Collective and Convergent
Barbara Burns talks to Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug, and Giuliana Pieri about their book Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence, which was published on Open Access this summer in Legenda’s Visual Culture series.
BB. Congratulations on your new, open-access volume which investigates the breaking down of artistic boundaries in Italy since the start of the twentieth century. Can you explain for our readers what the term ‘intermediality’ means, and how it represents a paradigm shift in terms of creative exchanges between different art forms?
CB. Simply and broadly put, intermediality is the relations between media, the way they interact, and interfere with each other, as Irina Rajewsky puts it. This in-between space of the arts is what our work explores, and we took inspiration from artist Dick Higgins who, back in the 1960s, thought the best artwork was falling between artistic media, and that the critical apparatus was failing to deal with it adequately.
While the arts have always been intermedial, the relations between the arts in Italy grew ever closer at the start of the twentieth century, when the Futurists first dabbled in synaesthesia and launched their idea of the total work of art. Intermedial art forms have quickly transformed how art is produced, and how and where we consume culture. We see the rapid growth in intermedial forms, from film to sound art, to video art, graphic art, and performance art and then interactive websites. We see new sites and technologies for hybridity appear (television, video projection, museums as white boxes, computers, the Internet). And we see key names appear who thrive in in-betweeness, like Bruno Munari, Fausto Melotti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Cannibali writers, and Wu Ming. From our current position, there is almost no sense of a medium or art form ‘that exists in itself’, but rather only media that exist ‘in relation to or in collaboration with other media’. This is what we mean by a paradigm shift in the very conception of a medium.
BB. What is the primary research question underpinning your book, and what does your study achieve that is new in this field?
CB. Our book is informed by a single critical research question: why has intermedial practice changed so markedly over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Italy? It’s an enormously challenging question, but our aim from the outset was to go beyond the narrow focus of monodisciplinary research to reveal a more comprehensive picture of intermedial encounters and new kinds of experimentation in Italy. We have endeavoured to challenge and amend established ideas of cultural centres and peripheries, to refocus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing.
Our work, in other words, along with other intermedial work, has led, we think, to a re-orientation of the field, which allows us to challenge canonicity and take stock of our changing disciplines. Intermedial research leads almost inevitably to a questioning of what we do, and what falls inside and outside its boundaries. As these boundaries change the object of research changes too.
BB. Your book charts key developments between 1900 and 2020 by selecting seven individual years and concepts representing significant moments of change during this period. Can you tell us something about this structure?
FM. We chose to focus on seven years (1915, 1932, 1963, 1972, 1994, 2007, 2020), which mark significant moments of change or consolidation for intermedial practice. This solution was inspired by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (1998). Every chapter functions as a ‘creative-critical snapshot’, providing insights into the ongoing flow of technological, aesthetic, and social transformation.
For each chapter, we picked an overarching concept which guided artistic practice in that given year. One might say that we did not just date our snapshots, we titled them too. In this, we followed the example of Mieke Bal, who taught us how to structure complex interdisciplinary material through the use of travelling concepts. ‘1915: Revolution’, ‘1963: Experiment’, and ‘1994: Hybridity’ are some of the pairings which allowed us to assemble large frameworks, to confront a range of artistic disciplines, and to avoid the dangers of disciplinary compartmentalisation. The concepts are simplifying tools: they can never be wholly adequate, but they provide, we believe, an intriguing, if imperfect, lens. Of course there are other, wider influences on intermedial change: economic, institutional, infrastructural, and technological factors play an important part in the developing relationships between the arts. We refer to these, as and when relevant, in all chapters.
BB. Your opening chapter, entitled ‘1915: Revolution’, focuses on the Italian avant-garde movement known as Futurism. In what ways did the Futurists’ rebellion against the old order and their championing of modernity manifest itself, and how did they influence subsequent artistic theories and practices?
GP. The influence of Futurism on intermedial theory and practice in Italy is remarkable. There is a clear shift away from traditional art practice, with its focus on individual artistic disciplines, in favour of a holistic and experimental view of all arts as being fundamentally interconnected. Fashion is an interesting example: the Futurists saw the potential of dress to unseat established ideas and behaviours; it could turn the wearer into a living dynamic sculpture, whilst also materialising ideas of speed and interconnectivity into the city space.
The interwar period, which is often overlooked and misunderstood in terms of Futurist innovation, is an excellent vantage point to look at the legacy and continued influence of Futurism. This is the time in which a new generation of Futurist artists, building on theories and practices of artistic interconnectedness, moved into the area of design which allowed them to reach the masses. Advertising is a good example of this. But the interwar period is also the time when Fascism dominated Italian culture and politics. The Futurist revolution of the arts and their vision of the arts as converging and working together was very helpful to the Fascist regime as it created a more seamless transition into a total control of the arts and the art system.
BB. What is the role of technology in the development of new media and intermediality?
FM. That’s a big question. Technological innovation plays a crucial role in the development of intermediality. In the later chapters of the book, we explore this connection when we discuss the importance of digital media. And yet, our definition of intermediality is broader than this. We do not see intermedia as being driven entirely by technological innovation. Our book shows that new forms of intermediality have emerged both in response to technological progress and when artists refused innovative technologies, for example because of their alleged complicity with hierarchies of social, political, and cultural privilege. In chapter five, ‘1972: Collapse’, we look at performance artists of the 1970s, who rejected publicly funded cultural institutions and their expensive new technologies, and preferred ‘poor’ materials, spontaneous creativity, and public participation.
CB. I’d just add that in chapter six, ‘2007: Convergence’, however, we do look explicitly at how digital technologies rapidly accelerated intermedial exchange. Technology is a theme of the book, but the reasons that we believe are behind the rise of intermediality are much more complex than this.
BB. You devote part of your chapter on 2007, on the theme ‘Convergence’, to the writers’ collective known as Wu Ming. What can you tell us about this group?
CB. Wu Ming is one of Italy’s most important writers’ collectives and hugely influential on early twenty-first-century Italy. It was born in 2000, but its members had been working since the mid-1990s under another name: the Luther Blisset Project. This small group of politically orientated Italian writers had a longstanding interest in what they called ‘communication warfare’, and they took inspiration from Dada events and Futurist soirées, as well as from pop culture and even Mexican Zapatistas. In other words, radically communicating their ideas was central to their sense of purpose. They had been looking, since the outset, for novel ways to break communicative conventions.
We see some of the group’s work as presenting a particularly interesting and radical form of digital convergence, a bottom-up, left-wing convergence that is quite different from the commercial top-down forms of convergence seen, for instance in the US. Wu Ming are key to the story of intermediality and illustrate the utopian drive that resurfaces wherever the concept of the unity of the arts emerges.
BB. It’s quite unusual to see a book that is written, rather than edited, by three people. How did this collaborative research project come about, and what were the challenges and rewards of authoring a volume in this way?
FM. Collaborative writing holds a special significance for us. We share a desire to explore patterns of connectivity that transcend the confines of our individual research expertise. We have worked together for almost a decade and have learned a lot from each other. We organised workshops and conferences together, have written co-authored journal articles, and met regularly to discuss the structure of this book. Each of us brings a particular set of interests and expertise. Giuliana specialises in art, design, and fashion. Clodagh’s current research is focused on cinema, video, and intermediality more widely. I am particularly interested in literature and have done some work on experimental music.
Collaborative writing gave us an opportunity to explore all these different fields. We did not strive for a single, unified approach or a perfectly coherent voice. After all, we all have our personal methodologies, our frankly obsessive interests, and our individual writing styles. But perhaps this is not entirely bad. Finding compromises between our interests and attitudes has made it easier, I think, to take in the complex, multifaceted, even kaleidoscopic nature of the interrelations between the arts in modern Italy. A famous folk tale tells the story of three people in a dark room, groping an elephant to learn what it is really like. Each person touches a different part and when they compare notes, they are in for a big surprise. There were periods, especially at the beginning of our collaboration, when we felt like this, sharing unexpected insights and savouring the intellectual excitement that came with these new perspectives. We may not have mapped every part of the elephant’s body, but we can now see her a lot more clearly.
BB. Can you tell us a bit about the thinking behind your project website, www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org? In what ways has this complemented your research and raised awareness of its focus in the academic community and beyond?
CB. The website is an open, dynamic space where we share intermedial research happening across our field. We invite writers, theorists, and artists to contribute with short blog or vlog posts. Contributors have ranged from some of the key theorists of intermediality – Henry Jenkins, Gabriele Rippl, Lars Elleström – to collective posts from PhD students who attended our annual Interdisciplinary Italy summer school. The website is a snapshot of the excellent work being done by our colleagues and we take this opportunity to invite others to contact us if they think they have relevant material that they would like published there. We always welcome new contributors.
BB. What implications does your study of intermedial forms of art have for teaching in Italian Studies today? Does it throw out a challenge to some of the traditional elements of our curriculum such as classic literary texts and films?
FM. Italian Studies is a fast-changing field with strong traditions of multidisciplinary research excellence. In recent years, many colleagues have become sensitive to the intermediality of their objects of study. Younger scholars, in particular, are incorporating intermedial methodologies into their work to deal better with the ontological complexity of artistic products. This has important implications for knowledge dissemination, outputs, and teaching. Our book poses some hefty questions: are academic monographs (including ours), with few, still, unmoving illustrations, the best way of sharing our research findings? What would it mean to explore intermediality not through the written word but through music or photographs, virtual reality, or film?
Related to this is the future of teaching. Students who are entering Italian Studies programmes in the 2020s were born after intermediality became normalised in the 1990s. They do not have any direct experience of a world in which the arts were not converging. As digital natives, they grew up with YouTube, tablets, and smartphones. Do we encourage these students to speak a critical language that was designed for analogue and much less intermedial forms of art, or do we make an effort to re-invent this language? COVID-19 lockdowns have already changed our teaching methods: we record lectures, curate recorded talks, learn to produce high-quality video essays and ensure that knowledge is easily accessible online. We expect to see more of this over the coming years.
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