Inter-media

Intermedia was a term used in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various inter-disciplinary art activities that occurred between genres in the 1960s.

The areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting and theatre could be described as "intermedia". With repeated occurrences, these new genres between genres could develop their own names (e.g. visual poetry, performance art); historically, an example is haiga, which combined brush painting and haiku into one composition.

Higgins described the tendency of what he thought was the most interesting and best in the new art to cross boundaries of recognized media or even to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered for art forms, including computers.

"Part of the reason that Duchamp's objects are fascinating while Picasso's voice is fading is that the Duchamp pieces are truly between media, between sculpture and something else, while a Picasso is readily classifiable as a painted ornament. Similarly, by invading the land between collage and photography, the German John Heartfield produced what are probably the greatest graphics of our century..."

With characteristic modesty, he often noted that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had first used the term.

Gene Youngblood also described intermedia, beginning in his "Intermedia" column for the Los Angeles Free Press beginning in 1967 as a part of a global network of multiple media that was "expanding consciousness"—the intermedia network—that would turn all people into artists by proxy. He gathered and expanded ideas from this series of columns in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, with an introduction by Buckminster Fuller.

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