Intermedia

In this chapter I describe the influence of Vilém Flusser's media theory on the development of the artistic movement of Polish Intermedia Photography in Poland, with particular emphasis on the reception of the philosopher's thoughts at the University of the Arts in Poznań. I present both the works of the most influential representatives of the movement: Jerzy Olek, Stefan Wojnecki, Piotr Wołyński and its successors like Agnieszka Antkowiak.

Since 1960s, artistic narrative began to occur in an intermediated manner and under the scrutiny of a critical episteme. The pictorial representation has been discarded and the artwork process began to juxtapose up various media and subjects. Galleries began to refuse the specific and filled their spaces with mixtures of video and embodied installations, which lead to a language called  “performance-for-the-monitor”, mostly  recognizable in a ‘gendered’ mediated artistic iconography...

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Since its release in 1972, Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s ‘Rocket Man’ has been treated to a variety of re-interpretations, covers, and performances. But an official music video for this song was not released until 2017. Having been selected as the winner of the music video competition The Cut, Majid Adin teamed up with Stephen McNally to direct an animated video that would become a distinctive visual accompaniment to John’s song, while also offering an evocative  re-imagining of Adin’s story of migration during the 2015 refugees crisis. Distinctive for its unusual convergence of genres and its integration of analogue and digital media, this music video offers a rich example of dialogic authorship. Through a close analysis of the sonic, lyrical, and visual construction of ‘Rocket Man’, this article offers insights into the possibilities for the transformation of music video, specifically in relation to intermedial and artisanal responses to exile and diaspora, and the potential of animated music video to provoke a therapeutic engagement with memory.

The democratizing movements of small press and artists book publishing attained political consciousness and blossomed alongside and in direct proportion to-the social and cultural upheavals of the 196Os and early 197Os. What is surprising is that they are rarely talked about in the space of the same paragraph or the same page or even the same book in most print culture histories. Dick Higgins' the Something Else Press (1964-1974) questioned the very distinction between between literary small press publications and artists books, even before the latter term was formulated. Higgins' refusal to dis-entwine literature from art, both in his own work and within the context of SEP (and later) publishing projects, is in line with his conceptualization of intermedia, and his experiments with the book form as a way to disturb divisions between the arts. This paper explores the material history of SEP publishing practices and Higgins' connections with the small press community (and COSMEP in particular) to offer correctives to established narratives of SEP within the history of artists book publishing.

This paper investigates the Japan pavilion and environment art in the 1967 Montreal World Exposition (Expo ’67). Japan in the 1960s is generally considered to be an era of urbanization with the Tokyo Olympics (1964) and the Osaka Expo (1970). Previous studies in art and architectural history have emphasized the importance of these two media events as representations of rapid urbanization and economic growth in Japan at the time, which was considered to be a unique social background of Japan that differentiated it from other countries. But these studies have overlooked the influences of the Montreal Expo (which was held in between the Tokyo Olympics and the Osaka Expo), because it was held abroad and, therefore, was outside of the view of national history. The Montreal Expo was one of the opportunities for the thriving of environment art, which considers viewers, the inside and the outside of buildings as a whole environment. Because this art movement was also well known in Japan before the Montreal Expo, it is important to examine the Japan pavilion by comparing with other pavilions of the East and the West during the Cold War.
By examining photos and drawings in the Canadian Center for Architecture Archives in Montreal, I reveal the design process of the Japan pavilion and its exhibition installations by Yoshinobu Ashihara and Katsuhei Toyoguchi. By comparing the Japan pavilion with the U.S. pavilion by Buckminster Fuller and the West Germany Pavilion by Frei Otto, I argue that the Japan pavilion was a mediocre project. I also articulate that Environment Art in the Montreal Expo, as an interdisciplinary and comprehensive art genre that incorporates painting, sculpture, craft, product design, graphic design, photography, cinema/film/video, music and architecture, greatly influenced the Osaka Expo in 1970.

This is the catalogue for Jack Ox's exhibition of her 800 Square foot  visualization of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland.  The exhibition occurred in conjunction with the first large Schwitters exhibition in Poland, with graphically matching catalogues. It covers such topics as intermedia and includes phonetic analyses etc of the Schwittters's sound-poem. Authors include The exhibition was sponsored by the German government in 2004.

"http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2011/111/184.full.pdf+html


The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States has become one of the most represented disasters in history since it produced an unprecedented visual impact on those around the world who watched the second plane crash into the South Tower live on television. In an atmosphere in which reality resembled fiction, fiction was initially rejected as a suitable means for understanding and relating to the enormity of the events because it apparently had nothing to offer that journalism and the news could not provide. Ten years later, these initial misgivings have been overcome and 9/11 fiction has become a genre in itself. This essay explores the use of newspaper articles, radio transcripts, phone messages, e-mails, and interviews with eyewitnesses in Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World (2004); the use of moving images—a flip book—and other visuals inserted in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005); and the references to well-known photographs of 9/11 in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). These authors do not ignore the mediated nature of 9/11 but display it through the incorporation of other media in their fiction, which renders their representation of the trauma more effective."

This article argues for the advantage of applying the analytical perspective of “visual iconicity in poetry,” rather than trying to delimit the problematic old category of “visual poetry,” which has been understood to be a type of poetry that deviates from normal poetry in and through its visual characteristics (for instance, poems looking like physical objects). However, all written poetry is obviously perceived by the eyes, and the notion of visuality has proven to be insufficient for accommodating the features of “visual poetry”; it is visual iconicity rather than simply visuality that must be investigated.

Whereas visuality is a sensory category, iconicity is a semiotic category consisting of meaning created by way of resemblance. When these two categories are conflated in poetry studies, so that visuality is understood to be the same as or to automatically include iconicity, or when iconicity is not recognized as a decisive notion for understanding how meaning is created in visual (written) poetry, the result is confusing. I therefore argue that all media, including art forms, must be understood as being based on four media modalities (essential categories of media traits): the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality, and the semiotic modality. Media differ in one or more of these four modalities. Some are visual, others are auditory, some are spatial but static, others are spatiotemporal, some are primarily based on conventional signs, others are based on iconic signs, and so forth.

Written poetry is generally based on conventional, verbal signs, but most poems are also iconic to some extent; and not only poems that are categorized as “visual.” Visual iconicity in poetry can be based on, for instance, empty spaces between words and between verses, lineation, typeface, letter size, and word order. Since there are many types and degrees of iconicity, I present a semiotic framework based on the idea that meaning can be produced by all kinds of resemblances between visual, auditory, and cognitive structures (abstract relations that form concepts and ideas in mental space). Visual iconicity in poetry is a specific part of this rich field of iconicity.

Finally, I analyze two poems that differ in their visual iconicity. No scholars refer to Sylvia Plath’s “I Am Vertical” as “visual,” but in addition to being visual this poem possesses a certain level of iconicity. Eugen Gomringer’s “Wind,” on the other hand, is a standard example of so-called visual poetry. Also this poem is certainly visual, even though it is not visuality but strong iconicity that sets it apart from poetry such as Plath’s. In fact, what is generally but misleadingly referred to as “visual poetry” is actually characterized by extensive iconicity.

Published in Animism in Art and Performance edited by Christopher Braddock (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. pp 91-107). This chapter addresses the work of non-digital text-based art in the age of digital media through a discussion of an installation by Australian artist/writer Lynne Barwick. It highlights the movement of the reader and the animation of space, considering text as simultaneously writing and image. Key to the discussion is the animating power of the word and the ways in which entangled bodies depend on media as a data-driven life-form with its own kind of (non-human) consciousness. Referencing writers such as Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, Gibbs explores the language of text as an assemblage that we cannot stand apart from, operating beyond a necessity for strategic communication. Accordingly, the focus is not about the individual ego but about language itself as a conduit or collaborator.

Perhaps the crucial question concerning irony is a hermeneutic one: how do you know when irony is at work in a proposition? When the concept was initially defined by the ancient thinkers, it was placed on a solid base of intentionality. Plato preferred the spoken language, as it is always possible to ask an interlocutor what he meant when using certain words. According to Plato in Phaedrus, a written text remains silent if you put a question to it; hence, it is inferior as a philosophical instrument. Since this hermeneutics of intention clearly dominates the world of classical antiquity, it is not hard to see why almost all the early theories about irony focus on the spoken language.1 The question of how to reveal irony is simply reduced to a question of how to interpret the speaker's gestures and mimicry. You hear him say one thing; but if he pulls faces at the same time, you may suspect that he means something else-and if you feel uncertain, you just ask him what he actually means. Then you are on safe ground as far as irony is concerned. Unless, of course, he tells you a lie ....

Die prozessuale Wirkungsweise der Immersion beschränkt sich nicht nur auf technisch-apparative Medien oder computergestützte Mediensysteme, sondern zeigt sich innerhalb zahlreicher Forschungsdiskurse ebenfalls bei analogen oder monomodalen Medien. Die Gradstufen und Ausprägungen von immersiven Prozessen ereignen sich dabei stets über ein bivektorielles Induktionsschema: Entweder wird Immersion maßgeblich über ein mediales Reiz- beziehungsweise Strukturangebot über sensomotorisch fundierte Wahrnehmungsprozesse eingeleitet oder über weitestgehend subjektive, phantasmatisch-imaginäre Annäherungen an ein Medium. Der Immersionsprozess besitzt allerdings nicht nur das Potenzial zur Analyse und Beschreibung spezifischer Rezeptionsprozesse im Verhältnis von Medium, Interface und Rezipient, sondern er lässt sich als eine komplexe Modellannahme zur Beschreibung einer Kulturtheorie medialer Hybride verstehen, die der Medienevolution der letzten Jahrzehnte adäquat Rechnung tragen kann. In Anknüpfung an Ernst Cassirers animal symbolicum und Hans Jonas’ homo pictor formuliert dieser Artikel die These des homo immergens.

Media Borders, Multimodality, and Intermediality is a collection of essays that have found their final forms in dialog with each other. The initial question that was posed was simply ‘what is intermediality?’ To answer this question, one must also ask what a medium is, and where we find the ‘gaps’ that intermediality bridges. Clearly, the supposedly crossed borders must be described before one can proceed to the ‘inter’ of intermediality. We also set out to investigate how the two notions of intermediality and multimodality, rarely discussed together, are related. The aim was to facilitate communication and theoretical cross-fertilization over the borders between the esthetic disciplines, media and communication studies, linguistics, and so forth.

This paper investigates the 1966 exhibition “From Space to Environment,” held at Matsuya Department Store in Tokyo, Ginza, involving the architects Arata Isozaki and Hiroshi Hara. This exhibition’s subtitle was “Synthesized Exhibition of Painting + Sculpture + Photo + Design + Architecture + Music,” which was instrumental in introducing the terms Intermedia and Environment Art (Kankyō Geijutsu) to Japan. This paper examines the exhibition installations studying primary sources and clarifying the formation of the collective named Environment Society. This paper analyzes the impact generated by the topic of “Environment” seen through a different point of view rather than the one of art movement establishment of the time.

Divine Madness provides a theory that enables the concept of irony to be transferred from the literary to the visual and aural domains. Two stories are being told. One is a story of how literary conceptualization has conquered the fields of the other arts and the other is a story of how literary conceptualization, conversely, has been successively relativized. Elleström provides a survey of the historical roots of the concept of irony as well as a discussion of two hermeneutical "options": irony as a mode of oral communication and irony as a mode of literary expression. The author examines how irony is classified and how it is used as an interpretive strategy rather than a "textual trait" intended by an author. Other concepts such as paradox, mysticism and deconstruction are also evaluated in terms of their relation to irony. Elleström concludes by demonstrating that ironic interpretations of not just music are intimately connected to norms, values, and even political stances that tend to be hidden behind an allegedly objective terminology - a terminology that has its roots in the comprehension of irony as an intentional, oral phenomenon.

Bratislava-based art historian and curator Daniel Grúň researches the legacy of the neo-avant-garde movements of Central Europe. In his essay, he begins by analysing the work Vodná hudba (Water Music), a now-legendary musical happening created by the Slovak artist Milan Adamčiak (1946 - 2017) and two others in a Bratislava swimming pool in 1970.
Grúň goes on to explore the archival material associated with this and
other works by Adamčiak, paying particular attention to the modes
and strategies of documentation (and their political context) as
well as to the interdependence of documentary/notational formats
and artistic forms. Among other things, Adamčiak’s art provides Grúň
with a case study for discussing the complex questions related to the
“performativity” of documentation and the reasons for the selfhistoricization of Central European neo-avant-garde artists.

Podejmuję tu rozważania nad sztuką nowych mediów, rozwijającą się dynamicznie w ciągu ostatniego półwiecza. Analizuję jej koncepcję, a następnie przeobrażenia, od formy początkowej, wyłaniającej się w rezultacie wprowadzenia nowych mediów jako narzędzi pracy twórczej w pole sztuki, przez fazę postmedialną, w ramach której sztuki starych i nowych mediów technicznych integrują się z tradycyjnymi dziedzinami sztuki, aż po współczesną fazę transdyscyplinarną, w której zintegrowane na poprzednim etapie intermedia artystyczne wchodzą w twórcze interakcje z innymi, pozaartystycznymi dziedzinami praktyk społecznych: nauką, humanistyką, polityką, aktywizmem społecznym, tworząc artystyczne formy transmedialne. Prezentuję aktualną sztukę nowych mediów jako pole rozpostarte w szczególności między SciArt a sztuką krytyczną.

""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural animator, mycologist and a New Yorker in one person? In relation to musical practice, with which he is most often associated, he preferred to describe himself as an “organizer of sounds” and it seems that it was not only a stylistic manipulation, but the expression of a certain attitude, characterized by a high degree of distrust in relation to the musical tradition (which Cage consistently challenged), inherited from aesthetic components such as composition, work of art, score, harmony, as well as the artistry of composition. A paradoxical and somewhat surprising feature of his artistic practice, which ultimately sought to deny the foundations of matters in which he dabbled, was that it at first glance, the accidental and absurd assumptions were the result of meticulous study and analysis, creating a very coherent and thoughtful whole. Th e conceptual dimension of Cage’s artistic achievements allows to situate his work within the phenomenon that Kosuth describes as “art after philosophy” , in turn Cage himself in a suggestive manner defines the philosophical and conceptual nature of his art, writing that “philosophy for the [contemporary] artist is what the Bible is for the priest”. Certainly, Cage’s artistic achievements should not be put in the same category with the achievements of artists, whose only tangible characteristic is that of a single sweeping gesture to crack down on binding canons, undefining all that is definite. Cage’s artistic and ideological path strongly denies such an image. This book takes a bearings of this path.
The aim of my work is the reconstruction of the philosophical framework that creates the conceptual content of the work of the author of Silence. This analysis is a de facto reconstruction of the foundations of his aesthetic and ideological system . The reconstruction appears to be interesting because it contains the schema of possible references of Cage’s aesthetic to its various philosophical aspects, including those that were oblivious to him. Aspect (Latin appearance) is a frame, from which is considered a given object or phenomenon. “Philosophical” means in this case - a reference to a philosopher or a philosophical position. In Cage’s “paradoxical case” the possibility of such an approach seems to be twofold. On the one hand it presents ideas that deserve, in my opinion, attention, because they seem to me to be the most “adequate” to present the creative path of the author of Music of Change and the most “in his spirit.” They are not only original concepts, their presence in the vicinity of Cage’s aesthetic views is often dictated by the duty to simply repeat what Cage himself considered the conceptual framework of his creative activity. I am first and foremost thinking about the views of D.T. Suzuki, H.D. Thoreau, J. Joyce, B. Fuller and M. McLuhan. Subsequently capturing the aesthetic phenomenon of the works of the author of Four in the light of philosophical and artistic ideas of F. Nietzsche, J. Dewey, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J.-N. Vuarnet and W. Welsch may be a risky treatment, but in my opinion, fully justified. On the other hand, built by Cage for more than half a century, the conceptual edifice of hisart, is not merely the chance result of various influences (conscious or unconscious), but appears in the eyes of the investigator as an independent being, deserving of attention and introduction, which on closer examination carries with it a whole new quality, putting the researcher in the face of unpleasant fact of almost complete incompatibility of the existing conceptual apparatus to describe this unexpected phenomenon. For the researcher, however, there is no other way. A researcher must come from that which is known, to perchance get to what is apparently unknown, or only temporarily inexpressible. He must at the same time give up many of the usual ways and habits, to see the matters from another perspective.
In the opinion of most researchers of the work of the author of Music of Changes a very important element that should be taken into account during the reconstruction of his views, is biography. This is the engine of his aesthetic choices. Spheres of practice and art, everyday experience and aesthetic experience are indeed inextricably linked for Cage, penetrating to the extent that almost always aesthetic choices are determined by the life situations, and not vice versa. They also shape by what might be called the world view of creator, but also his attitude and moral life. During writing, I used David Revill’s competent biography The Roaring Silence: John Cage - A Life, which, irrespective of magnitude of the accumulated evidence of the source material remains a proof of almost crystalline objectivity of the author: as when he describes the lessons that Cage learned due to difficult experiences of an emotional crisis period (due to personal problems) and financial collapse (which is related to the economic crisis of 1930s America and the hardships of war). From this period: “lesson of acceptance” and “practice of patience” in relation to own emotions - at first just as exuberant, as unfulfilled - in relation to the world and the people, sounds and musical material (supported by the idea explained to him by G. Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind”) - became the guiding motto in Cage’s life. In the shape of subsequent aesthetic assumptions, the deficit in talent and “staying in line”, were also reflected in almost all the components of the Cage’s concept of art such as acting to overcome both his own individual limitations, and the entire former Western aesthetic paradigm.
My work consists of five chapters, introduction and conclusion. It also contains a time line of John Cage’s life, bibliography of Cage’s writings, titles of major critical studies and the remaining critical bibliography. In the first chapter At the basis of avant-garde. Some facts from the history of aesthetics from Kant to Cage in the context of an aesthetic nature of art (with music in the background), raises the question of the status of contemporary aesthetics and the adequacy of its categories for the description of contemporary art. To introduce the reader to the problems of aesthetics, I present Kant’s conception of beauty and Hegel’s and Schelling’s concept of art in the context of a dispute about the aesthetic nature of art (A. Danto, G. Dickie). Then, I present Nietzsche’s concept of art with particular emphasis on Wagner’s impact, all in relation to the fundamental dilemmas of creative individual in the modern era. In the next part I describe the avant-garde revolution, which took place in the play first half of the twentieth century in relation to theoretical propositions of Dewey, Adorno, and Bauman. In the second chapter In Schoenberg’s circle: the source of new music, I present the history of acquaintance between the creator of dodecaphony and Cage and the reasons for their separation in connection with the concept of expressionist art, taking into account the position of anti expressionistic Popper, and all this in the context of opposition of tonality to atonality and the uniquely American category of “experimental action”. The third chapter From sound to noise, from noise to silence. Formation of a new aesthetic of music by John Cage, I present the assumptions of Cage’s first manifest Future of Music: Credo, the impact of development of American civilization on aesthetic of his early ideas, the relation of Cage to Futurism, the concept of noise as an integral component of music in the context of twentieth- century discoveries in the field of electro-acoustics, psychology of the new perception, lying at the basis of the Listening to music manifesto, the concept of “music of all sounds” and “music of all time” as well as Cage’s understanding of time in the context of ontological discontinuity of the universe of sounds, and essential for his aesthetics of music, the term “indeterminacy of the composition.” In the fourth chapter Between art and experience, I describe the sequence of events from the biography of Cage, which had a direct influence on the shaping of his conception of art, in respect to the development of technology, artist’s creative and emotional crisis, relationships (including social) with abstract expressionism and discovering the silence for music. In the fifth chapter Philosophy and the aesthetic dimension of the work of John Cage, I present his views in the context of the anti-platonism position (Nietzsche, B. Fuller), a dispute between modernism and the avant-garde, and also in relation to the pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience (Dewey), the time and the sublime categories (Beckett, Lyotard), the concepts of fear and chance (Heidegger, Sartre), the experimental action and chance (W. Welsch, M. Eldred), the concept of demilitarization of language and a new philosophy of reception (Derrida), and in the context of Eastern thought (Suzuki), anarchist and apolitical nature of art (Thoreau, Artaud), Marxist criticism (C. Cardew) and the philosopher-artist category (J.-N. Vuarnet).""
trans. Magda Gziut

In Media Res post on the lyric video for Taylor Swift's 'exile'.
(http://128.122.109.51/imr/content/lyric-video-moving-concrete-poetry-or-pleasures-eye-tennis-tay-tay)

Part of the In Media Res theme week on 'Lyric Videos', with Laura McLaren, Virginia Kuhn, Elsie Walker, and Carol Vernallis.
(http://128.122.109.51/imr/content/lyric-videos)

'Écfrasis’ en Miguel Ángel Garrido Gallardo (dir.), Diccionario español de términos literarios internacionales (DETLI). CSIC, Union Académique Internationale, 2015. ISBN : 978-950-585-116-4
(disponible en: http://www.proyectos.cchs.csic.es/detli/listado_terminos)

Gregorova Stach, Lucia - Murin, Michal: Adamčiak, začni / Adamčiak, Begin! Bratislava : SNG 2017
Slovak / English biligual catalogue from the retrospective exhibition of Slovak conceptual artist, musicologist, poet and intermedia artist Milan Adamčiak, (1946 - 2017) that was held in the Slovak National Gallery, March - June 2017 (curator Lucia Gregorova Stach, Michal Murin). It is also accompanied by a A3 large box with 100 sheets of graphic scores and music projects titled CONCEPT & MUSIC edited by curators (published also in Bratislava : SNG, 2017)

This licentiate establishes the conceptual and methodological foundation for a doctoral thesis on how film creates and sustains a symbolic universe. Rather than addressing the ultimate thesis problem, the purpose of this licentiate is to lay the groundwork for that project. It introduces and examines the film Unforgiven as the empirical data, and it locates Unforgiven in the genre and tradition of the Western film.

The licentiate has five subsidiary purposes: 1) it discusses the theoretical and methodological perspective of symbolic interactionism; 2) it describes and examines the Western genre in film and earlier media; 3) it proposes a basic typology for the Western film; 4) it presents a synopsis and overview of the film Unforgiven, and 5) it reviews the literature on Unforgiven, extracting key themes to establish the thematic taxonomy that permits a robust analysis of the film.

Order through the press at 20% off with code UCPNEW at checkout: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo46107003.html

“PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art. . . . Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples,” writes artist George Maciunas in his Fluxus manifesto of 1963. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making.

While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.

CONTENTS

Prelude: The Artwork in Flux

1: Diagramming Form, from Graphic Notation to the Fluxus Event Score

2: Of Drips, Diagrams, and Immanent Form: Fluxus in the Wake of Abstract Expressionist Painting

3: George Brecht and the Notational Object

4: George Maciunas, Fluxboxes, and the Transitional Commodity

5: Objects Without Object: Robert Filliou and the Unworking of Fluxus

Coda: The Fluxus Virtual, Actually

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

REVIEW QUOTES

Michael Pisaro, California Institute of the Arts
“With this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Harren gracefully erases boundaries between art history and musicology. In the discussion of George Brecht and the event score, she reveals the ambiguous double power of the score: as both action and potential. Over the course of the book she slows down the explosive event of Fluxus just enough to draw the personal and conceptual chain reactions that made the movement into a turning point in twentieth-century art, but she does not lose its FLUX.”

Judith Rodenbeck, author of Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings
"What a terrific book! Fluxus Forms is beautifully written, lovingly detailed, intelligent, groundbreaking, and will be a field-defining text for many years. Nuanced and muscular in both argument and prosody, the book presents a long overdue formal and critical analysis of Fluxus. It is Harren’s insistence on the variabilities, the very fluxiness, of the virtual and its attentive materializations in the actual that is at the heart of this historical account. Showing an intimate knowledge of the material, her exegesis of the diagrammatic aspect of Fluxus complicates and deepens the urgency of this work today. The enormous value of this project is its eschewal of a general theory in favor of a working theory—a brilliant diagramming, in fact—of something that ‘refuses to work.’”

Hannah Higgins, author of Fluxus Experience
“Fluxus Forms offers an original perspective by focusing on the diagram and the musical score as key components of Fluxus. In shaping her discussion of Fluxus around the idea of ‘artworks in flux,’ Harren opens up connection between the abstract and the concrete. Using Andreas Huyssen’s idea that Fluxus is the ‘master code of postmodernism,’ she presents the movement with fresh eyes and reveals how the collective’s multisensory engagement with the debris of capitalist production—found in the form of Fluxus boxes as well as the notational objects that link things and events—functions as instructional signposts for a newly imagined postindustrial politics that avoid commoditization of the art spectacle.”

Michael Gallope, author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable
“Fluxus took inspiration from music, but not because of its abstract forms or its affective power. Rather, these artists saw potential in music’s philosophically powerful technology: the score. Experimental scores enabled Fluxus to provoke audiences with endlessly novel and open-ended linkages between concepts, materials, and forms. Harren’s tour-de-force narrative dramatically reframes the way we understand the cross-fertilization of the postwar avant-garde.”

Jeffrey Weiss, curator and critic
“From Byzantine studies to theories of representation in the digital age, a wave of historical and critical thinking is now devoted to questions surrounding the identity of the artwork and the status of the object. Harren’s remarkable book is a deep dive into the intermedial history of Fluxus from that vantage. Grounded in an intensive examination of means, her account brings new clarity to the terms of a practice that, long elusive, emerges in her hands as utterly indispensable to a historical and conceptual investigation of the ontology of art.”

The Arts Fuse
"Grade this book A+."

Art Libraries Society of North America
"Richly researched and academically grounded, Harren fluidly weaves together the stories of artists and events key to the evolution of Fluxus... an outstanding addition to the literature on Fluxus that offers new context and fresh insight on the foundations of art performance and object-based practices."

Media, New Media, Postmedia è stato scritto tra il 2008 e il 2010, per aiutare prima di tutto me stesso, l'autore, a venire a capo di quello strano conflitto tra mondi dell'arte di cui facevo, e faccio tutt'oggi esperienza quotidianamente, nel mio lavoro di docente, critico e curatore; per metterne a fuoco e spiegarne le dinamiche e le motivazioni profonde, per studiarne e illustrarne gli sviluppi storici, e per indicare una via d'uscita possibile. I mondi dell'arte a cui faccio riferimento sono il mondo dell'arte contemporanea "mainstream", con la sua popolazione di artisti e professionisti e il suo paesaggio di musei, gallerie, biennali, premi, fiere, riviste; e il mondo della cosiddetta New Media Art, messo a punto tra gli anni Sessanta e gli anni Novanta del Novecento per ospitare, sostenere, nutrire, discutere, valorizzare e conservare la sperimentazione artistica con le nuove tecnologie in una fase storica in cui queste ricerche erano, con poche eccezioni, ignorate dal mondo dell'arte. Il conflitto è, ovviamente, quello relativo al posizionamento di queste pratiche artistiche, in un momento - la svolta di Millennio - in cui, complice l'esplosione della rivoluzione digitale, il mondo dell'arte ha cominciato finalmente a riconoscerne la rilevanza e l'urgenza culturale.

In Domenico Quaranta, Media, New Media, Postmedia, Postmedia Books, Milano 2018. Seconda edizione

In this paper I study the interaction between sound and art, its development in time, and its behavior in different acoustic spaces. I will concentrate on the concepts of sound sculpture and sound installation, and on their aesthetic implications. I will analyze how they are to be found in a new expanded field. The works studied here belong to an interdisciplinary realm (often called sound art, time based art, and intermedia art), placed between the music and visual arts fields. Different types of contexts that will be examined affect these works. I will analyze sound in its paradigmatic relation to space and time. Finally, I will propose different sound organization techniques for the creation of sound installations. I hope that through this research, I will be able to understand better the complexity of these “new” possible sound aesthetic languages that bring new paradigms about our perception and understanding of sound and its relationship with visual art and other media.

“Going wireless” involves not only the elimination of wires but also the production of electromagnetic waves, a realization that had far-reaching implications for the cultural logics of German modernity. As a media archaeology of wirelessness, this dissertation situates the “discovery” of electromagnetic radiation and the “invention” of wireless transmission in a richer field of scientific, experimental, and aesthetic relations during the early and pre-history of national broadcasting. Before wireless transmission came to be synonymous with the mass distribution medium of radio or even the long-distance communication medium of wireless telegraphy, it was at the center of speculation about a variety of possible wireless futures. Understanding the rhetoric of the new media of radio and wireless telegraphy in the first chapter opens onto questions of continuity and change in the longue durée of the second chapter. The insights gained from this comparison of pre-modern cultural techniques and modern electronic technologies are crucial for understanding the “discovery” of electromagnetic radiation and the “invention” of wireless telegraphy examined in the third and fourth chapters with a focus on the immediate pre-history of national broadcasting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The significance of this pre-historical period and the contingency of national broadcasting in the mid-twentieth century arguably only became apparent with the revival of wireless transmission at the turn of the twenty-first century, as the fifth chapter makes evident. As a contribution to the early and pre-history of national broadcasting, this dissertation suggests a new way of thinking about the order of wirelessness, from “wireless” as synonymous with the communication medium of telegraphy or the distribution medium of radio, to “wireless” as electromagnetic radiation and a medium of experimentation.

Este trabalho apresenta uma investigação sobre o indeterminismo na música, a partir da análise de três obras musicais que utilizam processos de indeterminação como elementos estruturais. Partindo de uma contextualização das práticas e tendências musicais que enfatizam o fenômeno da indeterminação, é feita uma reflexão filosófica sobre o papel da experiência na música aleatória e experimental, enfatizando a importância da idéia de novidade e sua associação com o acaso. A poética compositiva e o aspecto virtual da forma são as bases sobre as quais se fundamentam as análises das peças.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: poética, indeterminação, fenomenologia, música experimental

ABSTRACT

This work presents an inquiry on indeterminism in music, based on the analysis of three musical works that use indeterminacy processes as structural elements. A philosophical reflection on the role of experience in aleatory and experimental music is made after an oversight of the musical practices and tendencies that emphasize the indeterminacy phenomenon. The concept of “new” and its relationship with chance are also explored. The compositional poetics and the virtual aspect of form are the basis on which are founded the analyses of the pieces.

KEYWORDS: poetics, indeterminacy, phenomenology, experimental music

Pionieri di un utilizzo espressivo del personal computer, proprio quando questo irresistibile strumento del futuro entrava nelle nostre case, la produzione multimediale dei Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici o GMM ha rappresentato la quintessenza della cultura postmoderna italiana, un modello di contaminazione di media, linguaggi, generi e contesti che ha preso forma di fumetti, installazioni video, performance, produzioni discografiche, teatrali e televisive.

Raccolti e «rimasterizzati» qui, per la prima volta, i loro famigerati computer comics a 8-bit originariamente pubblicati su Frigidaire tra il 1984 e il 1987, il lavoro più noto ed emblematico del gruppo fondato da Antonio Glessi e Andrea Zingoni. Realizzate mediante una primordiale tavoletta grafica con un Apple II da Glessi e caratterizzate dalla dimensione onirica delle sceneggiature di Zingoni, queste storie narrano delle surreali scorribande di una gang di loschi man in black, alter ego degli artisti, ora a spasso in una metafisica Firenze degli anni d’oro del Tenax ora impegnati a togliere la scena a personaggi come Dracula e Giulio Cesare.

I GMM furono al contempo vicini e lontani da: la scena del cosiddetto «nuovo fumetto»; l’attitudine al pastiche degli artisti visivi a loro contemporanei; le frange più ibride della cultura post-punk. Come scrisse Pier Vittorio Tondelli nel 1986, in un testo poi incluso nel suo epocale Un Weekend Postmoderno (1990): «Il dato più importante del lavoro dei GMM è proprio la commistione dei linguaggi, il loro intersecarsi e interagire. In altre parole quel concetto, quella musa, che sta alla base di tutta la produzione dei giovani degli anni ottanta; e quel concetto, quella musa, ha un nome: «multimedialità».

Adattate alle pagine della più inclassificabile pubblicazione periodica del postmodernismo italico e a volte presentate in forma di video accompagnate da colonne sonore realizzate dal «terzo» GMM, ovvero Maurizio Dami aka Alexander Robotnik, recuperare oggi le schizofreniche storie dei GMM è un modo per riscoprire una delle prime forme di risposta interrogative alla cultura elettronica e al suo impatto sull’individuo, la società e l’idea stessa di storia.

Punk was visual as much as it was musical. In recent years, art historical research of punk works of art has increased. However, a thorough analysis of punk art's themes, motifs, and methods is still lacking. This article examines infantilism and dilettantism as two key notions within punk art, as illustrated by the collage L'ecole de l'art infantile (COUM Transmissions, 1974) and the super 8 film Das Leben des Sid Vicious (Die Tödliche Doris, 1981). Analysis shows how concepts of childishness, nonconformism and anti-authoritarianism are interconnected both with punk's DIY ethos and its self-identification as a youth movement. Furthermore, the article discusses punk art's circumvention of antithetical concepts, such as failure vs. success, innocence vs. guilt, reality vs. fantasy, skill vs. incompetence.

The most important aim of this essay is to present a theoretical framework
that explains and describes how media are related to each other: what
they have in common, in what ways they differ and how these differences
are bridged over by intermediality. In order to accomplish this, it must be
understood that the concept of medium generally includes several types or
levels of mediality that have to be correlated with each other.

Although different manifestations form a mosaic of collective characteristics in this paper, I argue that a contemporary collective doesn’t have to form a community, an extended family model, have a political background or even a common philosophical outlook. I support that a collective could be a production prototype formed to serve the artistic purpose of the participant artists. It is a vehicle to enter the market of contemporary arts and a tool to help achieve competitive independent cross-arts.  In this paper I will set as a paradigm (Case Study 1) of collective work the production “City Above Life Below” by Medea Electronique: a collective cross-arts work that involves a number of practices such as music, video art, photography, set design, animation, and installation art in which I participate as a composer and producer. On the other hand I will use as an example of collaborative work (Case Study 2) the interactive photography installation ‘Arbitrariness’ by Maria Paschalidou, in which I participated as a sound designer and composer.

In order to make a definition of what collective artwork is, I need to make a distinction between collaborative art and collective art. By giving a clear description on what constitutes a collective cross-arts piece I intend to make a distinction between works of multiple authors and single authors respectively. Many times the authorship of the works created by a large group of artists is in question. The concept of single authorship is in doubt and rightfully the artists of cross arts collective works acquire equal intellectual property rights on the works created. For that reason, I will also define collaborative art as a separate method of creative process and use this definition as divergent to collective. My intention is that my definitions work as a consensus between artists, producers and technicians involved in multidisciplinary projects.