This article discusses how the use of mobile media in digital culture is ushering in a new set of conditions for the realization of the social reception of art. This is to say that mobile media practices present a renewed challenge to major national art museums in their organization and practices of display and exhibition. The problematic explored here is that between the art museum's continued attachment to aesthetic abstraction in the modernist trope and the clamouring and tumultuous world of (...) image reproduction. The article seeks to define an intersection between the academic discourses of media and technology on the one hand, and aesthetics and cultural policy on the other, through a focus on subjectivities and narration. It does this by way of a particular fieldwork example from the research project Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture. (shrink)

Some theorists claim that games are “transmedial”, meaning that the same game can be played in different media. It is unclear, however, what are the limits of transmedial games. Are all games in-principle transmedial, or only some? One suggestion offered by Jesper Juul is that, if games are understood as sets of rules, then a game is transmedial if its rules can be either implemented or adapted into some new media. I argue against this view on (...) the grounds that the rules of many games are dependent on the game’s media such that they cannot be adapted to a new medium. As such the games-as-rules view of transmediality is not restrictive enough. To add the necessary restriction, I suggest that games are transmedial, not only when they contain the same rules, but also when it requires the same set of skills to play each. I further argue that a skill-set view of transmediality is better able to account for many common intuitions about games. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that one has yet to acknowledge the extent to which the notion of the aesthetic and its content is institutionally negotiated. A central question that we ought to bear in mind is: does the organization of “aesthetic knowledge” that the traditional disciplines facilitate promote or prevent insight into meta-aesthetic and transaesthetic concerns?

This article discusses four different case studies related to complex technological works that were created through international collaborations.The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers/Ex.MechRed Dice/Des ChiffréCom↔SpaceA China of Many SensesThe article discusses elements of language, culture, technological creation and process.

:This paper examines the transmediation of sacrifice in the Isuma “Fast Runner” trilogy, focusing in particular upon The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. In this film the impact of the introduction of Christianity upon traditional Inuit culture in the 1920s sets the stage for literal and metaphorical sacrifice, tied inexorably to the parallel threat of conversion and the transvaluation of traditional shamanistic beliefs. In the process, the film maintains a critical stance with respect to both the ethnographic perspective of the outsider, (...) which it incorporates, and to its own preferred Inuit perspective. My reading of the transmediation of sacrifice in The Journals rests upon the relation between sacrificial substitution and the notion of communion, in both doctrinaire and more secular senses. I argue that the film presents the Inuit characters negotiating a necessary détente with Christian culture, both at the cost of traditional beliefs and in the form of the co-optation and transmediation of ritual within the film's story, a process mirrored in the appropriation of the digital video medium in the fictional re-creation of these events. (shrink)

This article adopts a transmedial perspective in order to investigate narrative similarities and differences between print and online travel writing. Texts, which are contemporary and Western-authored, are written either in English, French and Italian and they all focus on China as the travel destination. Drawing upon Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal's studies on the narrative discourse, it is contended that travel books and travel blogs, despite sharing basic generic features, present substantial differences. In the former, readers are presented with (...) a coherent and self-exhaustive narrative. This means that the representation of both China and the traveller results as a progressive discovery. On the other hand, travel blogs provide fragmented and objectified accounts rich in touristic tips. As a consequence, the narrative loses its internal development and takes on an informative value in which the portrayal of China and the traveller recede to the background. (shrink)

The cultural consumption research landscape of the 21st century is marked by an increasing cross-disciplinary fermentation. At the same time, cultural theory and analysis have been marked by successive ‘inter-’ turns, most notably with regard to the Big Four: multimodality (or intermodality), interdiscursivity, transmediality (or intermediality), and intertextuality. This book offers an outline of interdiscursivity as an integrative platform for accommodating these notions. To this end, a call for a return to Foucault is issued via a critical engagement with the (...) so-called practice-turn. This re-turn does not seek to reconstitute venerably Foucauldianism, but to theorize ‘inters-’ as vanishing points that challenge the integrity of discrete cultural orders in non-convergent manners. The propounded interdiscursivity approach is offered as a reading strategy that permeates the contemporary cultural consumption phenomena that are scrutinized in this book, against a pan-consumptivist framework. By drawing on qualitative and mixed methods research designs, facilitated by CAQDAS software, the empirical studies that are hosted here span a vivid array of topics that are directly relevant to both traditional and new media researchers, such as the consumption of ideologies in Web 2.0 social movements, the ability of micro-celebrities to act as cultural game-changers, the post-loyalty abjective consumption ethos. The theoretically novel approaches on offer are coupled with methodological innovations in areas such as user-generated content, artists’ branding, and experiential consumption. (shrink)

The exhibition Critical Zones – Horizonte einer neuen Erdpolitik (2020–2022) at the ZKM Karlsruhe is a renewed attempt to unite artistic, philosophical, and scientific knowledge production in the medium of the ›Gedankenausstellung‹ (thought exhibition). The thematic orientation of the exhibition draws upon the writings of Bruno Latour, one of the curators. The article analyzes how his research on the critical zone, the terrestrial, and the Gaia hypothesis has been transformed into an exhibition format, intending a transmedial spatialization of thoughts (...) combined with the visitor’s experience ›how to land on earth‹. Based on a detailed exhibition analysis, it examines the curation and mediation of Latour’s earth-political thoughts and concepts in both the physical exhibition and the digital exhibition platform that evolved in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Semiotics of mediation is based on comparative analysis of mediation processes, on typology of forms of mediation and on the subsequent complementary analysis of culture. Not only does cultural analysis that is based on semiotics of mediation proceed from communication processes, it also searches for possibilities of correlation between concepts of describability, analysability, translatability. Depending on the strategy of mediation semiotics it is possible to create an overview of the main parameters of cultural analysis and to specify the boundaries of (...) semiotic analysis of culture. The main types of mediation are simultaneously parameters of cultural analysis. The main types include autocommunicative mediation, metalingual mediation, intertextual mediation, interdiscursive mediation, and inter- or transmedial mediation. Typology of mediation types facilitates the understanding of the autocommunicative aspect of culture and creates the basis for analysing communication processes not on the level of the immediate sender and receiver but as part of the culture’s communication with itself. Semiotics of mediation starts from semiotic mediation and ends with a culture of mediation in which one and the same cultural language or text operates as a means of dialogue with itself, as a means of communication with others, as part of some textual system or discourse, or as a transmedial phenomenon. Semiotics of mediation is a means of studying the correlation between implicit semiotic mediation and forms of explicit semiotic mediation, thus complementing cultural semiotic study of culture. (shrink)

Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices (...) and of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era of screen-being, this essay reads the challenges of on-line music magazines, Leonard Cohen and k.d.lang, between modes of memorialization, including a reading of Anders’s poetic memorial on the violence of Walter Benjamin’s death to conclude with Ivan Illich on the ongoing expropriation of death (and health) today. (shrink)

Resumen: En el teatro posdramático la función mimética del cuerpo suele desplazarse hacia los recursos transmediales propiciando así la emergencia de una metateatralidad. El trabajo de Lola Arias se destaca sobre todo por tensionar el rol del cuerpo actoral en escena produciendo, por medio de recursos transmediales, una crisis representacional que cuestiona las formas tradicionales del drama. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo establecer las estrategias estéticas que utiliza la dramaturga y directora para problematizar el lugar del cuerpo en su (...) obra Campo Minado y su documental Teatro de Guerra.: Into the postdramatic theater the mimetic funtion of the body tends to be displaced towards transmedial resources thus favoring the producction of a metatheatre. The Lola Arias’s work stands out precisely because of putting in tension the role of the acting body on stage producing, through transmedial resources, a representational crisis that questions traditional forms of drama. The present article aims to establish the aesthetic strategies used by this playwright and director to problematize the place of the body in her theatral work Campo Minado and her documentary Teatro de Guerra. (shrink)

Transmedia storytelling nowadays represents a genuine communicative revolution; a new paradigm for generating and spreading all kinds of information and content. It is the best means of expression through digital techno-communicative networks; networks that make collaborative environments a reality and create close links between political organizations, the media and the target. The Internet, combined with the social networking sites, has certainly empowered common citizens and, consequently, has forced brands to get to know their interests and values in order to create (...) conversations with them. Not only do people provide their opinions, but also turn out to be genuinely emotional, social and intellectual investors. Their contributions have become so important that the key to measuring communicative success lies in clarifying the gratifications that pronet@rians obtain by participating in the narrative world of the organizations and by committing themselves to them, until they end up identifying themselves, as fans, in the transmedial world-building. (shrink)

If Lyotard is correct to acknowledge the role of commentary in guarding the kernel of misunderstanding at the heart of the ethical phrase when he exclaims, “but isn’t this exactly what commentary does with ethics! It comments upon it as though it were a misunderstanding, and it thereby conserves in itself its own requirement that there be something ununderstood,” he does not account for that which a trans-generic or transmedial “commentary” might permit, what troubling, unanswerable questions it might raise, (...) what ekphrastic or synesthetic call it might echo. This essay considers several artistic reworkings, interpretations, and distortions of the biblical scene of near sacrifice upon which Lyotard comments, arguing that the exposure of the ethical to the explicitly aesthetic would bring to the surface something that might be latent, that which is always already there, albeit spectrally. (shrink)

This paper examines the cultural antagonisms of Martial's _Apophoreta_ 170–82, a unique series of epigrammatic gift-tags for artworks to be given away during the Saturnalia. In these poems, I argue, Martial thematizes and enacts Rome's transformative appropriation of cultural capital from Greece and elsewhere. First, he adopts the Hellenistic trope of the ekphrastic gallery tour in order to evoke the "museum spaces" of the Flavian city, where artworks became testaments to the power and culture of Rome. While evoking these masterpiece (...) collections, however, the epigrams in fact describe miniatures changing hands at a banquet. Martial thus tropes a second Roman practice of appropriation, namely the widespread consumption of transmedial miniature copies. Third and finally, the epigrams dramatize the vulnerability of plundered objects by reevaluating their significance within the Roman frameworks of Latin literature and the Saturnalia. In this miniature ekphrastic series, then, Martial's apophoretic poetics converge with Roman forms of appropriation both imperial and domestic, concrete and conceptual. (shrink)

This paper examines the cultural antagonisms of Martial's Apophoreta 170–82, a unique series of epigrammatic gift-tags for artworks to be given away during the Saturnalia. In these poems, I argue, Martial thematizes and enacts Rome's transformative appropriation of cultural capital from Greece and elsewhere. First, he adopts the Hellenistic trope of the ekphrastic gallery tour in order to evoke the “museum spaces” of the Flavian city, where artworks became testaments to the power and culture of Rome. While evoking these masterpiece (...) collections, however, the epigrams in fact describe miniatures changing hands at a banquet. Martial thus tropes a second Roman practice of appropriation, namely the widespread consumption of transmedial miniature copies. Third and finally, the epigrams dramatize the vulnerability of plundered objects by reevaluating their significance within the Roman frameworks of Latin literature and the Saturnalia. In this miniature ekphrastic series, then, Martial's apophoretic poetics converge with Roman forms of appropriation both imperial and domestic, concrete and conceptual. (shrink)

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.(William Faulkner)This article investigates ‘transcultural tendencies’ and ‘transmedial transaction’ between the Sasanian, the last dynasty to rule the Persian plateau, and the Muslims who conquered this land. These transactions and exchanges took place during the seventh century in the Ērānshahr distributing lots of different features, cultures, languages, religions, sciences and artistic achievements by the Persian people and sharing them with Muslim territories from the East to the West. The article (...) also investigates the Shu’ubiyya parties, which were a non-Arab Muslim response to the privileged status of Arabs within them that would later become Sufism. The protest approach travelled in its haptic spaces from ancient Iranian times to the present day, carrying the same habits and cultures, and among protesters characterizes contemporary artists in particular. In my study, I have classified them and decoded their artistic practices. Through this article, I investigate them by looking to contemporary art practices, which contain protest language, and identifying common ground with Sufism ideology. I bring them into the light, through a non-Islamic perspective that carries a lot of truth and spirituality, which I found both Iranian people and the global culture at large need to be reacquainted with. People need to understand how and why this perspective matters in the modern world, as well as the ways in which it is relevant. How does or would it affect the world of Internet, new media, the mix of old and new media in today’s and tomorrow’s cultures? The Sasanian Empire fell to Arab Muslims, and consequently the ‘transcultural tendencies’ took place around the beginning of the seventh century (AD 628) with the death of the last great Sassanid kings of Shahanshah Khusroparviz. I wish to take up the challenge of understanding more of Iranian history at the moment of transition that occurred at the end of the Sassanid epoch. This era (historical–cultural period) can be said to have characterized the beginning of the Islamic period. The question is how did this newborn culture, an outgrowth of this ‘transactive’ movement, spread through contemporary Iranian lifestyle? (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of “New Conceptualism.” It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial “generic art” and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music’s New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues (...) that the perspective on New Music it takes has wider implications in music and art. It begins by defining what exactly “New Music” refers to, and outlines some of the conditions for the recent rise of conceptualism in New Music. It then takes the work of the composer Johannes Kreidler as a key example of some artistic tendencies and theoretical presuppositions in New Conceptualism. Following this it draws on work in the field of sound studies in order to critically examine the theoretical attempt to connect New Music with contemporary art that is found in the notion of “Music in the Expanded Field.” To conclude it offers some reflections on how a more robust conversation between contemporary art and New Music can begin to be conceived. (shrink)

This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book historicizes and contextualizes the notion of seriality, combining narratological, aesthetic, industrial, philosophical, and political perspectives, showing how seriality as a paradigm informs media convergence and resides at the core of cinema and television history. By associating theoretical considerations and close readings of specific works, as well as diachronic and synchronic approaches, this volume offers a (...) complex panorama of issues related to seriality including audience engagement, intertextuality and transmediality, cultural legitimacy, authorship, and medium specificity in remakes, adaptations, sequels, and reboots. Written by a team of international scholars, this book highlights a diversity of methodologies that will be of interest to scholars and doctoral students across disciplinary areas such as media studies, film studies, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies. It will also interest students attending classes on serial audiovisual narratives and will appeal to fans of the series it addresses, such as Fargo, Twin Peaks, The Hunger Games, Bates Motel, and Sherlock. (shrink)

Philosophy and science fiction are two separate discourses that use counter-intuitive scenarios in two distinct ways. Where philosophy endeavours to ground counter-intuitive scenarios, science fiction as a transmedial fictional genre acts in a pragmatic and exploratory manner by seeking to imagine what it would be like if they were real. In this paper, I analyse David Cronenberg’s science fiction film eXistenZ, and defend two theses. The critical-theoretical thesis: Cronenberg thinks society is being gamified and seeks to dramatise the process (...) of gamification along with its pitfalls. The metaphysical thesis: Cronenberg’s diegetic world brings about a new articulation of the scepticism as an old philosophical problem. An attempt to excavate the metaphysical presuppositions of this work reanimates Cartesian interactionist dualism and Kantian transcendental idealism, as two well-known philosophical positions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 221 Seiten: 261-277.