Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations : The Frame

Of particular note is Higgins's emphasis of the press's newfound orientation toward "exploring the ways and means of communication" — a tag used nowhere else in press publication or newsletters. However, the publications mentioned on the back cover are indeed all concerned with exploring communications:

John Cage is a well-documented compatriot of McLuhan. In Cage’s introduction to the 1989 volume McLuhan: The Man and his Message he declared Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan the two thinkers best tuned to the future of the planet. (In "Network Fever," 2001, Mark Wigley has described the relationship and exchange of ideas between Fuller and McLuhan through the Delos meetings as a paradigmatic example of the network culture today.) In a feedback loop, Cage is also featured in a number of McLuhan's books, probes, and anecdotes. As a conduit between the media investigations of McLuhan and the experimental arts in writing, music, and performance, Cage charges McLuhan's book with his radiant connectivity. Notations, an experiment in collage, bears heavy resemblance to the mosaic method that would come to characterize so much of McLuhan's written work.

The description of this book by Robert Filliou and George Brecht, two of the most prominent members of the international Fluxus movement, could well be applied to The Medium is the Massage. Citing Jerome Agel's approval of these "aesthetic researches" into the "communications industry" spoken "in examples only," Higgins is boldly asserting the anteriority (what the Oulipo would call "anticipatory plagiarism") of the intermedia art of Something Else Press. It is interesting that while 'happenings' are a part of McLuhan's vocabulary, neither of these artists, nor the majority of contemporaneous experimental arts from the day, ever surfaces in McLuhan's work. Similarly, while there is an Aspen journal devoted to McLuhan, some work by Paik and a few other artists, there is a strange erasure of the McLuhan brand from 1965 on in the arts.

The single major publication of Something Else Press remains An Anthology of Concrete Poetry edited by Emmett Williams. This omnibus of visual poetry from the 60s defined a new international field of verbi-voco-visual written artistry in the mid-century. McLuhan's collaborations with Harley Parker from the 1950s until 1969, all could well be subsumed by concrete poetry as laid out in Williams's Anthology. Like McLuhan's own aesthetic background, this work is rooted in Vorticism, French symbolism, and the typographic experiments of the historical avant-garde. Indeed, the formal similarity to Parker's design in Explorations 8 explains Higgins's interest in republishing the magazine in the heyday of the press's international production and influence.