölling reads the work through sonic materialism, preservation theory, and the politics of silencing, asking what it means for a concept to survive the obsolescence of its successive carriers. </jats:p> <jats:p>Touching on Fluxus event scores and Cagean silence, the political economy of streaming platforms and the conservation of time-based media, these essays stage a sustained interdisciplinary meditation on silence as material, medium, commodity, and philosophical provocation.</jats:p>