Introduction to EJES special journal issue on ‘Feminist Interventions in Intermedial Studies'

Abstract The feminist project has radicalised text/image relationships in myriad ways, disrupting the contours of discipline and medium. The multifaceted recyclings of a transdisciplinary methodology remind us that although in the past decades text/image studies has become an established academic research field in the first decades of the twenty-first century, its subversive potential to challenge cultural hegemonies has not diminished. On the contrary, intermedial fusions remain loaded with political and ethical issues that are in search of sites of resistance for marginalised, othered social subjects and meanings. The introduction explains how this special journal issue emerges from and is addressed to the politically significant network of feminist researchers -- artists, theoreticians, activists -- we believe we share ties with on account of putting the study of intermediality in the service of 'constructing a radically new understanding of our world in all its horror and hope' (Pollock, 1988: 22)

Intermedial arts : disrupting, remembering and transforming media

Intermedialit?als Begriff verweist nicht nur auf die heutige Gesellschaft als ?mediascape? (Appadurai) und auf die entsprechende Vernetzung der Medien, sondern auch auf die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem, was der ?Medien?-Begriff ?haupt bedeutet; was ?ert sich wenn sich die sogenannten Neuen Medien die Formen der ?alten? Medien wieder aneigen; und was passiert, wenn das Wissen selbst als intermediales Wissen begriffen wird, das selbstreflexiv die L? zwischen Wahrnehmungsprozessen und dem ?Zugriff? des Intellekts darstellt. Intermediales Denken hei?, dass digitale Dichtung nicht nur Lessings Trennung zwischen Gem?e als r?licher Kunst, und Dichtung als zeitlicher Kunst ablehnt, sondern ist vor allem ein Hinweis auf die Weise wie unterschiedliche Organisationen des Wissens neue Perspektiven er?en bzw. verschleiern k?n. Weiterhin kann Forschung zur Intermedialit?auf die kulturpolitische Dimension im Streit um Bedeutung und Darstellung hinweisen. In a mediascape society, intermediality is not only the study of the interconnectedness of new media to the larger social collective, but also a means of asking critical questions about what constitutes a medium, what changes when we look at new media as reappropriations of older forms, and how knowledges themselves can be understood intermedially, as self-reflexive acts that make visible the necessary lag or gap that opens up between perception and the ?grasp? of the intellectual apparatus. To think intermedially means to consider something like digital poetry not only as a challenge to Lessing?s separation of the arts into time-based versus space-based media but also as an indication of how different organisations of knowledge can obscure or, respectively, make visible, different perspectives. Moreover, intermedial studies can point out the cultural politics involved in the struggle over meaning, since gender and other stratifying categories cannot be separated from how events come to be represented and understood. From this perspective, we can see the ?university in ruins? as an institution that promotes intermediality as part of a move toward a market-based, corporatized model of knowledge; nevertheless, we might be able to use the disjuncture that intermedial thinking introduces as a means to critically examine the apparent abandonment of critical thinking. Whether the challenge to reconceptualise derives from the historic avant-garde practice of estrangement via, e.g., collage, or from a reading of ekphrasis as a means of grasping an event historically, ?after? its occurrence, or from the ?pictorial third? which emerges in the space between word and image, an intermedial approach enables a consideration of the mediating role of media themselves, which disrupt, remember and transform as much as they ?transmit,? ?translate,? and ?transport? across spatial and historical distances