Art has recently tended toward medium melding: painters have been writing on their canvases; writers have been doodling on their manuscripts; and installations target all the senses, aiming for an unprecedented sort of participatory immersion. But, even the immersive installations are fast losing their edge, and new media promise a future of increasingly integrated art mediums.
I use the word melding because it fits the intermedial approach. As art evolves, we will see it, not as a sum of its parts, but as a whole. In the future, people won't think of film as a mix of music and pictures; they will think of it as film. Intermedia is art where a meeting of mediums achieves something that can't be done with one medium alone: a synergetic spirit must permeate the piece.
Dick Higgins intended this method of analysis when he defined intermedia, and later when he defended his word and distinguished it from multimedia. Multimedia is obsessed with the preconceived notion of media: we think in terms of what we already know. Indermedia asks us to look where mediums merge, to accept a piece as new.
Interestingly, or perhaps fittingly considering the decentralization of Fluxus and Mail Art, intermedial aesthetics are being adopted by low culture faster than they can be considered in ivory towers. Gamers, for instance, are beginning to demand narrative sophistication; and most players don't dissect their favorite games, evaluating music, dialogue, animation, and textures independently. They see a whole.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Futurism in Stevens' Age of Adz
Sufjan Stevens' 2010 album, The Age of Adz, was inspired, in part, by the art of Royal Robertson. The schizophrenic's art was characterized by apocalyptic assurances (motivated largely by his ex-wife) and "futuristic images". To sonically realize Robertson's sci-fi scrawlings, Stevens incorporates portions of the Futurist musical program.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Video Essay at TriQuarterly
Digital lit mags make intermedial art easier to publish. With luck, this new trend will be a pleasant BLAST! from the past.
Intentions
I will publish blog entries for my independent study in intermedia here. Hope to get one cranked out by the end of the week. Thinking about the Futurist sounds in Sufjan's Age of Adz or interactivity in the Wilderness Downtown music video. I could pick some hypertextual poetry, but that would be too easy.
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