Presentation
Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies is a bilingual academic journal (French and English), publishing articles as well as contributions in research-creation, which encompass a variety of objects, mediums, and conceptual perspectives. In accordance with the journal’s mandate to valorize intermedial artistic practices, each issue also features the work of one or more guest artists.
With the purpose of deepening and renewing contextual approaches in the humanities, Intermediality examines the relationship between mediums, technologies, institutions, collective imaginaries and social discourses. It covers a wide range of disciplines including media studies, film studies, literature, history of art, and communications as well as architecture, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.
The journal publishes two issues per year, grouped thematically around a single verb in the infinitive, which points to gestures, practices, or events to be explored in the context of their mediality.
Orientation of the Journal
Surpassing the frameworks of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, intermediality “observes that a work does not only function in its more or less evident debt to other works, or yet in its mobilization of discursive practices (usurped, whenever necessary), but also in recourse to the institutions which allow for its efficacy as well as through the medium or material support which determines its effectiveness. […] [T]he efficacy orchestrated by the institutions and the effectiveness brought about by the techniques and the materials ultimately produce effects of meaning” (Éric Méchoulan, Intermédialités, no. 1 “Naître,” 2003, p. 10).
From this perspective, the journal Intermediality proposes to approach cultural works and productions as processes of mediation, with the purpose of dislodging our reflection from narrower approaches, which limit it to the analysis of either information and entertainment media or yet art mediums. In its larger project, mediality can “account for modes of objectification, transmission and circulation of cultural expression in all its forms. It can thus designate objects and machines as much as discursive formations or forms of sociality” (Will Straw, Intermédialités, no. 26 “Habiter la nuit,” 2015, §10). In this sense, an intermedial analysis means paying special attention to the singularity of objects, environments and experiences as well as trusting their heuristic potential. Yet importantly, the intermedial analysis does not privilege technological determinism, nor does it aim to identify macrosocial logics, all the while remaining attentive to the structuring effects of various forms of materiality implicated in the production of meaning.
As an interdisciplinary journal, Intermediality distinguishes itself in its emphasis on a theoretical as well as a historical contextualization: the journal welcomes a wide range of conceptual perspectives and embraces the idea of a necessary methodological and theoretical diversity, responding to the particularity of the proposed case studies. Thanks to this openness, the journal aims to constitute an arena for conceptual inventiveness in the study of the relationships between cultural expressions and social practices. Finally, Intermediality attributes an important role to contemporary art practices in their capacity to engage, reflect and think through the intermedial.