Intermedia 2.0
Cross-disciplinary approaches, cutting across media and genres, have become so well entrenched since the 1960s that it has become impossible to conceive of the art scene without them. Sculpture, sound, film, theatre, performance and numerous other art forms have entered into various kinds of fusion since then with approaches adopted in the traditional fine arts. A surge of activity, rooted in new ideas about creativity and about ways of conveying content, has become apparent recently in this type of »intermediality«. To put it in perhaps rather melodramatic terms, media-specific work has been replaced by a mode of production that extends its reach to link together the most distant fields. »Intercreativity«, a paradigm for work and working methods situated between various individual disciplines, has begun to take over from traditional models of creativity specific to each individual discipline.
The »Intermedia 2.0« edition, created in conjunction with the City of Vienna’s departure funding initiative, scrutinises the potential of these broader concepts of media and creativity. Selected contributions from »Quer – Symposium und Labor für Interkreativität« (»Quer – Symposium and Laboratory for Intercreativity«), held in mid-March 2010, form the point of departure for this exploration. The event involved a series of international media theorists and practitioners from a diverse range of different fields, who explored the current trend in the arts to mix elements from different disciplines. Diedrich Diederichsen for example takes a critical look in his essay at the debates that flare up periodically in relation to »Regietheater« (director’s theatre), and establishes a link between these discussions and the increasing attraction many contemporary artists seem to feel towards the large-scale format of the opera and the notions of bourgeois culture manifested in its underpinnings. Christian von Borries, a practitioner in the field of new classical music and the hybrid forms associated with this, reviews a series of projects and offers a political reading of the constantly recalibrated blend that emerges in these undertakings, which mix images and sound in ever-shifting proportions.
The difficulties and resistances that often appear when hot-wiring different disciplines together are addressed in numerous other essays. Artist Markus Schinwald explains what he finds on the one hand so fascinating in areas with a close affinity to art, such as fashion, dance and acting, whilst on the other hand never losing sight throughout his essay of the specific rules intrinsic to art. Jasper Sharp undertakes an extensive mapping exercise, recording collaborations between artists and practitioners of other disciplines (for example with architects), which are rife in the art scene and are apparently still full of restless energy. In this examination he focuses above all on the fragility and ephemerality of such cooperation projects. Finally, Anne Hilde Neset considers why institutions specialised in the visual arts continue to have such difficulty in dealing with music-related art-forms.
Inverting the terms of the equation, Barbara Lesák uses the example of Friedrich Kiesler as historical evidence to support her argument that the barriers between art, design, architecture and the stage have long since been eroded – particularly in areas where the concept of transgression was always apparent, and proves as bold as it is self-evident. Current endeavours to cross boundaries or to extend the scope of concepts enclosed within such boundaries are explored in two projects that are also presented (albeit rather briefly) in the following pages: in the »lied lab 2010: hugo wolf festival« several visual artists from a digital culture background experimented with visual transposition of classical »Kunstlieder« (art songs) performed live; a similar approach was adopted during readings by authors in the »literatur lab – Vom Hörbuch zum Sehbuch« (»literature lab – From the Audio Book to the Visual Book «). Although there is only limited scope within the pages of a magazine to reproduce the way that intercreative work in tune with the times is of necessity really put to the test in the course of such initiatives, this format does offer one advantage: it makes it possible to bring together a plethora of analytic perspectives that elucidate and complement each other. The superpositions of different media depicted here leave little doubt that this approach is opening up new, primarily electronic, avenues for artistic exploration.