We are thrilled to announce Hannah B Higgins, Professor of Intermedia and Avant-Garde Art and Culture and Founding Director of IDEAS at the University of Illinois Chicago as our speaker at the Research Wednesday seminar series, on May 22, 2024, 5 pm – 6:30 pm CEST (online).
“NOW THAT YOU’RE READY FOR THE REAL THING”
The front page of a 1964 cc VTRE Fluxus newsletter contained the statement, “Now That You’re Ready for the Real Thing.” The statement was followed by all manner of Fluxus event, object, and action. This talk examines the place of the real across some paradigmatic Fluxus events, kits, and actions. George Maciunas used the term “non-art reality” as an essential component of Fluxus. This talk theorizes a Fluxus multisensory aesthetics and ethics beyond the artworld while framing a few of the substantial challenges that “non-art reality” brings to Fluxus exhibition and preservation.
Professor Hannah B Higgins is solo author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002; with recent translation to Korean from National Research Foundation of Korea and Spanish translation coming up) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and co-editor of with Douglas Kahn of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012; coming up in Chinese with the Commercial Press of Hong Kong). She has received the UIC University Scholar Award, DAAD, Getty Research Institute, Philips Collection, and Emily Harvey Foundation Fellowships. Higgins is the daughter of Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and is co-executor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press.
Professor Higgins’s research examines twentieth century avant-garde art with a specific interest in Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, performance art, food art and early computer art. Her books and articles argue for the humanistic value of multi-modal sensory cognitive experience.
This online event is free, but you will need to register in order to attend. You can register through Eventbrite via this link.
Activating Fluxus 