Intermedia Composition in Fools Paradise

We have chosen to use an intermedia strategy for our collaboration in designing and composing Fools Paradise. As employed by Fluxus artist and theorist Dick Higgins, intermedia designates a compositional process that works across the boundaries between media or even fuses media. It extends the creation of form across media or sensory modalities without necessarily promoting a tight coupling of events. At the same time, intermedia implies something more specific than multisensory opera. It is not so much a "total art work" as a hybrid art work.

We plan initially on using as base material a generative system that Paul Hertz has used in graphic works, performances, and intermedia installations. The Diagram and Database sections can give you an idea of how we are working with the system for Fools Paradise. The PDF documents linked below can give you an idea of Hertz's theoretical work with this particular system. Examples of concrete productions may be found in Hertz's online portfolio.

We're dividing up the work of collaboration roughly as follows:

It is expected that Stephen Dembski, in composing music for the final realization of the work, will reinterpret and select parameters as best fits his compositional purposes and style, and that he may contribute new material that Hertz can in turn interpret in graphical or interactive structures.

Within the artistic freedom granted to both artists, intermedia parameterization acts as a sort of scaffolding for the work, and as a tool for generating compositional material. Its importance resides not in the literal values assigned to parameters, but in the establishment of correspondences as a point of departure for collaborative composition.