Dick Higgins (born Cambridge, England 1938, died Quebec, Canada 1998) was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Like many of the other Fluxus artists, he studied composition with John Cage. He married artist Alison Knowles in 1960. He founded Something Else Press in 1963, which published many important texts by artists including Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, Ray Johnson, Ken Friedman, and others.

Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name. His most notable contributions include "Danger Music" scores and the use of the term Intermedia to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s. He published forty-seven books, including a translation of Giordano Bruno's On the Composition of Signs and Images, which could be seen as an early text on multimedia. The Book of Love & War & Death, a book-length aleatory poem published in 1972 may have been one of the first computer-generated texts: in the introduction, he describes writing a FORTRAN IV program to randomize the lines in one of the poem's cantos. A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts collected many of his essays and theoretical works in 1976.

External links

• Higgins Remembered
• Higgins's Metadramas
• 1966 Statement on Intermedia
• Intermedia Tribute to Dick Higgins
• Ruud Janssen interview with Dick Higgins about mail art

1938 births | 1998 deaths | Fluxus

Dick Higgins | Dick Higgins | Dick Higgins