Contenu du sommaire : Études intermédiales

This is an interview with Éric Méchoulan, Professor at the University of Montréal, former director of the CRIalt (Center for Intermedial Research in Arts, Literatures and Technologies) and founder of the journal Intermédialités/Intermediality. It is an opportunity to discover a little better the intermedial approach – its dynamics and its collective dimension in Montreal – which provokes original questions about the resonances, the common points (in terms of objects and ways of thinking about them) between Montreal's conception of intermediality and Information and Communication Sciences in France.

Inspired by Giorgio Agamben's remarks about Enzo Melandri's La linea e il circolo, this article explores the heuristic value of analogy in the framework of intermediality. Two films from French director Yannick Bellon, about the role of the theater in the life of a troupe of young people “in difficulty” constitute the ground on which the reflection is developed. After demonstrating that only cinema can make us aware of the intermedial milieu in all its complexity, the author addresses the relations between intermediality and analogy, and demonstrates that intermediality is in fact part of the thought and practice of analogy with important epistemological, ethical and political implications.

This paper provides an intermedial analysis of the rituals that surround the body of Lenin exposed in its Mausoleum since 1924. Over time, it appears that this “object” has generated a tangle of milieux, an intermediation of religion and politics. Moreover, this intermedia comes with a technological imaginary that is rooted in 19th century inventions: in particular, photography, cinema and embalming. By analyzing gestures and rituals that surround this exposed body, we discuss a wide range of media and technologies: from mummies, statuaries and effigies, to the art of blending, photographic falsification and electricity.

This paper proposes an intermedial reading of the polymorphous and polymediatic work Zen for Film (1962-1964…) by Korean American artist Nam June Paik. By tracing the multiple modes of existence of the work since its first presentation in 1964, and by showing the affinities it holds with other works by the artist but also with minimalist works that precede or follow it (Cage's 4'33'', Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Wolfgang Laib's Pierre de lait), it attempts to consider Zen for Film as singular and exemplary vessel of intermedial relations (that the work is contemporary of Dick Higgins' article on Intermedia is not by chance). The article ends on a series of reflections concerning dust, a central element of Zen for Film, by considering ultimately that intermedial researches could be defined as a science or an art of collecting dust, to arrange them, cultivate them, and project light upon them.

Intermedial theory, as it germinated since the mid-1980s in the fields of visual arts, cinema, communications and media, found its way into art history and literature, but it seemingly came up against a disciplinary resistance in the field of theater. It was indeed a resistance. Intermediality was at first perceived as a threat by a discipline which was paradoxically intermedial by itself and which endeavored throughout the 20th century to distinguish its own mediality from the media which competed with theater in the field of the entertainment. It is only at the beginning of the 21st century that theatrical studies opened up to the intermedial theory. This article presents some hypotheses on this resistance and explores the most recent advances in intermedial theory.

From his immersion in the operation of a psychiatric penitentiary (Titicut Follies, 1967) to Boston City Hall (2020), Frederick Wiseman's documentaries are regarded as observational cinema. Emphasis is thus placed on their ability to provide the most immediate access to the reality of American institutions. The intermedial approach proposed in this article contradicts this point of view. This is done by identifying the presence of both professional and amateur cameras (still and movie cameras) in many of these works. This phenomenon of media copresence prompts a reflection on the imaginary of the technique and ultimately leads to a rethinking of the political dimension of his work.

After defining the notion of mediating conjunctures and explaining its relations with other concepts from the intermedial tradition (mediation, media, cultural series), I will show the ontological stakes linked to this idea. I will focus in particular on the case of the digital culture by trying to propose a paradoxical ontology, an ontology without essence, which grasps the characteristics of a mediation without essentializing it into a “media”.

Aby Warburg's inquiry into the mnemonic function of images in the history of culture was at the heart of the eponymous library and photographic collection he founded in Hamburg at the beginning of the last century. In order to fully grasp his project of tracking the “afterlife” of ancient images and representations, it is necessary to understand the unprecedented modalities of disposition and visualization established therein as intermedial mechanisms. This article explores how the development of a key Warburgian concept like “pathos formula” is embedded in experimental ways of reproducing and serializing images, of slide-projection and display that already points to the last project of the Mnemosyne picture atlas.

What might we say of those examples of media in which one medium “hosts” another, which is attached to its front pages, hidden in its centre, or inscribed within its very textuality. This article examines several cases of what we might call the “prosthetic” attachment of one medium to another. In some cases, these attachments are meant to simply increase the attraction of one medium to potential buyers, as when a newspaper offers a compact disc of music free to its readers. In other cases, a “hosted” example of media serves to bring an air of the contemporary to an older medium, as when a magazine offers a CD-ROM of computer software attached to its cover. In more complicated cases, compact discs of film music may contain diegetic sounds and dialogue from a film, either intentionally, so as to extend the atmosphere of particular genres, or unavoidably, as when the music offered has been taken directly from celluloid copies of the film and is inseparable from that music. Each of these examples of intermedial “hosting”, it will be suggested, rests on judgements about the status of one medium relative to another, in a historical moment which finds each in a different phase of its relative ascension and decline.

Taking Tiziana Panizza's Tierra sola (Chile, 2017), a documentary film about Easter Island, as a case study, this article focuses on media's historic role in the production of geographic and cultural differences. Drawing from notions of “recursion” and “cultural techniques”, it analyzes the effects of self-reference emerging when media technologies are represented in colonial contexts. It argues that the recursive gesture by which the media used to record frontier encounters show their own instruments in the field, has historically contributed to the definition of spatial limits and territories. The article shows how media are connected to geographical space, and how their instruments intervene in the distribution of places.

Any object in the world, any event is susceptible of an intermedial analysis as they could be of a study in terms of communication or semiotics. It is then a question of apprehending all the mediations at work in the performance of a social practice. In order to shed light on such movements and sidesteps, this article develops an intermedial analysis by taking as its object a window: the one around which is built in a complex way Béla Tarr's Turin Horse, by games of interweaving and inter-relations. This analysis is an opportunity to revisit to the relationship to objects/fieldwork in research.

Notwithstanding the absence of a generally accepted theory of intermediality, the aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which intermedial research has come to constitute itself through a collective, cumulative process. Taking as a starting point the international, peer-reviewed journal Intermédialités/Intermediality, a journal that has been particularly open to the publication and promotion of case studies, we study how case studies published in the journal between its inception in 2003 and the time of writing (2020), have given rise to a new intelligibility. Building on the recommendations formulated by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel in their 2005 book Penser par cas, we will aim, in particular, to “highlight […] the reciprocal implication that takes place between the articulation of theory and the unfolding of inquiry.” Seeking to identify the “descriptive concepts” that have allowed for “previously unobservable phenomena” to be deciphered, our aim is to reflect on the multiple ways intermedial case studies collect the results of their inquiries so as to attempt a “theoretical reconfiguration” that nonetheless retains its specific empirical, provisional, and circumstantial character. By delving into the archive of articles of a singular journal, one that was born from a specific context and operating within specific milieus, we are thus ourselves performing a “case study” of sorts. Consequently, as is the case with most case studies, ours also constitutes an invitation for future case studies of that type to emerge.

Among the signs circulating on social web platforms, emoji play a special role. Graphic in nature, they are used jointly by users and community managers. By analyzing these uses, through a massive collection of tweets and by confronting them with interviews with practitioners, we take emoji as a starting point in order to establish how a grammar of relations between audiences and organizations can be observed. Following the use of emoji allows us to highlight the emotional and affective work of community managers as well as the type of relationships they can build, using “word-images” or “word-emotions”. Emoji then act as emotional affordances guiding professional practices in a constantly changing environment. The final result is that the singular expression of affections, mediated by affective functionalities, allows to feed a general sentiment that serves the interest of platforms, and incidentally the interest of brands.

This article epistemologically subscribes to the line developed by Anne-Marie Christin's “screen thinking”. It explores the possibility of understanding how an application of augmented reality, intended for the architectural representation, is in fact a writing device of/in space, but also a belief device proposing a singular design experience: the in-between.

The Sandwichman is one of the oldest techniques in modern advertising. Through a century of its history in France, we would like to show how this technique allows us to question the change that takes place between two specific periods of advertising sciences and techniques. The first is typical of the 19th century. During this period, advertisements “covered” the modern world; the Sandwichman, most often someone “in need”, was then employed to walk the urban pavements. During the second period, at the beginning of the 20th century, the first advertisers began to think about consumers' psychology. The Sandwichman was seen as an ineffective technique that no longer corresponded to the principles of professional advertising.