Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission

Intermediality has become a fashionable concept: it appears whenever we speak about what we once referred to easily as the medium or media, of systems and apparatuses, mises en scene and structures. It is used frequently in a number of different traditions, whether European, American or Australian. In some cases it holds the potential to redefine the purpose of an art or a specific medium. Consider the example that cinema provides: “its medium-specific possibility seems to have been well and truly overrun by its tendency to intermediality, its fundamental impurity. That is where its true materiality-effect, today, is situated: in the palpable aura of a mise en scene that is always less than itself and more than itself, not only itself but also its contrary, ever vanishing and yet ever renewed across a thousand and one screens, platforms and dispositifs” (Martin). But it’s important not to reduce intermediality to a simple intersection of mediums or media: “intermediality [...] refers to more than simply the sheer fact of a multimedia culture, or the mixing and copresence of many media forms within specific works” (Martin). In this way, theater, according to Kattenbelt, bears “a distinctive capacity to be a hypermedium which ‘stages’ other mediums” (37). Every art or media thus seems to find its means in other arts and media, unsettling the expected borders between them. It is important to generalize these judicious reappropriations: there is no pure medium. The impurity of the medium, as rightly emphasized by Adrian Martin, concerns all mediums. To some extent, a “media” (if we understand this term to refer to a specific medium that has been institutionalized, hence the plural form) is a stabilization system for each medium. Thus, it is important to outline a brief history of the formation of the concept of intermediality so as to better estimate its field of possibilities and what it might offer in terms of new ways of apprehending artistic or day-to-day phenomena.

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