Intermediality Now: Remapping In-Betweenness

International Film and Media Studies Conference
Sapientia University Cluj (RO)
Cluj-Napoca, 19-20 October 2018

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Connected to our new exploratory research project “Rethinking Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema: Changing Forms of In-Betweenness” funded by the UEFISCDI, and following up on the topics of our previous conferences, we would like to bring into focus the idea of “in-betweenness” set in a wider context of contemporary visual culture, and to re-evaluate its relevance regarding the state of the art in researches on intermediality.
Digital media have not only prompted a reassessment of the relationship of the “old” and the “new” through their extraordinary capacity for absorption and remediation but have literally flooded our life with their ubiquity and sheer excess. The technological convergences of devices producing and displaying media, the fusions, expansions, relocations taking place have effectively challenged our perception of media differences. If the idea of intermediality is based on the assumption of a productive interaction of media, then there should be no more pressing issue regarding intermediality studies today than fine-tuning its core concept of in-betweenness to the phenomena of the so called post-media age, in the spirit of Raymond Bellour’s concept of l’entre-images (i.e. images-in-between/inter-images), in which novel forms are continuously “hollowed out from within surrounded by the new forces that irrigate it” (2012: 21). On the other hand, however, as recent theoretical approaches imply by viewing media products embedded in their palpable, real-life environment (i.e. in the dispositifs we experience them, in their phenomenology that links them to our bodies, or in their concrete, historical and socio-political context), the relevance of intermediality is not limited to what happens to media, but it extends, even more importantly, to what happens through the in-betweenness of media and what is the agency of in-betweenness in our contemporary multimedia environment. Besides the analysis of new configurations, we should also examine what is inscribed and communicated through various intermedia relations and what new types of passages are established in-between art and life, in-between the emotional, spiritual and the material, as well as the imaginary and the real, and so on.
We invite proposals to unravel the complex new relationships t\\\\\\\\\hat define our contemporary visual culture, and to map new, relevant areas of in-betweenness that may enrich our knowledge of intermediality today.

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