In the interest of showing my research process, I’ll add some bits and pieces here:
I found a pdf copy of The Fluxus Reader online. (If this needs to be taken down, please let me know and I’ll oblige) Plenty to digest here, so I’ll be picking at it as the rest of the semester goes on.
There are some typos in the PDF, I believe from OCR glitches. I’ve cleaned up a little bit, but some were a little too far gone for me to guess the original intent. Ken Friedman says this:
“As I see it, Fluxus has been a laboratory, a grand project summed up by George Macmnas’ notion of the ‘learning machines’. The Fluxus research programme has been characterized by twelve ideas globalism, the unity of art and life, intermedia, expenmentahsm,
chance, playfulness, simplicity, imphcativeness, exemplativism, specificity, presence time and musicality (These twelve ideas are elaborated in the chapter titled ‘Fluxus and Company’). These ideas are not a prescription for how to be a Fluxus artist Rather they
form a description of the qualities and issues that characterize the work of Fluxus. Each idea describes a ‘way of doing things’ Taken together, these twelve ideas form a picture of what Fluxus is and does.”
Perhaps a bit opinionated and fast and loose, but good perspective and prompts to work from.
Other thoughts:
I’ve also seen a lot of “Facebook Event Memes” lately. I have friends in Chicago who responded to a series of viral Facebook Events that revolve around the public art piece Cloud Gate, commonly known as “The Bean”. Having event scores on the brain made them stick out to me:
This phenomenon has been written up in Hyperallergic, if you want to read an exhaustive list.
Having looked at many event scores, now it seems that I’m extra aware of imperative sentences. Internet memes in general commonly have instructions, and some are solely imperative sentences. Many, read in different contexts, could be interpreted as a kind of event score.
Might be a phenomenon to consider if trying to appraise event scores in the 21st century.