We have chosen the topic Intermedia for this year’s Without Borders Festival to acknowledge that this year’s Exhibition included the first two Graduates of the new Intermedia MFA Program at the University of Maine. Thus it seemed appropriate to both celebrate this milestone and to take the opportunity to consider what the program and its students are involved in exploring, developing and producing. This Festival presents the work of more than two dozen artists, both contemporary and historic, who have explored the "space" of intermedial praxis.

The Use of the term Intermedia for this year's festival as a way to reflect our programmatic aim and intent - that is to work with, and study, creative processes and to develop works which fall conceptually between media. Such works can be "between" media that are already known/used, "between" traditional disciplines such as art and computer science and "between" functions or uses such as personal expression and documentation. This sense of Intermedia, and by extension our exhibition, is directly taken from the art theorist Dick Higgins who is primarily responsible for determining the contemporary use of this term. In 1966 Higgins wrote the following:

For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world.
Published in: Wolf Vostell (ed.): De-coll/age(decollage) * 6, July 1967

The three key aspects of this sensibility that the artists in this festival explore are:

1. Traditional media distinctions are only reference points not
   limits for current creative practice.
2. A studio practice that interrogates/shapes media through intellectual/critical tools (praxis).
3. A necessity of new forms that result from a dialectic between
   materials, media or categories.

Intermedia is now part of a historic trajectory and tradition. A tradition that can be traced at least back to concepts connected with Romanticism, but given its nature intermedia is limitlessly malleable, as evidenced by the works in this exhibition and festival, for it is not so much a style or even an category but an approach which centers on situational or relational elements and activities.

 

This festival and exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the following groups that we would like to acknowledge: Cultural Affairs /Distinguished Lecture Series Fund, the Intermedia MFA Program, the  New Media Department, the Lord Hall Gallery, the office of the University of Maine CFO, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the following individuals, Jeff Goolsby, Laurie Hicks. Lastly, and most especially deserving of recognition and thanks for their hard work and engagement, is the team of associate curators, Justin Taylor, Bethany Engstrom, John Bell, Abby Stiers, and Alex Gross for without them the festival would not have happened.