Research Wednesday, May 22, 17:00-18:30 CEST, online.

The team of Activating Fluxus, a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at Bern Academy of the Arts, is 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.

“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.

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Professor Hannah B Higgins is solo author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) 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). 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.

The event will take place within the Research Wednesday seminar series organized at the Department of Materiality in Art and Culture, Bern University of the Arts. The event has been organized by SNSF Activating Fluxus funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project investigates the objects, events, scores, and ephemera that emerged in the spirit of Fluxus in the 1960s–70s in Switzerland, Europe, the UK, and the USA. Inherently fluctuating by definition, Fluxus rejects any stable, material form. Considering the transitory aspects of Fluxus forms not destined for preservation, and looking through a multidisciplinary lens of conservation, art history, performance studies, heritage studies and museology, our project advances novel strategies for activating Fluxus through the reconstruction, adaptation and artistic reinterpretation of Fluxus forms.

This online event is free, but you will need to register in order to attend. A Zoom link will be sent to the registrants shortly before the event.

Image courtesy of The University of Illinois Chicago.