caption death_date death_place influenced birth_place imagesize field birth_date image article_title name bgcolour
dick higgins 25 october 1998 quebec , canada language poets cambridge , england 150px printmaking , composing , poetry 15 march 1938 dickhigginspromo-1 . jpg dick higgins
 dick higgins # 6495ed
dick higgins

dick higgins -lrb- march 15 , 1938 -- october 25 , 1998 -rrb- was a composer , poet , printer , and early fluxus artist .
higgins was born in cambridge , england , but raised in the united states in various parts of new england , including worcester , massachusetts , putney , vermont , and concord , new hampshire .
he was the son of carter chapin higgins and katherine huntington bigelow .
his younger brother mark huntington higgins was murdered in the congo in 1960 .
with the poet jackson mac low , another soon-to-be fluxus artist george brecht , and the two innovators of happenings , allan kaprow and al hansen , higgins studied composition with john cage at the new school of social research in new york in the late 1950s .
during this time higgins began to produce the first scores for events that rework everyday activities into performances that may or may not incorporate music .
he then married fellow artist alison knowles in 1960 and both took part in the wiesbaden , germany `` fluxus '' festival in 1962 that marked the founding of fluxus activity .
he founded something else press in 1963 , which published many important texts including gertrude stein , bern porter , marshall mcluhan , cage , merce cunningham , cage 's teacher henry cowell , as well as his contemporaries such as artists kaprow , hansen , claes oldenburg and ray johnson as well as leading fluxus members brecht , wolf vostell , daniel spoerri , emmett williams , eric andersen , ken friedman , and others .
the something else press series of `` great bear pamphlets , '' documented the earliest fluxus performances .
higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities , defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name , published in the first number of the `` something else newsletter '' .
his most notable contributions include `` danger music '' scores and the `` intermedia '' concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s .
he was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making , dating back to the mid-1960s , when alison knowles and he created the first computer generated literary texts .
his `` a book about love & war & death '' , a book-length aleatory poem published in 1972 included one of those .
in his introduction , higgins says , having finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice , he wrote a fortran iv program to produce part -lrb- or `` canto '' -rrb- four .
all in all he wrote and edited forty-seven books , including `` george herbert 's pattern poems : in their tradition '' and `` on the composition of signs and images '' , his edition of a giordano bruno text , which he annotated .
he saw bruno 's essay on the `` art of memory '' also as an early text on intermedia .
`` a dialectic of centuries : notes towards a theory of the new arts '' collected many of his essays and theoretical works in 1976 .
in 1972 higgins founded unpublished editions to publish his short novel `` amigo '' , which was later renamed printed editions .
the daughter of higgins and knowles , hannah higgins , is the author of `` fluxus experience '' , an authoritative volume about the fluxus movement .
her twin sister , jessica higgins , a new york based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator lance fung , late fluxus gallerist emily harvey and the artists museum 's and construction in process , performed and collaborated as a youth in original fluxus related events .
higgins died of a heart attack while attending an event in quebec , canada .
