Hannah B. Higgins (born 1964) is an American writer and academic living in Chicago, Illinois. Higgins's research examines various post-conceptual art historical subjects (visual, musical, computational and material) in terms of two philosophically and practically entwined terms: information and sensation. She is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a founding Director of IDEAS, an interdisciplinary arts major, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Higgins is the daughter of the Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles. [1] She received her B.A. in 1988 from Oberlin College, her M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1990, and graduated with her Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Chicago. Higgins is married to Joe Reinstein, a digital marketing executive, and has two children: Zoë and Nathalie. Her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, is a New York-based intermedia artist.
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties."
Dick Higgins (1938–1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement. Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.
Intermedia was a term used in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various inter-disciplinary art activities that occurred between genres in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works in expanded cinema that were associated with the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque.
James Tenney was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. He was married to the artist Iris Lezak from 1962 to 1978, and to the poet Anne Tardos from 1990 until his death.
Ken Friedman, was a member of Fluxus, an international laboratory for experimental art, architecture, design, and music. Friedman joined Fluxus in 1966 as the youngest member of the classic Fluxus group. He has worked closely with other Fluxus artists and composers such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, and Nam June Paik, as well as collaborating with John Cage and Joseph Beuys. He was the general manager of Dick Higgins's Something Else Press in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, Friedman's work as a management consultant and designer led him to an academic career, first as Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, then as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Friedman is currently University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne and Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at Tongji University.
Alison Knowles is an American visual artist known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications. Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists who aspired to merge different artistic media and disciplines. Criteria that have come to distinguish her work as an artist are the arena of performance, the indeterminacy of her event scores resulting in the deauthorization of the work, and the element of tactile participation. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. In May 2015, she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Pratt.
Experimentalism is the philosophical belief that the way to truth is through experiments and empiricism. It is also associated with instrumentalism, the belief that truth should be evaluated based upon its demonstrated usefulness. Experimentalism is considered a theory of knowledge that emphasizes direct action and scientific control as well as methods and consequences.
Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by such Fluxus artists as Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, John Cage, Emmett Williams and by such important modernist figures as Gertrude Stein, Henry Cowell, and Bern Porter.
Poem Field is the name of a series of 8 computer-generated animations by Stan Vanderbeek and Ken Knowlton in 1964-1967. The animations were programmed in a language called Beflix, which was developed by Knowlton.
Emmett Williams was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Nöel.
Robert John Lansdown was a British computer graphics pioneer, polymath and Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, which was renamed in his honour in 2000.
Danger music is an experimental form of avant-garde 20th and 21st century music and performance art. It is based on the concept that some pieces of music can or will harm either the listener or the performer, understanding that the piece in question may or may not be performed. Kyle Gann describes in his book Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice how Takehisa Kosugi's composition Music for a Revolution directs the performer to "[s]coop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later". Works such as this are also sometimes referred to as anti-music because they seem to rebel against the concept of music itself. Danger music is often closely associated with the Fluxus school of composition, especially the work of Dick Higgins who composed a series of works entitled Danger Music.
Charlie Gere is a British academic who is professor of media theory and history at The Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, The University of Lancaster and previously, director of research at the Institute for Cultural Research at The University of Lancaster. He is author of several books and articles on new media art, art and technology, continental philosophy and technology. His main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to post-conceptual art and philosophy.
Joe Jones was an American avant-garde musician associated with Fluxus especially known for his creation of rhythmic music machines.
Source: Music of the Avant-Garde – also known and hereafter referred to as Source Magazine – was an independent, not-for-profit musical and artistic magazine published between 1967 and 1973 by teachers and students of the University of California, Davis, California. It emerged from the flourishing Californian musical experimentalism of the late 1950s-early 1960s, at UC-Davis and Mills College. The 11 issues document new music practices of the period like indeterminacy, performance, graphic scores, electronic music and intermedia arts.
Eric Andersen is a Danish artist associated with the Fluxus art movement. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Benjamin Patterson was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement.
Douglas Kahn is known for his historical and theoretical writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music, energies in the arts, and history and theory of the media arts. His writings have been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art. He is Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Professor Emeritus at University of New South Wales, Australia, and Professor Emeritus at University of California, Davis, where he was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies. He was a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship from 2012 to 2016 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.
Jacquelynn Baas is an independent curator, cultural historian, writer, and Director Emeritus of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has published on topics ranging from the history of the print media to Mexican muralism to Fluxus to Asian philosophies and practices as resources for European and American artists.
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