Finding Meaning in Intermedial Gaps

Beyond Media Borders, Volume 2 ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-49683-8_1 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 3-31 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Mary Simonson

Keyword(s):

Cultural Intervention ◽

Finding Meaning ◽

Conceptual Understandings ◽

Media Objects ◽

Contemporary Media

Abstract Media is generally conceptualized as any communicative conduit that conveys ideas or meaning between one place or person and another. However, media products—and particularly intermedial products—do not always transmit meanings and ideas smoothly. This chapter explores a series of historical and contemporary media objects and performances that do not facilitate “successful” transfers of meaning, partly due to their intermedial configurations. Each of these media objects and performances both conceal and reveal, either accidentally as a byproduct of experimentation with the medium’s modalities or purposefully as an aesthetic, social, or cultural intervention. The author argues that these concealments and intermedial “gaps” generate new modes of expression, new artistic experiences for audiences and performers, and new conceptual understandings of existing genres and media.

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Mashup as Paratextual Practice

Advances in Human and Social Aspects of Technology - Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-6002-1.ch004 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 63-82 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Anna Nacher

Keyword(s):

Web Services ◽

Digital Media ◽

Digital Content ◽

Media Environment ◽

Main Text ◽

Media Objects ◽

Digital Objects ◽

Contemporary Media ◽

Media Environments

The main objective of this chapter is to contribute to a more dynamic understanding of the notion of paratext (Genette, 1997a). The author argues that in order to fully grasp the discourse of contemporary media objects, one has to focus on the networked, hyperconnective and fluid nature of today's media environments (Jenkins, 2008; Varnelis, 2008), where content itself often seems secondary to the modes of its circulation. In this regard, the concept of paratext still provides a valuable framework of analysis, especially when related to the widespread programming and coding procedures of contemporary Web services. In order to enable such a dynamic understanding of the notion in the contemporary digital media environment, Genette's proposition should be read not only (or primarily) as relating to the set of subtexts, “parasitic” texts, annotations and markers accompanying the “main” text, but first and foremost as a semiotic-technological apparatus enabling the circulation of digital content across different media platforms. Such a re-reading also calls for an updated understanding of digital media, with more prominence given to the relational characteristics of the objects, as well as to the fluidity and dynamics of the processes of circulation, rather than to digital “objects” as such.

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A MOVIE BY ... Appropriation, authorship, and the ecologies of the moving image

First Monday ◽

10.5210/fm.v22i1.7265 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Leo Goldsmith

Keyword(s):

Theoretical Framework ◽

Media Theory ◽

The Other ◽

Moving Image ◽

Found Footage ◽

Media Objects ◽

The Media ◽

Contemporary Media ◽

Appropriation Art ◽

The One

This essay positions two works of experimental moving-image appropriation art — Bruce Conner’s seminal 1958 found-footage film A MOVIE and a recent ‘remake” by the artist and filmmaker Jen Proctor — as models for a hybrid artistic-scholarly form of materialist media theory through which to examine the ways in which media are produced and circulate. The essay argues that both Conner’s and Proctor’s respective works deploy strategies of appropriation and remix not simply as a form for playful commentary upon contemporary media objects and texts, but crucially as an implicit theoretical framework through which to articulate and expose, on the one hand, the media infrastructures in which the works were made and, on the other, the artists’ own labor within these infrastructures.

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Polyaesthetic sights and sounds: media aesthetics in The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Upgrade Soul and The Vampyre of Time and Memory

SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience ◽

10.7146/se.v4i1.20370 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 21-40 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Maria Engberg

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Creative Practice ◽

Media Objects ◽

Changing Patterns ◽

Contemporary Media ◽

The Fantastic ◽

Media Condition

This article explores the notion of polyaesthetics as a contemporary media condition that relates to questions of production, reception and analysis of media objects. Primarily, the paper is concerned with understanding the aesthetics of digital media works that remediate existing genres of creative practice and ultimately move towards creating new digital media forms that are conditional and provisional.The three digital works that the article analyses – The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Upgrade Soul and The Vampyre of Time and Memory – exemplify contemporary strategies and changing patterns of creation, distribution and reception evidenced in how we create, read, listen to, engage with, play and understand contemporary digital works.

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