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Uniformbooks

@uniformbooks.bsky.social

Edited and published by Colin Sackett. colinsackett.co.uk / uniformbooks.co.uk

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Uniformbooks@uniformbooks.bsky.social · 22h ago

A revised 'Uniformbooks-house-style' version [image 1] of Dick Higgins' famous 'Intermedia' diagram, originally from 1966 [image 2]; intended to illustrate an unpublished essay by Michael Hampton about the various activities at Better Books in the 1960s. [excerpt in alt-text, image 3]

BildBild"The ‘Intermedia Chart’ retrospectively formalised as a serigraphic print by Dick Higgins in 1995, was a deadpan guide to the Fluxus universe for bewildered layman, and a smart way of validating that complex movement. On paper the schematic resembles a tambourine, its main delimiting circle (or tympanum) interrupted along its edge by different sized overlapping circles, each denoting a particular art form: multiple interstices, areas of dissonance (or ‘noise’) and ludic potential where disciplines might bleed together. The Happenings circle for instance, crosses over syntactically with Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Action Music and Fluxus. By representing Better Books diagrammatically as a bold circle with the book trade as its principal boundary, [image 3] it is possible with the aid of Higgins’ original Venn diagram, to map it as a site of perceptual ‘multimodality’, where a new species of undifferentiated, percussive ‘noise’ was generated of an intensity and magnitude greater than that of a bland high street store: a historically significant commercial platform, which despite being a haven for shoplifters, revelled in its underground status as a purveyor of 'occultural mystique'."
Uniformbooks@uniformbooks.bsky.social · 22h ago

A revised 'Uniformbooks-house-style' version [image 1] of Dick Higgins' famous 'Intermedia' diagram, originally from 1966 [image 2]; intended to illustrate an unpublished essay by Michael Hampton about the various activities at Better Books in the 1960s. [excerpt in alt-text, image 3]

BildBild"The ‘Intermedia Chart’ retrospectively formalised as a serigraphic print by Dick Higgins in 1995, was a deadpan guide to the Fluxus universe for bewildered layman, and a smart way of validating that complex movement. On paper the schematic resembles a tambourine, its main delimiting circle (or tympanum) interrupted along its edge by different sized overlapping circles, each denoting a particular art form: multiple interstices, areas of dissonance (or ‘noise’) and ludic potential where disciplines might bleed together. The Happenings circle for instance, crosses over syntactically with Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Action Music and Fluxus. By representing Better Books diagrammatically as a bold circle with the book trade as its principal boundary, [image 3] it is possible with the aid of Higgins’ original Venn diagram, to map it as a site of perceptual ‘multimodality’, where a new species of undifferentiated, percussive ‘noise’ was generated of an intensity and magnitude greater than that of a bland high street store: a historically significant commercial platform, which despite being a haven for shoplifters, revelled in its underground status as a purveyor of 'occultural mystique'."