Fluxus,Intermedia and Language Experimentation: The Reconstruction of Media at the End of Language

Symposium:

• ISEA2002: 11th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2002:  

• Intermedia Art in the Digital Age

• Fluxus,Intermedia and Language Experimentation: The Reconstruction of Media at the End of Language

• Owen F. Smith

• 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.

   

  Full text (PDF) p. 129-130

Category:

• Panel