Search Results

For poets such as Finlay and Morgan, concrete poetry remained a fundamentally linguistic practice, with visual effects used to enhance or methodically alter a central semantic message. For the Guernsey-born, Gloucestershire-based poet Dom Sylvester Houedárd, concrete poetry came to entail a grammar of abstract visual forms, constructed from letters and diacritical marks, in which semantic meaning was largely subsumed. This quality is most virtuosically expressed in the so-called ‘typestracts’ which he created on his Olivetti typewriter. Houédard’s wordless poetics partly exemplifies the re-conceptualisation of concrete poetry as an intermedia, neo-dada artform across the 1950s-70s, which often manifested itself through a movement away from language, and in attachments to the sixties counter-culture. But the unique distinction of Houédard’s work is its attempt to express a wordless or apophatic awareness of God, in which sense his concrete poetry is connected to his vocation as a Benedictine monk, priest, and theologian. This chapter traces the development of these entwined impulses, moving from his beat-influenced verse of the 1940s-50s to his ‘kinetic’ concrete poetry of the mid-1960s, and finally to the typestracts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Influences touched on along the way include Wittgenstein, auto-destructive art, and Tantric ritual.

Jack Benny was not only radio’s biggest star after the mid-1930s, but he was the most visible celebrity in Hollywood. This chapter examines the many ways that Benny’s radio program, and Benny’s performance career, intertwined radio and film, two powerful media industries that were often said to be at war with one another. While media conglomeration today means that performers and story ideas are moved freely across media, there were many impediments to do so in the past. Benny’s radio show was the first to parody popular movies, but he could not mention the radio stars who sold rival products. Benny’s radio-themed films made at Paramount between 1939 and 1941, met with significant box office success and even greater critical disparagement.

This chapter uses the specificities of analogue video to argue that the genre has a double lineage that runs through music and art histories. The theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion and Yvonne Spielmann is used to situate early video art-music within the expansive multimedia culture of the 1960s. Contrasting the electromagnetic basis of the medium with the technologies of film and television, the issues of transmission, preservation and deliberation are used to demonstrate how the simultaneity of the video signal enabled image and sound to be produced, projected and manipulated at the same time. Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Robert Cahen, Tony Conrad and Bill Viola provide examples of musically-trained artists who embraced video as an audiovisual agent for transformation. With the experimental nature of these musicians in mind, video art-music is discussed as a form of visual noise-composition able to produce a form of live intermedia.

The members of the Art Ensemble belonged to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an African American community organization on Chicago’s South Side. Formed in 1965, the AACM was the most influential artists’ collective in jazz and experimental music, and the Art Ensemble was its flagship band, the first AACM group to tour the world and record for major labels. The Art Ensemble’s model of social relations, adapted from the AACM, made all of these accomplishments possible. Although AACM musicians composed and performed in many different styles, they were bound together by a shared commitment to support one another’s creative explorations. Drawing on the Association’s example, the members of the Art Ensemble established their own social model based on the practices of cooperation and personal autonomy. The Art Ensemble’s revolutionary musical practices were also rooted in the early discoveries of the Association. In the 1960s, AACM members devised new means of integrating improvisation and composition, hybrid modes of music-making not previously envisioned by jazz players or experimentalist composers. The Art Ensemble took AACM-style hybridity to a new level, developing a unique performance practice that combined group improvisation with intermedia and a large repertoire of written compositions.

Chapter 2 chronicles the early years of the Association for Creative Musicians (AACM). Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, and Roscoe Mitchell joined the Association at its founding in 1965, enlisting in a nationwide movement of African American organizations working to achieve social change through the arts. By 1966, the preeminent bands in the AACM were Jarman’s quartet and Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, which featured Favors on bass and a new arrival from St. Louis, trumpeter Lester Bowie. The two groups were developing distinct yet compatible approaches to improvisation, composition, intermedia, and instrumentation (multi-instrumentalism, little instruments), and the members of the Art Ensemble started inviting Jarman to collaborate with them. He joined the Art Ensemble in 1969, just as the group was planning a voyage to Paris.

Chapter 4 examines A Jackson in Your House, the first of fifteen albums the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded in Europe. A Jackson in Your House brilliantly illustrates the band’s innovations in intermedia performance. On the album’s A-side, the musicians use verbal commentary and dramatic scenarios to address a number of political and cultural issues—notably the reception of black experimental music, including their own. However, on the B-side, they take a different approach, blending music with poetry and theater to create the kinds of vibrant soundscapes that Paris audiences found so compelling.

Chapter 8 addresses the Art Ensemble’s tenure at ECM Records, when the group achieved international renown and critical acclaim. By the 1980s, the band was touring more widely than ever, both abroad and at home. In the United States, the musicians’ mastery of intermedia allowed them to break into the performing-arts scene, while the success of their ECM albums earned them a prominent place in the jazz community, which was contending with the rise of a powerful traditionalist movement headed by Wynton Marsalis. This movement attracted many opponents, including the members of the Art Ensemble, who resisted traditionalism by proposing an alternative aesthetic, expressed in their evocative slogan “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”

Chapter 9 concentrates on Live from the Jazz Showcase, a video recording that captures all the sounds and sights of an Art Ensemble performance. In this concert, the band plays pieces inspired by the African diaspora, from Nigeria, Mali, and Morocco to New Orleans and New York. As the music unfolds, the group members’ onstage movements turn the performance into an immersive intermedia experience. Live from the Jazz Showcase is a ritual, a community celebration, and a captivating sonic and visual narrative about the meaning of Great Black Music.

This chapter explains how the media universe is like an ecosystem, an ensemble of interconnected “components” interacting in a series of exchanges out of which emerges a new phenomenon. Cinema has its own place in this fragile homeostasis, commonly known as the media culture of an era. Like any system, the “intermedia” system must manage information and feedback loops. Such feedback is negative if it does not modify the system; but if it radically affects the system and the foundation of its identity, it is seen as positive. The actions of the digital within the media system is seen as generating explosive feedback—as is the case with “audio-scripto-vision” media. The top to bottom digitalization of the new millennium thus fits into what media scholars call an irreversible ratchet; once it has ratcheted high enough, it is impossible to go back. This is the case with digital media, to the point that predigital media now seem like a distant continent.

This chapter examines changes in the Liverpool context of Liverpool poetry. It considers ‘intermedia poetry’, which refers to poetry that works in tandem with other arts, such as music, art, photography, genre fiction, or film. The analysis covers works such as ‘We Meet at Last’ by Matt Simpson, Deryn Rees-Jones' Quiver, Adrian Henri' Lowlands Away, and the poems of Paul Farley and Sean O'Brien.

This chapter examines the human and spatial dimensions of Fluxus, as embodied in the “interhuman intermedia”—a dense network of interactions and innovations created between individuals living and working together despite racial, political, and religious differences, as well as the various arguments therein and the critiques against Fluxus ideals. The interhuman intermedia is a cohesion of several variegated forces, all coming together into a harmonious whole. And as a movement, Fluxusis an advocate of peace and harmony, as seen in its appropriation of Buddhist ideals (i.e. the “awakeness to the precariousness of the other”) and practices, its sense of internationalism that expands on localized humanism, and even in its lighthearted delivery of political ideals and “unthought.” Proponents of Fluxus, in the end, seek that ever-elusive “art of peace”.

This chapter explores hypertext as a popular form of computer-mediated communication that has raised perhaps the highest expectations for a transformation of culture. It considers how the widespread aestheticization of digital forms of expression, which distinguishes between hypermedia and intermedia, separates fiction from interactive art, etc., fails to account for the fundamental question raised by hypertext: how to explain the anachronism of claiming precursors and forefathers while presenting a radical departure. It argues that plurivocal hypertext may have seemed like a radical shift but in fact grew out of the historical logic of the archive and the database. It also examines the convergence hypothesis and some of its proponents, including George Landow, and their claim that Roland Barthes anticipated hypertext. Finally, it looks at a number of twentieth-century thinkers who relied extensively on index cards, such as media theorist Harold Innis.

This chapter converges on the sound-in-film/sound-on-film dichotomy, when Cage revised his aesthetic stance on multimedia sound-system assemblages in the 1960s. Framed around a conference panel in 1967 at the University of Cincinnati, Cinema Now, in which Cage discussed the current state of Underground Cinema in the United States, this chapter outlines Cage’s interaction with the “two Stans,” Stan Brakhage and Stan VanDerBeek, culminating in a detailed critique of Cage’s 1965 immersive interactive multimedia work, Variations V. The chapter begins with a detailed reading of the fundamental tenets of Cage’s negative aesthetic set forth in his seminal publication, Silence (1961), exploring its implications for multimedia and intermedia theories in the 1960s. Two competing poles of interpretation of Cage’s theories surrounding chance and indeterminacy emerged from the first post-Cage generation. The first sought out a reduction of the artwork to its base materials in an act of contraction, whereas the second reached for the opposite, a total expansion of individual medium-specific artworks in a monumental Gesamtkunstwerk, epitomized by Stan VanDerBeek’s theories of expanded cinema and intermedia.

Chantal Akerman’s work of the 1970s is a sustained dissection of the connections and separations between sound and visual tracks within film. Indexicality comes under intense pressure, but is never dismissed, and the question of diegetic sound is permanently in play, as Akerman undermines easy distinctions between what is inside or beyond the accepted conventions of a film’s visual borders. This chapter argues that sound becomes a mode of structuring events and their perception, allowing a rigorous formalism to suggest not only meaning but also its fractalisation. Hearing underneath the visual and political strategies of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and News from Home (1976) via Saute ma ville (1968), Je tu il elle (1974) and Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), we can sense a pulsing of meaning that expands the film event into intermediality.