Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning “to flow”—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia.

The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his experimental music of the 1950s. Cage explored notions of indeterminacy in art, through works such as 4' 33", which influenced Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas. Maciunas (1931–1978) organized the first Fluxus event in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe in 1962.

While Fluxus was named and organized by Maciunas, the Fluxus community began in a small but global network of artists and composers who were already at work when Maciunas met them through minimalist composer La Monte Young and poet Jackson Mac Low in the early 1960s. John Cage's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City were attended by Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, many of whom were working in other media with little or no background in music. Another cluster of artists was connected to each other through Rutgers University. Many other artists were invited by Cage to attend his classes unofficially at the New School. Marcel Duchamp and Allan Kaprow (who is credited as the creator of the first "happenings") were also influential to Fluxus. In its early days, Fluxus artists were active in Europe (especially in Germany), and Japan, as well as in the United States.

Alison Knowles (born 1933) in New York City is an American visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, and publications. Knowles was very active in the Fluxus movement, and continues to create work inspired by her Fluxus experience.

She has created work that incorporates performance, radio, and sound, papermaking, and printmaking. She briefly attended Middlebury College and graduated from the Pratt Institute in New York with an honors degree in fine art. Knowles was married to the Fluxus artist and prominent intermedia theorist, Dick Higgins, from 1960 to 1970, and again from 1984 until Higgins' death in 1998.

In 2000, Knowles began casting flax paper to make musical instruments. The Bean Turner, Rattles, and Wings and Drums use beans for sound with the aid of text, toys and silence.

Knowles studied with the painters, Adolph Gottlieb and Josef Albers and maintains a studio in New York City. She has twin daughters: Jessica Higgins, a New York-based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung, late Fluxus gallerist Emily Harvey, The Artists Museum's Construction In Process and having performed and collaborated as a youth in original Fluxus related events; and Hannah Higgins, a writer and art historian residing in Chicago, Illinois.

George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil. He was a key member of, and influence on, Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centred around George Maciunas, having been involved with the group from the first performances in Wiesbaden 1962 until Maciunas' death in 1978.

One of the originators of 'participatory' art, in which the artwork can only be experienced by the active involvement of the viewer, he is most famous for his Event Scores such as Drip Music 1962, (see [2]) and is widely seen as an important precursor to conceptual art. He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”

Brecht was born George Ellis MacDiarmid in New York, August 27, 1926. His father, also George Ellis MacDiarmid, was a professional flautist who had toured with John Philip Sousa's marching band before settling in New York to play bass flute for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. After his father's death from alcoholism when Brecht was 10 years old, he moved with his mother to Atlantic City, New Jersey. He enlisted for military service in 1943, and it was whilst he was stationed near the Black Forest, Germany, 1945, that he changed his surname to 'Brecht' - 'not in reference to Bertolt Brecht, but because he liked the sound of the name'.

Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 Leverkusen – 3 April 1998 Berlin) was a German painter and sculptor of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of Video art, Environment, Installation, Happening and the Fluxus Movement. Techniques such as blurring and the Dé-collage are characteristic of his work, as is embedding objects in concrete.

Wolf Vostell was born in Leverkusen, Germany, and put his artistic ideas into practice from 1950 onwards. In 1953, he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer and studied at the Academy of Applied Art in Wuppertal. Wolf Vostell created his first Dé-collage in 1954. In 1955-1956, he studied at the École Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts in Paris and in 1957 he attended the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts. Wolf Vostell's philosophy was built around the idea that destruction is all around us and it runs through all of the twentieth century. He used the term Dé-coll/age, (in connection with a plane crash) in 1954 to refer to the process of tearing down posters, and for the use of mobile fragments of reality. His first Happening, Theater is in the Street, took place in Paris in 1958, and incorporated auto parts and a TV.

Dick Higgins (March 15, 1938 – October 25, 1998) was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.

Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied composition with John Cage at the New School of Social Research in New York. He married fellow artist Alison Knowles in 1960. Both took part in the Wiesbaden, Germany Fluxus festival in 1962. He founded Something Else Press in 1963, which published many important texts including Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, artists John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenburg, Ray Johnson, Bern Porter, leading Fluxus members George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Ken Friedman, and others. His daughter, Hannah Higgins is the author of Fluxus Experience, an authoritative volume about the Fluxus movement. Her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, a New York based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung, late Fluxus gallerist Emily Harvey and The Artists Museum's and Construction In Process, performed and collaborated as a youth in original Fluxus related events.