John Brockman: 40 years of "intermedia kinetic environments"

Here's what the New York Times had to say about "cultural impresario," sci/tech literary uber-agent, and EDGE founder John Brockman -- 40 years ago, today. Snip from "So What Happens After Happenings," an article dated Sunday, September 4, 1966. "Hate Happenings. Love Intermedia Kinetic Environments." John Brockman is partly kidding, while conveying the notion that Happenings are Out and Intermedia Kinetic Environments are In in the places where the action is.

John Brockman, the New York Film Festival's 25-year-old coordinator of a special events program on independent cinema in the United States, plugging into the switched-on "expanded cinema" world in which a film is not just a movie, but an Experience, an Event, an Environment.

This is a humming electronic world, in which multiple films, tapes, amplifiers, kinetic sculpture, lights and live dancers or actors are combined to Involve Audiences in a Total Theater Experience.

Unlike Happenings, which often involve audiences in complicated relationships with plastics, bottles, sacks, ropes and other objects, Intermedia Kinetic Experiences permit audiences simply to sit, stand, walk or lie down and allow their senses to be Saturated by Media.

No Way Out: "You can't escape from an Intermedia Kinetic Environments the way you can from a play or any art form that reaches you through language," says Brockman.
Link. Much respect, Mr. Brockman. Much respect.