The object of this paper is to share a new way of thinking about Intermedia and possible intermedial aspects within the writing of poetry; intermedial aspects that are not necessarily revealed through the use of New Media components or digital or video texts. I will use examples from my own writing and research to try and explicate how poetries can uncover Intermedia that don’t have such an obvious presence in their writing or performance.

A bit about my work:- working in a poetics that educates itself through Sound Poetry, without directly continuing its project, I seek to test the interlocutory role of media in poetry and the various dynamics of voice and speech. For example I have been investigating the connectivity between The Radio Voice, analogue sound, and Sound Poetry. What relationships are at play within these units that are not simply an ‘inter’ or crossover? And what is intermedial about poetry that references them?

To answer this question I will start with the historical proposition for Intermedia as made by artist Dick Higgins in 1966. Taking the form of a newsletter for Higgings’ Something Else Press, the word Intermedia was claimed and defined in reference to the Fluxus art project. It laid out a strategy for practices that combined objects, forms and approaches to artwork in a way that ‘conceptually fused’ the discursive elements.

In contemporary terms this ‘conceptual fusion’ is now the homogenized site of the digital, where the digital interface is the meeting point – the intermedium. Like New Media, Intermedia is an umbrella term – in art school and institution speak – that generalizes the use of technology. I want to tease out meaning from the original definition, still with view to the modern interface, but with a focus on the relationships within the networks produced by cross-media work.

To facilitate this unraveling I will be drawing on the language of Michel Serres and his model of the parasite and the quasi-object, and then the extension on this made by Bruno Latour with his definition of hybrids. Both promote an alternative way of deconstructing boundaries, emphasizing the relational links between them.

First I want to look at this diagram ‘The Intermedia Chart’ made (possibly with tongue in cheek) by Dick Higgins to illustrate the process of work that probe the in between spaces of media and the extent of the cross-pollination of the Fluxus works. The Fluxus sphere incorporates the ellipses of happenings, actions music, conceptual art, mail art, concrete poetry, sound poetries, and graphic notation. The diagram is like a guide then, for a viewer encountering a Fluxus work – for example an event-score such as Alison Knowles’s Make a Salad; for them to decipher the role and origin of the score, the salad (or readymade) and the performer/audience dynamic.
We can then see that the purer forms keep a lip outside the organizing circle of Intermedia that designates the area of crossovers, where the language of one art form is transposed onto the syntax of another.
In this diagram, and indeed the thinking out of Intermedia, each circle is its own distinction, with boundaries, that indeed overlap, but have the form of objects. They share components on the basis of their objecthood and territories. By the laws of this 2-dimensional diagram the localized circles (modes of working), cross at the point of generic intentions (a musical instrument say in Robert Watts F/H Trace 1979, – takes a bow and ping-pong balls fall out of the horn?) and a new inter media or cross-genre is born.

Now, instead of a diagram with forms overlapping, I want to think about a cluster of relations. And then apply this relational network to Michel Serres’ paradigm of the parasite. The French implications on the word include a multitude of meanings – all at play in Serre’s writing – the biological, the social parasite, the infection, and the dual meaning of guest feeding from the table and also the host. And finally it also means static noise. All meanings are useful to this discourse.

In a system of circulation then, as partially represented by the Intermedia Chart, there are flows of activity, directing messages and information. A diverted flow, the introduction of a new media, is the interruption of a parasite – and so we have not shared elements – but one media parasitizing another. Performance art parasitizing a paradigm of everyday life (a happening), art parasitizing science (Science Art). So rather than medial fusions of Dada, oral traditions, concrete poetry etc, , Sound Poetry can be seen as poetry making parasitic interruptions on technology, the body, speech and language, song etc. The series of relations is a movement. A flow, with static noise.

For Serres the host and the parasitic guest make something new together – generates a new system. And the static noise within the system is not merely interruptive but creative. The noise, is what instigates change – creating multiple escape routes throughout a territory. And so perhaps I am interested in Intermedia as setting up systems of noise, and a generative diversion of relations within the process of making poetry.

In my research into radio I have homed in on two moments in its history that illustrate this. One is the broadcasted adaptation of H.G Well’s War of the Wars, directed and voiced by Orson Wells. The so-called hysteria that ensued on its airing signaled the impact of the radio voice. The event gave a new definition to radio as a media, and a new relationship between media and the voice.
The second example is the discovery of Pulsars – where data from a Cambridge laboratory radio telescope in 19— revealed regular pulsing emissions which was at first dismissed by the researcher Jocelyn Bell as meaningless interference –and she wrote ‘scruff’ on charts. When the pulses continued with similar regularity they were then cautiously/jokingly referred to as LGM (little green men). Further research located them as emissions from the core of a supernoved star – spinning on its jolted axis like a lighthouse.

This movement from scruff → LGM → pulsar; from noise → intelligent message → dead star is only in the reading through the radio media. The pulsing signal was a constant around which a system was organsied.

Serres would call the signal a quasi-object, where diverging relations to the same signal kept it in a state of flux. The noise generated a new system. The quasi-object, like a ball that lies on the ground, dormant outside definition, then becomes active when kicked or bounced, is the meeting point of relations. It is interesting to think about this in terms of a Fluxus action, where the performer revolves around a prop or score – each component being both quasi-object and quasi-subject.

I’d like to see my work, and intermedial poetry, as the setting up of such systems and allowing quasi-objects to emerge, and collapse and new ones emerge… Just as Jocelyn Bell affected noise into the system by writing scruff – and the scruff became the creative drive to change. A poetry that allows for the noise of the system, or the scruff, to be the instigator of a work, is surely intermedial – even if in its eventual transmission – it’s just voice and paper. Systems that broadcast the voice and voice the broadcast.

This framework, rather than in the DH model of an artist ‘taking this from that and that from that’ to make a new media, decentres the position of the poet, or the text, or the medium, or the voice. So it is not even as simple to say that the poem is the noise of an intermedia, nor is it simple to say what medium (or speech or language) is used in the making of a text or how the medium uses the text.

Michel Serres “I feed myself endlessly at the buffet of my language ; I shall never be able to give it what it gave me. I am the noise of its complicated harmony, or its wail. I would die from not writing; I would die of not taking my feast of words with a few friends, from whom, somehow, I get my language. I shall never be weaned from it” [Serres, 1982/2007, p. 231]
This decentering makes the matter of the poem, and its medium, a new, arguably more open space to work and write poetry in. Which is the parasite; guest or host, and what is the static? This is how this framework gives the intermedial poet more freedom, and space to explore relationships between the various dynamics at work in the work. To create a network around a quasi-object – to follow a quasi-object is to trace a network.

Bruno Latour, in ‘We Have Never Been Modern’ [1991] talks about Serres’ quasi-object as hybrids. He highlights the false distinctions between social, political, scientific and the mythical divide between culture-nature. Every daily newspaper reveals a Hybrid Network; a simple news article on a contraceptive pill is tracing a network of culture/nature, politics, fallopian tubes, drug companies and the Pope. The objects, systems and individual identities are not representatives from primary zones, because hybrids are not made up of pure districts – are not one pure ingredient combined with another. The world is nothing but hybrids, and there never have been pure forms. There are only actants impacting on and implicating connections. An actant; an actor and actions in an event-system pulls various hybrids into play (through a series of transformations). The actants in the hybrid poem may be the score, a recording technology, a radio, a microphone, a poet, a voice. The radio itself as an actant is at once a narrative, an object, a medium – “without ever being reduced to pure being”. Each actant transforms the role of the other, so that the work, the poem, the quasi-object is operating in a way that the original terminology for Intermedia doesn’t allow.
It would be Latourian to undo the line drawn between the analogue era and the digital in our approach to media. And instead to observe and experiment in our relations to the changing interfaces of each. It is important not to let the definition of Intermedia flatten these relations into a one sound.

Intermedia and Hybrids both represent a lack of borders, but this latter version maybe allows for an extended horizon. For example, it undoes the separation between the poem’s voice, the radio-voice, the TV’s voice, the tannoy’s voice. The experience of writing a poem is to see how it parasites these (hosts them, feeds on them)

A quasi-text, a hybrid poem – These non-separations, and therefore non-un-separations make it more interesting to work in, it is not so much an ‘inter’ or a between than the noise of parasites and the actants of hybrids. To not separate human subject and technological objects in the first place makes the relational networks between them more dynamic than a joining or even re-joining. I am body like an analogue sound wave, I am a node on a multi-dimensional network.

The voice continues to be pushed through new modes of media, Intermedia poetry should keep the relations influx, and keep introducing noise.

OthersSaid

OhGod

Loaner1

WeAppear

Locksmith

Scruff Poetry.
Is not Sound Poetry.
Is sometimes little green men.
Is sometimes just meaningless interference (scratches or fluffs)
Always has a pulse.

Holly Pester and James Wilkes Performance
Friday July 2nd 9.30pm – 10.30pm. £6

James Wilkes and Holly Pester work collaboratively on themed
poetry sets which explore forms of performed texts and live word-scores. They are currently experimenting with the sound aesthetics and themes of radio, devising a poetics that performs something they term as a ‘radio voice’. Their collaborative Ledbury reading is an accumulation of investigations into the voice and transmission. Using radiophonic scores and parodies of ‘panic broadcasts’ they ask: why does radio seem to so neatly equate with ruin?
Where’s the line between a signal for help, and a transmission call to arms? And, how does the voice preserve the message?

Holly Pester performs regularly throughout the UK including the
recent Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon. James Wilkes is a poet,
critic and playwright based in South East London. They both appeared in the anthology City States (Penned in the Margins, 2009).

See here for details.

interview pieces by Holly Pester is licensed under a Creative Commons License

2
No one wants to see a bashed berry yogurt in the morning. On occasion it’s forgivable to tone two neutrals together. Soap and sack, rough water holidays. This fest is an ideal time to try some new samples – plucked skin is hot but to be daring is to risk a sterile ruby. Minus a shade or two for a proper century carpet, and now you’re really staining! A good fantasy fetcher is ¾ pig ink, a must-have for this corner space.
Feather the brick wash. You won’t regret putting blush before you’re 40. Make space, make time, the cherries are groaning. The crack of a new month is the perfect excuse for some fresh acid thinking. Why not update your alcoves with something musty. Your home is a mood-farm and worth every lick. If the dappled long coats get you down, sprinkle some fizz and relive the era of the mantle-piece. Something for sitting and driving: it should always make you roomy, a bit like a garden.

3
People of the watermelon, listen to the new sound coming from the angry red planet. Peach-wash or milk crust? This is contemporary California style. The new motors have a wonderful aroma and a mildness that agrees with your red-eye. Liner. So do yourselves a flavour and complete the decking in meat planks. Do it for your family, or just for the sheer fat of it. Life is certainly pleasurable now. It’s made of pure foam – Don’t ever forget that. Fact.

In the olden days a wife was a spread of bacteria. She knew the smack of pink wafer biscuit. Spray, spray, spray away the crinkles. Lip is the stick smart women should wear – says Andy McDowell, the glut agent. Today the trend in telephones is certainly to colour – in both home and the office. So why not update your talking shades? You’re a smoker, so American. Not a baby washer after all.
This bathroom is synonymous with the gracious living of Beverly Hills. It’s mulberry blush, it’s sandalwood and it won’t harm your pets. Want to know Paris’s secret to beauty in the morning? Cry a little. And there’s no need to plug it in, or even shake. To keep your decor in trend, you must follow the Johnson Plan. Step one is a Barbarella diet with two-tone salmon trays. Step two to three becomes available on Boxing Day. The most recent devotee has inched herself into 3 flesh sizes her previous. It could be you, so why not update your talking shades?

4
Feeling low? Blow away the brown air with a new internal wall. You’ve seen them in the showrooms; they leak real-life hormones. Halleluiah Jimmy. Now award yourself a twin-pack and really begin the neo year. It really really really will make your mornings bigger. It’s what every contempo doll is looking for. What is? This is! And you thought the bag-hogs had the last sample stitch. We all care about your lounge, Ronda. Believe it.
R-O-T spells luxury rug.

5
Monroes welcomes Baglics, the most recent member of the Vanity family. They insist on surfaces being bright and clear. Keeping up bright and across clear, ensuring a bright and clear sphere that’s bright and clear. The portals are bright and clear. The bays are bright and clear. They’ve customized bright to enhance clear, really bringing out the shine in the furnishings. The focus is on bringing out the bright, it’s clear. The design shanks are aren’t just clear, they’re brighter than clear, they’re bright and clear. And the rest. Bag-a-lics say, Come Alive! You’re in the coochie purse generation. That’s bright; that’s clearer than clear. Pimp your basement room ready for some grade A action. Hang up the stuff! Match faux fur with jaundice stones. And always make sure there’s plenty of peach on the blankets.

Programme notes:

At the conception of this project Kaye and Pester created a system of exchange and translation, developing shared concerns for chance operations, periphery speech sounds and the thrill of live performance. By trading sound, text and image material, they allowed the piece to workshop itself out of their (re)interpretation and (mis)translation. Kaye and Pester have engendered not only a musical score, but a hypertextual network of graphic notation, sound poetics and a prolific collaborative partnership.

The piece works as a triptych, with each instant both setting Pester’s text and also conceptually representing each visual poem. The piece is also interspersed with rhythmic interludes.

Baritone – Alex Garziglia

Percussion 1 – Catherine Ring

Percussion 2 – Louise Morgan

To begin our collaboration Josh and I exchanged compilation CDs with recordings that we felt represented or at least indicated the direction of our practices/interests. My CD for Josh was a mix of sound poetry excerpts from Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing, some experimental vocal tracks by heavy metal musician Mike Patton, a few songs from Bjork’s ‘Medulla’ album and some Mongolian throat singing. (And some pretty incredible Michael Jackson acapella!) Things that I like, listen to, make me think about the voice and the concept of singing.

Josh passed on to me an alien world of contemporary opera, some of his own piano pieces and pieces for many voices, plus a welcome reminder of The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’. What did they tell me about Josh? That he likes inter-sections of voice and percussion; rhythmic, polyphonic vocal sounds.

After this we talked over our listening experiences and went to see as many exhibition, event and performances as we could, trying to build or uncover a common language. It became clear that neither of us were interested in the conventional poet-composer partnership, i.e. having me compose a text, hand it over to Josh and then have him set it to music. We wanted a collaboration that involved a continuous workshop and thought laboratory, that pushed both our practices forward, and gave away our personal artistic temperaments.

More than this, we wanted the piece to perform the exciting collision of text and music that was occurring in our dialogue.

We started by making a small collection of vocal noise. I recorded some ‘para-speech’ noises (erming, ahring, coughing, spluttering, laughing etc.) and Josh produced some piano bits and some of his own throat singing. Josh set this using some sound editing software and passed it back to me. I took this newly constructed sound piece and visually translated it into a sequence of typewriter poems. I passed these back to Josh who translated these as graphic notation, unpicking the flat plane of paper and creating a dimensionality that I found very exciting.

And this was how the process continued, passing back and forth sound, to image to composition.

Eventually I narrowed down the sources for my noise-making to YouTube footage of Barack Obama interviews, extracting those wonderful, distinctively pitched, vocal controllers he makes when pausing between words. I collected these, mimicked them and recorded them. I then juxtaposed this recording with impressions of talking pet birds (also sourced from YouTube). These sounds were arranged into the sound piece ‘bird interview’ which informed the body of much of the final piece:

Download audio file (bird-interview.mp3)

This suited our mutual creative interests in interviews, periphery speech expenditure and procedure-led art-making. It was also inevitable given my current fixation with the phenomenal sound of Obama’s voice.

While much of the material was still in fragments; typewriter poems, sound texts and annotated scores, we met with our singer, Alex and began testing some of the vocal sequences Josh had devised. During one of these rehearsal sessions I transcribed some conversations between Josh and Alex, discussing the technicalities of singing the score. These transcriptions were worked into another poem that was spliced into the interventional sections before each miniature.

I was continually excited by the way Josh interpreted the material we had workshopped out between us. One of the typewriter poems I gave him had solid squares of letters, which Josh – through the indetermination of  graphic notation – devised into a game for percussionists. This is ‘played’ in the final miniature where Louise and Catherine race to get to a certain note in the grid. Because of this each performance, although structurally identical, has an inbuilt facilitator for different versions. Both Josh and I place a great deal of value on the alchemic moment of live performance and were eager to make sure that there was something deliberate that ensured each time would be different.

The female percussionists work together regularly as a duo and had a wonderful energy between them. Josh’s vision for Alex’s vocals to be constantly struggling to break through the drumming was almost too successful. They embraced the vocal interjections Josh had written for them with a thrilling vivacity. Overall the performic dynamic between the trio for the final performance made it something of a visual and sonic spectacle.

Photos by Marsha Bradfield

Alison Knowles Workshop Report: Intermedia and the Archive

Talk given at Translated Acts 2, Southampton University, 08.06.09

On April 3rd and 4th I was one of 10(ish) artists and researchers invited to take part in a practice-based workshop with the ‘exemplar’ artist Alison Knowles. It was an opportunity that promised a healthy shot of dynamism into my working as a poet and text artist; granting the freedom to experiment away from didactics. Knowles’ diverse practice is a great influence to me through its commitment to the Fluxus experience and its occupying of modalities between sculpture, performance, poetry and music. She is currently exploring sound making and sculpture with performance, continuing to develop the potential of Intermedia.

The workshop took place over two days in the October Gallery, London in two different spaces. On the Friday we were in a grand conference room, discussing and sharing ideas, and on Saturday we took over the next door theatre space for our Fluxus concert (with multiple interventions outside in the park). Day one opened with a tutorial of sorts on the concerns of Alison Knowles’ practice, and the continuing Fluxus project. These were introduced to us via a list of meditative questions of of which I can remember were,
“is the work exemplative or definitive?”
“is there something of the artist’s temperament in the work?”
“do you agree with what the work, successful or not, is ultimately saying/doing?”

We were taken on a tour of the history of ‘Event Score’, looking at footage of their premières at the 1963 Fluxus Festival at Staatliche Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, and of recent re-stagings like the Tate Modern’s Long Weekend May 2008, where Knowles’ exemplary piece Make a Salad (a score consisting of that single proposition) was performed for an audience of 3000.

On day 2 we held our own Fluxus concert with every member of the group (including Alison) being both performer and audience. The concert was prepared and executed in the prescribed Fluxus style with a detailed order of proceedings, black n’ white clothing etc. and featured both re-stagings of original Alison Knowles Event Scores; ‘Shoes of your choice’; ‘Song of your choice’; ‘The Colour Red’, and short (capsule) performance pieces that some of us devised especially as homage or adaptations of Fluxus works; ‘Reading Gertrude Stein’ and ‘Photo of Your Choice’.

It was clear that every work shown during our concert was considered (by Alison) as much an extension of, a supplement to or as much a realisation of the scores as every enactment of them that has ever taken place. The vast index of scores devised and published by the Fluxus group is just one fragment of the living archive of their performances and re-performances; the printed ephemera can be considered the index while the continuing activations of the scores through their performances world-wide, is the expanding archive.It’s the Event Score; its functionality as works of art and as an archive that every artist is granted access to, that I want to focus on in relation to my work and contemporary poetic practice.

In terms of the artist’s temperament, every Knowles Event Score has an assured focus. Each one is an instruction for the process of researching an act, an object, or a concept from everyday reality. It removes the functionality of this act and reveals a poiesis. ‘Make a Salad’ takes a commonplace activity and reveals an aesthetic in the physical movements, sounds and colours of the production. ‘Shoes of Your Choice’ (in my reading) reveals the phenomenology in impromptu speech and description.

Alison Knowles stressed how important it is, when transposing everyday reality into artwork, to have and maintain focus. She said ‘know your ingredients’. You must have clearly defined parameters of investigation and let the results be guided by chance. Be aware of the act, revel in it, and notice what it is doing outside reality. Notice how it feeds back into reality and in what ways the transmission continues beyond the performance.

The Event Score de-familiarises an activity; it is an algorithm on making a salad, walking in the street, talking about your shoes, reading a book; in it’s reframing it weirds it. The algorithm, the affecting code, is to estrange the act from our understanding and re-codify it.

There is no artefact, only an act. It’s the identity of the act that is the focus for viewing, reading, and it is an unbreakable self-same product over 30 years later. It activates the ideal of making a salad and locates a point of Intermedia between everyday reality and art.

This original Fluxus notion of Intermedia and the resistance of artefact is what drives my work in speech and sound poetry. Intermedia is the Fluxus legacy of the interchange between multiple modes of production, often with the affect of relieving the authority from an ‘established’ media by internally and conceptually transposing it through another, thus engendering new practices. In the 1960s the Fluxus project de-stabilised the authority of painting and sculpture through a conceptual interchange with performance; the authority of classical music composition through an encounter with visual poetry and performance.

In my work I am trying to think about Intermedia from this starting point and apart from the institutionalised term. I would like my poetics to occupy sites of medium counterchange as a poetic act. And so in my research I ask the question;

How is Intermedia useful when thinking about the reveling-in-the-act-ness of an event score, and the revelling in the cross-over between functionality and de-familiarisation?

Is my voice-driven poetics a revelling in the cross-over between language and speech-sound? When I store and exchange sound or image texts through digital networks am I revelling in the cross-over between databasing and exposition?
In Benjamin’s terms Intermedia signals a functional transformation in the production of writing or art making. Mediums are re-functioned to channel artistic production – rather than save or package them. In my sound-poetry practice, an digital archive that’s intended to store sound files, or snippets of text – can becomes the facilitator of the creative act. The interface which is designed to interrogate the archive, is used to create an index-composition (howzat for an intermedia?) of texts and recordings, documentation and discourse. For the practitioner the processing, exhibiting, exchanging and archiving of works is all as much a part of the artistic production. The space of the archive internally and conceptually relates the practice and the criticism; the writer and reader; the data and the database.

I’m not an expert in New Media but I am interested in how this new relationship to the database feeds my poetics and also my reading of artists who have a history of creative archive practices. Sound artist Henri Chopin’s publishing enterprise was precisely this. His magazines Cinquième Saison and OU creatively indexed new and old works into an original system of poetics. And I have already mentioned the Fluxus ephemera and the compedium of Event Scores as being part of an creative archive.

The archive is not static nor permanent. Poetics can move through an internal or external system. In my work I engage in found, sourced or generated speech material by breaking it down into sound elements and de-familiarising myself to it. It follows Alison Knowles’ code for ‘sampling’ every-day life, and re-coding it as something alien. With outlined algorithmic parameters the poetry-object is an ideal model for re-enactments and re-versions to occur. The medium workshops the text into being just as the medium of a workshop (the Alison Knowles workshop!) both archives and generates texts.

An intermedia artist is active through technique not style – they are operating not informing, creating new apparatus for different kinds of production. The task, my task, is to re-function spaces and mediums for new artistic production. Perhaps the intermedia between art and everyday reality of Alison Knowles’s Event Scores is a way of protecting the act of intervening on the world as an artist; interventions like taking pictures of public buildings, and refusing imposed ‘speech-acts’ to qualify being present in the street or park. Liberties are more and more compromised.

My poetry is in the act, the saying doing and sound making; and then the storing, exchanging and showing. My ingredients are the sounds and the shape of everyday language; the toungue and the mouth, as is the translation and the workshopping between them.