Panel Statement

Panel: Intermedia Art in the Digital Age

The critical role played by Intermedia in reevaluating aspects of art, music and performance in the early 1960s has gained increasing recognition, a similar important relationship between Fluxus language experimentation and intermedia has often been overlooked. Fluxus and the artists who associated themselves at various times with this rubric had a significant roll in the development of and explorations in intermedia in the late 1950s and 1960s. This part of the Fluxus project can be connected to four Post-Modern challenges to both language and media determinism: the enactment of a multiplicity of meaning systems (and states) and the apparent devaluation of specific meaning; a focus on the structure of discourse as opposed to its operative function; the loss of subjective definition in culture and discourse; the denial of historicity in social and linguistic change. This essay will specifically consider the first two of these aspects in depth because it is with regards to these two that Fluxus developments in intermedia and its intersections with language and art are most clearly evident.

• Owen F. Smith, University of Maine, USA, s an historian of alternative art forms, a producer of multiples, digital artist, and performance artist. His scholarly work has been published in numerous books and catalogs on Fluxus, Intermedia and related forms of creativity. In 1998 his historical survey of the Fluxus Movement, Fluxus, The History of an Attitude, was published by San Diego State University Press. His work as an artist has been exhibited throughout the US and in Europe and Japan. His work was recently seen in Experimenta New Media Arts Festival, Australia, The Newbury Arts Centre, Cork, UK and the Boston CyberArts Festival.

Full text (PDF) p. 129-130