ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an initiative to activate Dick Higgins’s Intermedia Chart (1995) through artistic interventions. It begins by tracing and contextualizing the Intermedia Chart’s development, which originated from Higgins’s attempt to explain the concept of intermedia to Italian collector Luigi Bonotto. The project, coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of Higgins’s “Intermedia” essay, published in Something Else Newsletter (1966), and the thirtieth anniversary of the Intermedia Chart, invited both Fluxus artists and a young generation of makers to intervene conceptually and visually on reproductions of the original diagram. Through analysis of selected artistic responses, particularly those by Philip Corner, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Mieko Shiomi and Ken Friedman, the text explores how contemporary artists have expanded on and reinterpreted Higgins’s concept. It then examines how the activation project aligns with current curatorial practices by serving as a catalyst for new artistic production and theoretical discourse. It concludes by proposing that activation not only enlivens archival collections but also expands conservation, transforming the archive from a static repository into a generative space for contemporary artistic practice.
