Dick Higgins' 'intermedia' names a new entity that emerges from merging two art forms rather than merely adding them

Dick Higgins coined ‘intermedia’ in 1966 to describe work that fuses two established art forms or media into a genuinely new intermedium — one that is not reducible to either source. This differs from multimedia, which stacks media side by side without creating a third thing. In the context of AV performance, the concept is foundational: visual music, live cinema, and live AV performance all aspire to create an intermedium from audio and image. The idea connects historically to the notion of metamedium (a digital-era successor concept), but intermedia remains the sharpest term for the moment of genuine fusion. Understanding intermedia helps distinguish AV work that merely accompanies music from work where the visual and sonic are co-constituted.

Examples

A VJ projecting abstract loops over a DJ set = multimedia (two independent layers). A composer-performer who derives visuals algorithmically from the same generative score as the audio = intermedium.

Assessment

Give an example of a performance that achieves intermediality and one that does not; explain what distinguishes them.