Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication "Transmedia Navigation." But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.
Dick Higgins, an artist with the Fluxus movement in the 1970s, referred to his pieces as "intermedia," suggesting that they were not part of any existing media practice like drama, music, or poetry, but rather in between them, emphasizing "the dialectic between the media." For example, read the score to his "Constellation Number 4":
Constellation Number 4
A sound is made. The sound is to have a clearly-defined percussive attack and decay [such as produced by plucking strings, hitting gongs, bells, helmets, or tubes]. Each performer produces his sound efficiently and almost simultaneously with other performers' sounds. Each sound is produced only once.
The performance ends up as a set of performers playing a single note, almost simultaneously. What looks like a musical event to the audience is scored like a theatrical event, with no traditional musical notation in sight. Other Higgins works have instructions like "Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!" or "Volunteer to have your spine removed," which are either confusing or impossible. (The "Scream!" piece is called "Danger Music Number Seventeen," and is usually performed by someone screaming until they lose their voice. Seriously!) These pieces that cannot be performed are clearly intended to be read, and again stretch the boundaries of their media.
A major difference between "Danger Music Seventeen" and a transmedia story such as the Pokémon franchise is the focus on media. While Pokémon exists across a variety of media, "Danger Music" is about the variety of media. A performer encountering the instructions is prompted to think about how the piece could possibly be interpreted, drawing on modes of communication from multiple media traditions. Pokémon, on the other hand, is not specifically about the fact that it is on television, in a comic book, video game, or on a deck of cards.
Intermedia is about production and the generation of new media types (many of the works of Fluxus composers like Dick Higgins have come to be classified as "Happenings" or "performance art"), while transmedia usually describes the reception of a story through different media channels. Intermedia suggests that we might reconceive New Media Literacy as not only the ability to read and write stories across media, but also the ability to identify the spaces between the media and creatively open them up to enable new media forms.
I like the idea that media literacy includes the pursuit of new communication formats in addition to the ability to navigate across existing ones. These two skills seem to come together when new technologies emerge before people have a real sense of what to do with them. In the current issue of October, Christine Mehring writes a kind of pre-history of television, looking at European artists after WWII, (including Fluxus artist Nam June Paik). Mehring makes a lot of this idea that the technology of television was developed before it had content, so its early days were devoted to thinking about its formal properties. I was interested in the way the artists and groups she discussed all seemed to be searching for the essential quality of the medium and how that informed its purpose. The painters in the Informel artist group fell in love with the abstract shapes produced on the screen and saw television as a painterly medium. Then this group called the Spatialists came along and said that TV was really about reaching many different people and places at the same time and the idea of the broadcast. Nam June Paik was interested in the lack of control that came with television, both in terms of the weird distortions that occurred on screen and in terms of the programming itself. Then there was the Zero group, which took up the idea that TV demanded collaborative creation and played with the possibilities of the production crew.
Contemporary art often gets dismissed for a kind of insular dialog about its own condition, but in this case (or the case of "Danger Music Seventeen") I think this self-consciousness definitely points to a productive part of media literacy. I found it interesting to see how the artists in Mehring's essay moved from simply using the new technology to do things that already interested them (like abstract painting) and into the possibilities that are now widely associated with television. It reminds me a bit of something Ben Rigby said on Henry's blog a little while ago about the early days of the internet when people scanned in their printed publicity materials to make websites, only later discovering interactive uses. Rigby thinks virtual worlds like Second Life are in the first stage, where they simply translate existing forms into the new medium without thinking about the emerging possibilities that the medium offers. I like how you used the idea of "intermedia" to think about transmedia navigation from a production standpoint. On the creative side, it seems that media literacy should include thinking about the particular opportunities that new formats provide, not simply translating equivalent messages across media.
Oliver,
Thanks for pointing me to that television art article, it looks fascinating.
I agree with you (of course) about the creative possibilities opened up by changing relationships with our major media forms. What I haven't really thought out yet is the specific way in which this reconceptualization might be constructed as a "literacy." It is certainly a useful process from an artistic standpoint, but I'm curious to see if people catch on to the idea of exploring technological possibility as a distinct literacy. I would imagine that such an idea is currently served by a few of the current NML skills, like play and negotiation. In that case, this idea might be more of a lens through which to view the core NML skills--an artistic angle on literacy.