Fluxus & Event Scores

Before code, there were instructions. The Fluxus circle of the early 1960s — Alison Knowles, Benjamin Patterson, George Brecht, and their collaborators around Dick Higgins' Something Else Press — composed 'event scores': terse written procedures anyone could execute, separating a work's conception from its performance. That move anticipates the logic of generative art, where the artist authors a system and the output is one run of it. The library holds The Four Suits (Something Else Press, 1965), an anthology of scores by Patterson, Knowles, Philip Corner, and Tomas Schmit.