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Posted On: August 5th 2026, 09:08 pm
Dick Higgins's "Intermedia Chart" (1966), reproduced by Soft Systems, Chicago, 2024.
Original: Molvena, Italy, 1995.
Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought—categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers—which we call the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. This essentially mechanistic approach continued to be relevant throughout the first two industrial revolutions, just concluded, and into the present era of automation, which constitutes, in fact, a third industrial revolution. - Dick Higgins, "Intermedia," the Something Else NEWSLETTER, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1966
Original: Molvena, Italy, 1995.
Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought—categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers—which we call the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. This essentially mechanistic approach continued to be relevant throughout the first two industrial revolutions, just concluded, and into the present era of automation, which constitutes, in fact, a third industrial revolution. - Dick Higgins, "Intermedia," the Something Else NEWSLETTER, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1966
Comments (8)
2 months agoloureirostudio2026
And yet, asW. J. T. Mitchell would say, there is no media that is not "mixed media". Higgins comes from a practice position, although as he says himself, this is much more a discursive issue than an actual clear separation in the art praxis.
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