So What Happens After Happenings?
"Hate Happenings. Love Intermedia Kinetic Environments." John Brockman is partly kidding, while conveying the notion that Happenings are Out and Intermedia Kinetic Environments are In in the places where the action is. John Brockman, the New York Film Festival's 25-year-old coordinator of a special events program on independent cinema in the United States, plugging into the switched-on "expanded cinema" world in which a film is not just a movie, but an Experience, an Event, an Environment. This is a humming electronic world, in which multiple films, tapes, amplifiers, kinetic sculpture, lights and live dancers or actors are combined to Involve Audiences in a Total Theater Experience. Unlike Happenings, which often involve audiences in complicated relationships with plastics, bottles, sacks, ropes and other objects, Intermedia Kinetic Experiences permit audiences simply to sit, stand, walk or lie down and allow their senses to be Saturated by Media. No Way Out : "You can't escape from an Intermedia Kinetic Environments the way you can from a play or any art form that reaches you through language," says Brockman.
"This is primary experience. It takes place in a 360-degree environment." Brockman, who fully accepts Marshall McLuhan's "the medium-is-the-message" thesis, believes that full exposure to I.K.E. is positively "therapeutic." Brockman feels sure that exposure to Intermedia Kinetic Environments like these will change people's perceptions. He finds it difficult to describe exactly from what to what ("You just have to experience it. The whole point is that it cannot be told in words.") In any case, he is sure the change will be for the better. "After all, we're living in the second half of the 20th century, and for all most people know we may as well be in the 16th. Only the hippest, most aware artists are able to make a statement about our world today.
"It's really going to change a lot of the students' heads, experiencing all those people," hip John Brockman said happily the other day. Brockman, a young impresario sometimes known as Intermedia's intermediary was referring to "Intermedia '68," a two-month, touring festival he is producing with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Council on the Arts."These people traffic in experience, not objects or products," says Brockman, who sometimes sounds like the book he is writing on the subject (with USCO's Gerd Stern). "Their performances result from an awareness of the reality inherent in the new technologies.Their function is to make visible the perceptions of science. They use the environrnent as an art form, and have abandoned the notion of art as metaphor to deal with man in time and space."