Intermedia

Intermedia is a term used to describe art forms that draw on several media and grow into new hybrids. Intermedia works cross the boundaries of recognized media, and often fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered art forms.

Artist and composer Dick Higgins coined the word intermedia in a 1966 essay. Higgins, a former student and then-colleague of composer John Cage, described an art form appropriate to artists who felt that there are no boundaries between art and life. For a philosophy that denied the boundary between art and life, there could be no boundaries between art form and art form.

Higgins was a founding member of the influential circle of artists, architects, and composers known as Fluxus. Many of the artists active in intermedia art forms in the 1960s took part in Fluxus, including Korean Nam June Paik; Germans Wolf Vostell and Joseph Beuys; Japanese Takehisa Kosugi and Shigeko Kubota; Lithuanian-born Americans George Maciunas and Jonas Mekas; French Jean Dupuy, Robert Filliou, and Ben Vautier; and others. The interpretations that these artists gave to intermedia ran from the simple and primitive to the technically sophisticated. At one end of the spectrum, there were the folklore-based projects of Sweden's Bengt af Klintberg and the poetry performances of American Emmett Williams. At the other, there were Nam June Paik's technologically dazzling video proposals, the sophisticated book-print-installation works of American Alison Knowles, or Higgins' innovative radio plays and computer-generated art works.

The first intermedia courses entered the university curriculum in 1967, with Ken Friedman's projects [Page 246]at San Francisco State University and in 1968 with Hans Breder's courses at the University of Iowa. By the late 1960s, the term was in wide use in Europe and around the world; one of the hallmark projects in its diffusion was a book published in Germany titled Intermedia 1969. By the 1970s, artists of many kinds had begun to adopt the term.

The intermedia concept was discernible in three artistic directions of the late 1950s and early 1960s. One direction emphasized engagement with technology. In an era when multimedia often meant separate and disparate art forms being presented at the same time, however, this was often a fruitless approach. In contrast, those artists who were exploring the boundaries of technology and art and examining the larger social meaning of information technology in a post-industrial society often made good use of intermedia theory. In a powerful sense, these artists began to explore the generally unrealized dimensions of a world in which digital computer code and information flows would begin to render all media fluid, as digital control began to break down boundaries between separate forms of input, transmission, and output. Early examples include the electronic music of John Cage and Richard Maxfield and the early television experiments of Paik and Vostell. This direction blossomed in the art and technology programs of the 1960s and in the video art of the 1970s.

The second direction emphasized simplicity, a tradition of conceptual exploration. Often anchored in Zen Buddhism or philosophy, this stream was typified by the event structures of George Brecht, the early concept art of Henry Flynt, and the neo-haiku theater of Mieko Shiomi and Yoko Ono. In the 1960s, this second direction entered another phase with George Maciunas' publishing program for Fluxus, the radical reductive films of Paul Sharits, and the expanded use of events and scores for objects, installations, and performances by Higgins, Vautier, Robert Watts, Knizak, Filliou, Friedman, and others.

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