Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders [1 ed.] 0367244861, 9780367244866

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Transmediations

This collection offers a multi-faceted exploration of transmediations, the processes of transfer and transformation that occur when communicative acts in one medium are mediated again through another. While previous research has explored these processes from a broader perspective, Salmose and Elleström argue that a better understanding is needed of the extent to which the outcomes of communicative acts are modified when transferred across multimodal media in order to foster a better understanding of communication more generally. Using this imperative as a point of departure, the book details a variety of transmediations, viewed through four different lenses. The first part of the volume looks at narrative transmediations, building on existing work done by Marie-Laure Ryan on transmedia storytelling. The second section focuses on the spatial dynamics involved in media transformation as well as the role of the human body as a perceptive agent and a medium in its own right. The third part investigates new, radical boundaries and media types in transmediality and hence shows its versatility as a method of analyzing complex and contemporary communicative discourses. The fourth and final part explores the challenges involved in transmediating scientific data into the narrative format in the context of environmental issues. Taken together, these sections highlight a range of case studies of transmediations and, in turn, the complexity and variety of the process, informed by the methodologies of the different disciplines to which they belong. This innovative volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, communication, intermediality, semiotics, and adaptation studies. Niklas Salmose is Associate Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published and presented internationally on nostalgia, Nordic noir, Hitchcock, cinematic style in fiction, modernism, the Anthropocene and Hollywood, animal horror, intermediality and sensorial aesthetics in fiction. He co-edited an issue on the Anthropocene for the journal Ekfrase (2016), a special issue on contemporary nostalgia for the journal Humanities (2018), and a book on experimental Swedish filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson (2019). At Linnaeus University, he is a member of the Linnaeus University Centre of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS). Lars Elleström is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He presides over the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies and chairs the board of the International Society for Intermedial Studies. Elleström has written and edited several books, including Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically (2002), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (2010), Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (2014) and Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media (2019). He has also published numerous articles on poetry, intermediality, semiotics, gender, irony and communication.

Routledge Studies in Multimodality Edited by Kay L. O’Halloran Curtin University

Multimodality and Aesthetics Edited by Elise Seip Tønnessen and Frida Forsgren Multimodal Stylistics of the Novel More Than Words Nina Nørgaard A Multimodal Approach to Video Games and the Player Experience Weimin Toh Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames Jason Hawreliak Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics A Corpus-Based Experimental Study Ahmed Abdel-Raheem Design Perspectives on Multimodal Documents System, Medium, and Genre Relations Edited by Matthew David Lickiss A Multimodal Perspective on Applied Storytelling Performances Narrativity in Context Soe Marlar Lwin Shifts towards Image-centricity in Contemporary Multimodal Practices Edited by Hartmut Stöckl, Helen Caple and Jana Pflaeging Transmediations Communication Across Media Borders Edited by Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Multimodality/book-series/RSMM

Transmediations Communication Across Media Borders

Edited by Niklas Salmose and Lars Elleström

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Niklas Salmose & Lars Elleström; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Niklas Salmose & Lars Elleström to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-24486-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28277-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Table and Figures List of Contributors Foreword

vii ix xiii

N I K L A S SA L MO SE & L ARS E L L E STRÖ M

1 Transmediation: Some Theoretical Considerations

1

L A RS E L L E S TRÖ M

PART I

Transmedia Storytelling 2 Transmedia Storytelling and Its Discourses

15 17

M A R I E - L AU RE RYAN

3 Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases Project (2003−2005): Transmedia Storytelling as Self-Reference Multimediality

31

FÁTI M A C H I N ITA

4 The Gamification of Cinema and the Cinematization of Games

52

D O RU P O P

PART II

Ekphrasis 5 The “Unflinching Gaze”: The Representation of Suffering in Tony Harrison’s Film Poetry AG ATA H A N DL E Y

75

77

vi

Contents

6 Leaving the White Cube of Ekphrasis: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersection

97

H E I D RU N F Ü H RE R AN D AN N A KRAUS

7 Architectural Ekphraseis: Unveiling a Brazilian Wall-Less House in Contemporary Fiction

118

M I R I A M V I E IRA

PART III

Transmediation: A Broad Media Perspective 8 The Logic of Cutting Yourself: From Senseless Chaos to Signifying Order

137

139

H A N S T. S TE RN UDD

9 Three Ways of Transmediating a Theme Park: Spatializing Storyworlds in Epic Mickey, the Monkey Island Series and Theme Park Management Simulators

164

P É TE R K R I S TÓ F MAKAI

10 Intersemiotic Translation as a Creative Thinking Tool: From Gertrude Stein to Dance

186

J OÃO QU E I RO Z A N D P E DRO ATÃ

PART IV

Transmediating the Anthropocene

215

11 “We’re Doomed – Now What?”: Transmediating Temporality Into Narrative Forms

217

J Ø R G E N B RU H N

12 Transmediations of the Anthropocene: From Factual Media to Poetry

235

E M M A TO R NB O RG

13 Three Transmediations of the Anthropocene: An Intermedial Ecocritical Reading of Facts, Sci-Fi, PopSci and Eco-Horror

254

N I K L A S SA L MO SE

Index

274

Table and Figures

Table 10.1

Summary of episodes, main selected properties of Stein’s prose and the target

206

Figures 8.1 8.2 8.3

Clark and Henslin, Inside a Cutter’s Mind (2007) Duplass, Teen girl with troubled or scared expression Chaos here represented by black and white visual noise, often called TV snow 8.4 In this model the chaotic state is marked with an exclamation mark and a question mark, indicating its destructive force and how confusing the state is 8.5 The aftermath, medium 2 8.6 “M = Medium; C = represented media Characteristics; T = Transfer” 8.7 Transmediation from medium 2 to spoken verbal text 8.8 Transmediation from medium 2 to visual verbal text 8.9 Transmediation from medium 2 to digital photo 8.10 Transmediation from M3 b/c to a website 8.11 From Senseless Chaos to Signifying Order 10.1 The triadic relation S-O-I 10.2 Model 1 of intersemiotic translation 10.3 Model 2 of intersemiotic translation 10.4 Intersemiotic translation as an anticipatory tool 10.5 Intersemiotic translation as a generative tool 10.6 The dancers manipulating transparent plastic sheets on the overhead projectors 10.7 The dancers moving in straight lines, forward and backward 10.8 The dancers watching the audience

140 141 143

147 149 150 151 152 153 154 156 189 191 191 194 195 197 198 200

viii Table and Figures 10.9 The dancers in quotidian actions 10.10 Dyadic experiment with the dancers’ collision 10.11 The team

202 205 213

Contributors

Pedro Atã is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is interested in surprise, complexity and creativity, especially in arts. His research approximates C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, embodiedsituated and distributed cognitive science, philosophy of complex systems, and experimental traditions in arts, focusing on notions such as intersemiotic translation, emergence, cognitive niche construction and abductive inference. His doctoral project investigates the emergence of surprise from embodied-situated systems of agents and media, examining mainly experimental practices in poetry. Jørgen Bruhn is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Recent publications include The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter (Palgrave MacMillan 2016) and, co-written with Anne Gjelsvik, Cinema Between Media: An Intermediality Approach (Edinburgh UP, 2018). Bruhn is currently writing a book on representations of the Anthropocene condition across aesthetic and non-aesthetic media. Fátima Chinita is an Associate Professor at the Theatre and Film School of the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, Film Department, where she started lecturing in 1995. She holds a PhD, in Artistic Studies (specialty in Film and Audio-visual Media) and has pursued post-doctoral research at the Intermediality and Multimodality research center of the University of Linnaeus, together with Labcom.IFP in Portugal. She is currently co-editing Crossing Narrative Boundaries Between Cinema and other Arts and Media, a special issue of the Journal Ekphrasis (Vol. 22, No. 2, December 2019). Lars Elleström is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He presides over the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies and chairs the board of the International Society for Intermedial Studies. Elleström has written and edited several books, including Divine Madness: On Interpreting

x

Contributors Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically (2002), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (2010), Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (2014) and Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media (2019). He has also published numerous articles on poetry, intermediality, semiotics, gender, irony and communication.

Heidrun Führer is Associate Professor of Intermedial Studies in the department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, University in Lund, Sweden. After studying German literature and classic philology in Germany, she specialized in Latin drama at the University in Lund in Sweden, where she now teaches in the field of intermediality, in particular on the intermedial rhetoric of site-specific performances. Publications on  the  topic include “The Trajectory of Ancient Ekphrasis” (2014), “‘Take the Beuys off’: Reconsidering the Current Concept of Ekphrasis in the Performative Poetry of Thomas Kling” (2017) and “Digital Ekphrasis: Transferring an Old Concept Into a New Sphere?” (2017). Agata Handley is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Łódź, Poland. Her main areas of academic interest are British literature, with a special focus on Northern poetry and culture, and contemporary Canadian literature. She is the author of Constructing Identity: Continuity, Otherness and Revolt in the Poetry of Tony Harrison (2016), which analyzes the theme of identity construction recurring in Tony Harrison’s work from the seventies onwards. She is part of the editorial team for Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture. Anna Kraus (1980) is a Wallenberg Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, and member of the materia Focal Group in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. In her research she engages with new materialist philosophy and post-anthropocentric conceptualizations/ practices of corporeality in young Latin American fiction. She has published a book on performative visuality in/of Roberto Bolaño’s literary work. Previously she has worked as lecturer at Lund University and as literary translator from Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, and French to Polish. Péter Kristóf Makai is currently working as the Crafoord Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is researching how evolutionary theory is being communicated across media at LNU’s Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. His past research has investigated cognitive literary theory and evocriticism in the autism novel, science fiction and fantasy studies, how virtual reality has been presaged by J. R. R. Tolkien, and fantasy games. He published his results in Tolkien Studies and Blackwell’s A Companion to J.R.R.

Contributors

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Tolkien, as well as Subcreating Arda. In addition, he has published on immersive video games and theme park research. Doru Pop is a Professor of film and media studies at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. He was a Fulbright and Ron Brown Scholar at the New School for Social Research (1995–96) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2000–2002). In the United States, he taught a course on Romanian New Wave Cinema at Bard College, New York (2012–2013) and European cinema as visiting professor at Columbus State University, Georgia (2017). His most recent publications include Romanian New Wave Cinema (McFarland, 2014), and The Age of Promiscuity: Narrative and Mythological Meme Mutations in Contemporary Cinema and Popular Culture (Lexington, 2018). João Queiroz (www.semiotics.pro.br/) is a Professor at the Institute of Arts and Design, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil. He is a director member of the Iconicity Research Group (IRG), member (expert panel) of the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Sweden, and associate researcher of the Linguistics and Language Practice Department, University of the Free State. South Africa. His main interests include Cognitive Semiotics, Peirce’s philosophy, and Intermedial studies. Marie-Laure Ryan, a native of Geneva, Switzerland, is an independent scholar based in Colorado, working currently in the areas of narrative theory, media theory, and representations of space. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001, 2nd edition 2015), Avatars of Story (2006) and the co-author of Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016), as well as the editor of several books. She has been scholar in residence at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Johannes Gutenberg Fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany. In 2017 she received the lifetime achievement award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Niklas Salmose is Associate Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published and presented internationally on nostalgia, Nordic noir, Hitchcock, cinematic style in fiction, modernism, the Anthropocene and Hollywood, animal horror, intermediality and sensorial aesthetics in fiction. He co-edited an issue on the Anthropocene for the journal Ekfrase (2016), a special issue on contemporary nostalgia for the journal Humanities (2018), and a book on experimental Swedish filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson (2019). At Linnaeus University, he is a member of the Linnaeus University Center of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS).

xii

Contributors

Hans T. Sternudd is an Associate Professor in art history and visual studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is a member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. Sternudd’s research interests include questions about the articulation of gender, corporality and affect. He has published articles about self-injury and self-cutting in (among others) the Journal of Gender Studies, Visual Studies and the Journal of Youth Studies. Emma Tornborg holds a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University. She defended her thesis, “What Literature Can Make Us See: Poetry, Intermediality, Mental Imagery”, in 2014. Her research interests include transmediation, media representation, poetry, GIFs, and picture books. Her latest publication is “Att undvika genusfällor i bilderboken” (“Avoiding Gender Traps in Picture Books”, Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2019). Miriam Vieira is Professor of Literature in English at Universidade Federal de São João del Rei, Brazil. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (CNPq, 2018) and has a doctorate in literary studies at the same institution with mobility funded by Erasmus Mundus at Lund University, Sweden. She is a member of the International Society for Intermedial Studies and Intermídia: estudos sobre a intermidialidade. Recent edited volumes include Escrita, Som, Imagem: Perspectivas contemporȃneas (2019), with Márcia Arbex and Thaïs Diniz. Her current research areas are literature and architecture, ekphrasis, and (teaching of) intermediality.

Foreword

Media can be understood as those tangible or intangible entities that make communication among human minds possible. Although these entities are always material in some way – whether they are corporeal or external to the human body – their communicative abilities are determined by their capacity for creating a mental response. Media are cultural products that cannot be fully understood unless both their specific physical traits and their capacity to affect cognition are taken into account. One of the most astonishing capabilities of the interaction between media and human beings is that the outcome of one communicative act can successfully be mediated again through another kind of medium. A photograph in a newspaper may be described in spoken words; cinema may be gamified; the spatial experience of a theme park may be transferred to a TV series; a novel may be adapted into a movie; the gist of a scientific account may be rendered into a cinematic narrative; spoken words may be transmitted via sign language. These processes of transfer and transformation can be called transmediations. Transmediation is an exceedingly common phenomenon in all kinds of communication. It is a cross-cultural and cross-historical phenomenon which ultimately results from the flexibility our minds have developed through thousands of years of multisensory interaction with multi-material surroundings and communication with other minds in widely different situations. As transmediation cannot be accomplished seamlessly, an understanding of the communicative process appears to be an acutely important matter for our knowledge of communication at large. Although the study of transmediation is not virgin soil (it has been investigated in various subject areas using shifting terminology), we need a deeper understanding of how the outcome of communication is modified – sometimes dramatically – when it is transferred among different types of media with various multimodal traits. This book aims to reverberate such an understanding as explorations include, on the one hand, the inescapable media differences and similarities that set the limits for transmediation (transmediation involves material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic borders being crossed),

xiv

Foreword

and, on the other hand, the equally unavoidable contextual factors that determine communication in general (transmediation is affected by culture, history, politics, ideology, education and interpretive communities). The relatively eclectic selection of media and transmediations included is essential in order to demonstrate the complexity and variety of transmedial communication, and since these transmediations are approached from within different disciplines and by using divergent methods, they do not conform to one established theoretical framework, although they do fall into the general definition of intermedial theory. It is thus not the aim of this volume to unify these transmediations within a designed, or proposed, intermedial or multimodal theory. Lars Elleström, in his introductory chapter “Transmediation: Some Theoretical Considerations”, sketches out a theoretical and historical overview of the concept of transmediation and situates it within the broader concepts used in intermedial and multimodal studies. Although not all chapters in this volume subscribe to Elleström’s transmedial taxonomy, this chapter introduces readers to general media-transformative ideas and theoretical considerations that are useful in the conceptualizations of the different chapters and briefly discusses all the individual chapters in this volume, and hence no detailed description of the content of the chapters will be provided in this foreword. The first part of the book, “Transmedia Storytelling”, aims to develop Marie-Laure Ryan’s theories of transmedial narratology and Henry Jenkins’s concept of transmedia storytelling (several media together building narratives) in new, medial directions, looking primarily at narrative transmediations. Part 2, “Ekphrasis”, focuses less on the narratological aspects of transmediations and instead explores the spatial dynamics involved in media transformation as well as the role of the human body as a perceptive agent and a medium in its own right. Ekphrasis in this section is understood in a broader sense than its original meaning of verbal descriptions of art, involving all kinds of media representations. The third part, “Transmediation: A Broad Media Perspective”, investigates new, radical boundaries and media types in transmediality and hence shows its versatility as a method of analyzing complex and contemporary communicative discourses. The fourth and final part, “Transmediating the Anthropocene”, explores the challenges involved in transmediating scientific data, in this case the pressing issue of our environmental realities, into a narrative format. The thematic divisions in the book function by zooming in from a broader set of transmediations, through cognitive and affective embodied consequences, to a very specific transmedial source text. The thematic structure provides a logical development from the broad to the specific through well-defined transmedial categories. This collection of chapters aims to discuss a broad set of media transmediations, revealing that these transformations occur in a variety of communicative acts, and thus are

Foreword

xv

interdisciplinary, but that they still share some fundamental communicative and intermedial similarities. The idea of a volume on transmediations emanated from the creative and enthusiastic flux of ideas, debates, panels, keynotes and papers at an international conference on transmediation organized by the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, in the autumn of 2016. It was apparent at this conference that the interest in media transformation was extensive and that transmedial theory offered ways of understanding essential communicative acts in our contemporary world (social media, fake news, gaming, commodified narratives, ecological crisis) that seriously competed with more standardized hermeneutic or politicized ideological analyses. In fact, transmedial theory and methods seemed to be an appropriate top-up component of other analytical discourses. In that sense, transmedial theory was considered truly multidisciplinary in its scope. It is the editors’ hope that this volume embraces the spirit of the conference and advances the theoretical, empirical and practical use of transmedial concepts and perspectives to more fully understand the ramifications of living in a multimedial world. This book is a collaborative effort, as all books are. It would never have materialized without the overwhelming support of the editors’ families and friends. We would like to express gratitude to everybody at the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) who has contributed enthusiastically, inspirationally and practically to the development of this project, in particular Liviu Lutas, Beate Schirrmacher, Gunilla Byrman and Kristoffer Holt. A very special thank you goes to the commitment of selected members of the IMS expert panel who offered important and constructive feedback on individual chapters: Tom Leitch, Jens Schröter, Kamilla Elliott, Mieke Bal, Siglind Bruhn and Christina Ljungberg. Thanks, too, to Michel Delville for his comments on one of the chapters in this volume. Niklas Salmose & Lars Elleström, editors

1

Transmediation Some Theoretical Considerations Lars Elleström

In this survey I will first place transmediation within the broader frames of intermediality and transmediality and then recapitulate some of my ideas on transmediation. I will also continually relate all the chapters in this volume to my conceptual framework and to each other. However, it is not my task here to indulge in in-depth discussions of the chapters; I will instead pick out some relevant features in them that make comparison and overview possible.

Transmediality I define media products as those physical but not necessarily solid entities (objects or processes) that make communication among human minds possible. Intermedial relations can hence be understood as relations among different sorts of media products, in contrast to intramedial relations that are relations among similar sorts of media products. Intermedial relations can be found in all forms of communication. Although one does not always note their existence, they are ubiquitous and unavoidable. Without them, human communication would fall apart into a number of separate cognitive strata. As intermedial relations are everywhere in all forms of human communication, I prefer to think of intermediality not as specific cases of communication but rather as a deliberate way of researching them with the aid of tailored theories and methods. Hence, intermediality, or intermedial studies, is not just any research on intermedial relations (which would mean that intermedial studies is virtually the same as communication studies) as it is research that applies certain perspectives and concepts that are designed to disentangle the complexity of intermedial relations. Intermedial studies may be roughly divided using two main perspectives. The first is a synchronic perspective: how can different types of media be comprehended, analyzed and compared in terms of the combination and integration of their fundamental media traits? This viewpoint stresses an understanding of media as coexisting media types, media

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products and more specifically media modes (such as various material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic modes that generate meaning together). The second is a diachronic perspective: how can transfer and transformation of media characteristics be grasped and described adequately? Media characteristics are understood here as those things that are represented by media (its “content”, in more casual parlance). This viewpoint stresses an understanding of media that includes the existence of a temporal gap among media products, media types and media traits. This temporal gap may either be actual, in terms of different times of genesis of media, or a gap in the sense that the perceiver construes the significance of a medium on the basis of previously known media. In the chapters in this volume, the diachronic perspective dominates. However, the authors do not explicitly write in terms of diachronicity. Instead, the diachronic perspective on media interrelations is generally referred to in terms of transmediality. From the most wide-ranging perspective, the term “transmediality” can be understood as representing the general concept that different media types share basic traits that can be described in terms of material, or more broadly physical, properties and abilities to activate mental capacities. All media products, in somewhat similar ways, are physical existences that trigger semiotic activity and can be properly understood only in relation to each other. Thus, physical media properties and semiosis are transmedial phenomena. More specifically, different media types may, largely – although certainly not completely – communicate similar things. In other words, represented media characteristics may be transmedial to various degrees. It is only a short step from the idea that represented media characteristics may be transmedial to various degrees to recognizing that media characteristics, because of their transmedial nature, can be understood as being transferred among different kinds of media. Inserting a temporal perspective, it very often makes sense to acknowledge not only that similar media characteristics are or may be represented by dissimilar media but also that media characteristics that can in some respect be understood as the same recur after having appeared in another medium. For instance, a written email describing the television news and spoken words retelling the story of a film both include a temporal gap between what might be called source and target media, but also the implicit notion of sameness. We find the relations between email and television news and between speech and film meaningful because the events and other things that they represent are not only similar but are in some respects the same – if one understands sameness as a pragmatic rather than a metaphysical quality – although it is evident that transfers among different media always entail changes. There are no media transfers that do not entail at least some degree of transformation; sometimes, media transfers necessarily involve a great deal of transformation – indeed, which can be an asset as well as a problem.

Transmediation

3

Transfers like these have of course not been unnoticed by research. Although Roman Jakobson was certainly not the first to dwell on diachronic media interrelations, his brief statement in a linguistic article on translation from 1959 that “intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” could be viewed as the starting point of semiotically oriented research on diachronic media interrelations.1 However, Jakobson was restricted by the one-sided perspective of “verbal” versus “nonverbal” signs and offered no theoretical tools for analyzing intersemiotic translation. Several decades later, in 1989, Claus Clüver developed the notion of “intersemiotic transposition”, which was an attempt to sketch a broader approach to transmedial relations than Jakobson’s.2 However, Clüver’s approach is delimited by the misleading dichotomy of “verbal” versus “visual” texts that obscures the complex nature of overlapping media characteristics (some verbal media are visual, others not; some visual media are verbal, others not). Another similar approach can be found in Gunther Kress’s notion of “transduction”, from 1997,3 later developed in a publication by Dinda L. Gorlée.4 A few years after Kress’s idea of transduction was launched, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin published Remediation: Understanding New Media, which has been important in highlighting the wide area of media transfers and transformation in contemporary media culture, although their all-embracing concept of remediation is not designed for analyzing the processes in detail.5 Just over a decade after that, Regina Schober used yet another term: “intermedial translation”.6 A later article published in 2011 clarified that this term should cover various types of “intermedial transformation processes”.7 Because the word translation provides strong associations with transfers among different verbal languages, I prefer to refer to the notion of “intermedial transformation processes” simply in terms of media transformation.8 “Media transformation” is thus for me an umbrella term referring broadly and indiscriminately to all forms of media diachronicity.

Transmediation and Media Representation In my book Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (2014), in which I try to form a thorough conceptual framework that facilitates analysis of transfers of media characteristics among media, I initially establish a distinction between transmediation (repeated representation of media traits, such as a comic strip that tells a story that can be recognized from a song) and media representation (representation of another medium, such as a review that describes the performance of a dance show).9 To explain this in more detail requires the explanation of a few other concepts. Media products are realized by what I call technical media of distribution, which should simply be understood as those solid or non-solid

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Lars Elleström

physical entities of processes that harbour media products. Being a media product is, to be more precise, a function triggered within what one takes to be a communicative situation, and technical media of distribution are those physical entities or processes that enable the function of being a media product – in other words, the function of communicating among human minds. I use the term “mediate” to describe the process of a technical medium of distribution that realizes presemiotic (potentially meaningful) sensory configurations. For instance, a piece of paper is able to mediate visual sensory configurations that are (once perceived and rudimentarily interpreted) taken to be a food recipe, a bar chart, a scientific article or a musical score. If equivalent sensory configurations (sensory configurations that have the capacity to trigger corresponding representations) are mediated for a second (or third or fourth) time and by another type of technical medium, they are transmediated. In our minds, some of the perceived media characteristics of the target medium are, in important ways, the same as those of the source medium, which allows us to think that the musical score that is seen on the paper is later heard when it is transmediated by the sounds of instruments. In other words, the score’s vital characteristics are represented again by a new type of sensory configuration (not visual but auditory signs) mediated by another type of technical medium (not a piece of paper emitting photons but sound waves generated by musical instruments).10 The concept of transmediation involves two ideas. Transmediation is not only re-mediation – repeated mediation – but also trans-mediation: repeated mediation of equivalent sensory configurations by another technical medium (please note that remediation should not be understood in the open-ended sense of Bolter and Grusin). Hence, the composite term “transmedial remediation” is more accurate for denoting the concept in question. However, for the sake of simplicity, I prefer the brief term “transmediation” (which has been used previously by Charles Suhor to refer to a similar but not identical concept).11 In any case, this term should be understood to refer to notions of both “re” and “trans” – repeated mediation through another technical medium. Transmediation is the first type of media transformation, and the second type is media representation. Media representation involves the notion of one medium representing another medium. Media representation is at hand whenever a medium presents another medium to the mind of a communicatee. A medium, which is something that represents something in a context of communication, becomes represented itself. Clearly, such a representation may be more or less accurate and more or less fragmentary or complete; similar to transmediation, media representation involves different degrees of alteration. Because I define media representation as a kind of media transformation, I understand it to involve different types of media. Thus, if one wishes, terms such as “transmedial

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media representation,” “transmedial representation,” or “simply transrepresentation may be used to denote the concept that I prefer to call media representation.”12 Media representation, such as an autobiography describing a photograph, or a film depicting a person communicating through sign language, may involve the representation of what can be described roughly as both media form and media content; a verbal description of a photograph may focus on both its overall composition and its discrete parts, and a filmic depiction of a signing person may capture both vital interrelations between different body and hand movements and individual actions. Likewise, transmediation can involve both media form and media content (and what is perceived as content from one point of view may be perceived as form from another point of view, and this form contains other content). Whereas transmediation is about “picking out” elements from a medium and using them in a new way in another medium, media representation is about “pointing to” a medium from the viewpoint of another medium. In other words, whereas in transmediation the “frame” is not included in the transfer from one medium to another, it is in the case of media representation. For instance, a film representing a theatre performance (a film that includes a theatre performance in its story) can be understood in terms of media representation; however, a film whose story closely resembles that of a theatrical play should instead be understood in terms of transmediation. It is convenient to distinguish these two types of media transformation theoretically, as they emphasize two conceptually different forms of transfer among dissimilar media. However, they may well overlap in practice. What one perceives to be mainly a transmediation may include minor aspects of media representation. By the same token, a clear-cut media representation may certainly also involve transmediation: a simple written verbal description of a picture such as “I saw a nice drawing of a fishing boat this morning” is clearly a media representation, since it obviously represents another type of medium (a drawing), but because it represents for a second time a vital characteristic of the source medium (it mentions “a fishing boat” that was represented in the drawing), it is also a transmediation.

Transmediation: Adaptation Just as there are many different forms of media and communicational situations, there is a plenitude of transmediation types. The study of transmediations is thus potentially an exceedingly broad field. However, research has only paid full attention and given names to very few forms of transmediation. In the context of art, the general term for transmediation of media products to other media products is “adaptation” (although

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researchers such as Kamilla Elliott have argued that in effect adaptation studies must involve considerations of not only single media products but also characteristics of media types in general).13 Nevertheless, not all types of transmediation of specific media products tend to be called adaptations. For instance, transmediations from written, visual and symbolic (verbal) media products to oral, auditory and symbolic (verbal) media products – that is to say, the reading aloud of texts, or the other way around – are very seldom referred to as adaptation.14 The same goes for transmediations from non-temporal to temporal visual and iconic media products – from still to moving images15 – and for transmediations from written, visual and symbolic (verbal) media products to oral, auditory, iconic and symbolic media products – that is, the “setting” of text to music.16 Transmediations of media types such as libretti, scores and scripts are also generally excluded from the domain of adaptation. Instead, the archetypical adaptation is a novel-to-film transmediation; however, the term has not been reserved exclusively for this specific type of transfer. Adaptation studies today also fairly frequently work with not only theatre, literature and film but also media types such as computer games, opera, comics and graphic novels. This is the case in, for instance, Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation from 2006.17 However, Hutcheon addresses only media with developed narration, which is a common way of implicitly delimiting the notion of adaptation. Indeed, all authors in this volume who use the notion of adaptation – Marie-Laure Ryan, Fátima Chinita, Doru Pop and Péter Kristóf Makai – also focus on narration in various media. Additionally, they all work with a broad concept of adaptation, including a plenitude of mainly artistic media types.

Transmediation: Transmedial Narration and Transmedia Storytelling Mentioning narration in various media may lead one to think of a muchdiscussed phenomenon in modern popular culture: so-called transmedia storytelling. Allow me to frame the idea of transmedia storytelling through my notion of the broader concept of transmedial narration18 developed from Marie-Laure Ryan’s work on transmedial narratology.19 Transmedial narration should be understood as all varieties of transmediality and transmediation where narration is a media characteristic significant enough to be observed. In the most general terms, then, the concept of transmedial narration includes the notion that a wealth of dissimilar media types share traits that give them narrative capacities. In more specific terms, transmedial narration also includes the idea that the world is full of various sorts of more or less developed and complex narratives communicated by different media types. In its most particular sense, transmedial narration can be understood as transmediation of narratives; the characteristics of narratives can be

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represented again by different media types and yet be perceived to be the same despite the transfer. Transmediation of narratives is exceedingly common, not only in everyday communication but also in more complex and official systems of communication such as education, research and legal processes. It also flourishes in religion, art and entertainment. The lion’s share of this publication is permeated by considerations of transmedial narration, ranging from the more abstract notion that many media types have narrative capacities to actual cases of transmediation of narratives. They are prominent or at least feature to some degree in the articles by Marie-Laure Ryan, Fátima Chinita, Doru Pop, Miriam Vieira, Heidrun Führer and Anna Kraus, Péter Kristóf Makai, Jørgen Bruhn, Niklas Salmose and, to some extent, that of Agata Handley. How, then, can transmedia storytelling be understood in the light of transmedial narration? Henry Jenkins’s concept of transmedia storytelling captures the modern phenomenon of building large narratives as the sum of partial narratives distributed by different kinds of media such as films, comics, video games, novels and various forms of Internet-based media: “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole”.20 In fact, this is an old and widespread phenomenon that can be observed in, for instance, Hindu, Greek and Christian mythologies, although historical and cultural differences can obviously be noted.21 Transmedia storytelling – narratives in different media types working together to form a larger whole – requires that narratives can be largely transmediated. It would simply not be possible to combine narratives or parts of narratives from different media types into a larger whole if they did not overlap. In effect, this means that one recognizes represented media characteristics in the different media as the same; thus, represented persons, environments, ideas, events and their interrelations can interlock. However, current research in transmedia storytelling does not engage what I consider to be the central questions of transmedial narration: how are such transmediations possible at all, and what are their limitations?22 The first three of the contributions in this volume open doors between the more secluded research area of transmedia storytelling and the broad field of transmediation in general. Marie-Laure Ryan, Fátima Chinita and Doru Pop, who are among those who engage in discussion of the more general phenomenon of transmedial narration, also more specifically investigate transmedia storytelling. All three of them also connect the notion of adaptation to their discussions.

Media Representation: Ekphrasis As in the case of transmediation, only a few forms of media representation have been described and named in existing research. However, in the field of art research there is one rich area of media-representation

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investigations: the study of ekphrasis. Originally, the term “ekphrasis” referred to “a verbal description of something, almost anything, in life or art”.23 During the twentieth century, ekphrasis was primarily understood as a symbolic (verbal) representation of an iconic representation – typically a poem representing a painting – but was also circumscribed in terms of other traditional art forms and, indeed, forms of communication beyond the artistic domain. Lydia Goehr labelled the modern type of ekphrasis “work-to-work ekphrasis” to distinguish it from the understanding of the notion in classical rhetoric as any vivid description.24 Thus, the notion of ekphrasis has a long history and has been delimited in different ways, also within the modern outline of the work-to-work relation, and scholars have debated its proper delimitations. While a clear majority of the suggested definitions of ekphrasis have been constructed in terms of media representation, some also emphasize the importance of transmediation (because the representation of another media product also tends to include a re-representation of what it represents). Among the many academics who define ekphrasis mainly in terms of media representation, Siglind Bruhn is the person who has most radically expanded the modern notion: from a poem representing a painting to “a representation in one medium of a text composed in another medium”, indicating that both source and target medium may be of any type as long as they are not the same type.25 In principle, then, Bruhn’s notion of ekphrasis covers the entire field of (complex) media representation as I have circumscribed it, although we conceptualize this field in dissimilar ways. Even if one does not want the notion of ekphrasis to be extended that far for historical or other reasons, it must be acknowledged that representations of media products are possible, common and worthwhile to theorize about far beyond the more conventional modern borders of ekphrasis. All the chapters on ekphrasis in this volume, by Agata Handley, Miriam Vieira, and Heidrun Führer and Anna Kraus, move far beyond the more narrow borders of modern “work-to-work ekphrasis”. Furthermore, their contributions demonstrate that ekphrasis, as a form of media representation, normally clearly includes transmediation: representing a media product in general includes transmediating it to some extent. Ekphrasis would indeed seem quite pointless if the characteristics of the source media product were not represented again by the target media product. It may also be noted that all four authors writing about ekphrasis engage with issues of transmedial narration, too.

Transmediation of Media Products and Media Types The most straightforward and easy-to-grasp form of transmediation (and media representation) involves a source media product and a target media product. Therefore, my way of explaining and discussing transmediation has so far privileged such a view. However, leaving many other

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complications aside,26 this notion must be expanded to cover transmediation involving media types, too, rather than only specific media products. To understand the idea of transmediation among particular media products is to understand only one part of the broad field of transmediation where new communication re-mediates and trans-mediates media characteristics not from or to certain identifiable media products, but rather from or to media types. For instance, recognizing that some idea, structure, story or experience has been communicated before in another form of medium does not necessarily mean that it stems from a particular media product; instead it may be that the recognized idea, structure, story or experience is a general characteristic of a media type – or more specifically a “qualified” media type. This term calls for an explanation. I find it helpful to work with the two complementary notions of basic media types and qualified media types.27 Sometimes one mainly pays attention to the most basic features of media products and classifies them according to their most salient material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic properties. One thinks, for instance, in terms of still images (most often understood as tangible, flat, static, visual and iconic media products). This is what I call a basic medium (a basic type of media product). However, such a basic classification is sometimes not enough to capture more specific media properties. What one does then is to qualify the definition of the media type that one is after and add criteria that lie beyond the basic media modalities; one also includes all kinds of aspects of how the media products are produced, situated, used and evaluated in the world. One tends to think about a media type as something that has certain functions or begins to be used in a certain way at a certain time and in a certain cultural and social context. One may want to delimit the focus to still images that, say, are handmade by very young people – children’s drawings. This is what I call a qualified medium (a qualified type of media product). Qualified media types include categories such as music, painting, television programmes, news articles, visual art, messages in Morse code, sign language and email. Although they are normally construed on the basis that each includes one or several basic media types, and therefore may have a certain stability, the qualifying aspects are, of course, not eternally inscribed but formed by conventions. Media products represent and transmediate both other media products and qualified media types. Whereas a novel may describe a particular piece of music, it may also discuss and, hence, represent music in general. A set of gestures may transmediate the characteristics of a specific musical piece (such as when hands rise and fall in symmetry with a certain melody, resulting in a new representation of the same motional structure) but it may also transmediate general musical characteristics (such as when hands move in a rhythmical manner suggestive of typical musical structures). Similarly, qualified media types may represent and transmediate

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both other qualified media and media products. Qualified media, consisting of clusters of related media products, must be understood as accumulating phenomena: if a qualified medium exists that consists of a certain number of media products that considerably transmediate certain media characteristics, such as films that use narrative patterns associated with written literature, the qualified target medium may be said to transmediate characteristics of the qualified source medium. However, when discussing individual examples of what is perceived to be transmediation and media representation, distinguishing clearly among general characteristics of qualified media types and properties that belong to a certain media product is obviously not always possible. There is no better way of demonstrating the breadth and complexity of transmediation processes than briefly summarizing the approaches of the contributions to this volume. In “Transmedia Storytelling and its Discourses”, Marie-Laure Ryan, as the title of her contribution reveals, is first and foremost engaged in exploring transmedia storytelling, which primarily involves transmediation of a multitude of represented segments among several media products belonging to different qualified media types. These numerous media products may in turn be seen as together forming an overarching, major media product, such as Star Wars, discussed by Ryan, and this is made possible precisely because of a multitude of transmediations among several minor media products. Fátima Chinita also writes about transmedia storytelling in her contribution “Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases Project (2003–2005): Transmedia Storytelling as Self-Reference Multimediality”. Whereas the principle of transmediation in transmedia storytelling remains the same as in Ryan’s article, her example of an overarching, major media product is of a somewhat different kind: compared to Star Wars, Peter Greenaway’s art project The Tulse Luper Suitcases is more strongly commanded by one central communicator, Greenaway himself. The third author who discusses transmedia storytelling is Doru Pop. However, his chapter, “The Gamification of Cinema and the Cinematization of Games”, also deals with transmediation of media characteristics among qualified media types. Gamification and cinematization should partly be understood as transmediation of general media characteristics between computer games and cinema – in both directions. Yet Pop’s examinations also include transmediation among a variety of other media types and, additionally, more specific transmediations from, for instance, a particular computer game to a certain film. The three articles that mainly focus on ekphrasis demonstrate an illuminating variety of transmediation approaches. In Agata Handley’s “The ‘Unflinching Gaze’ – The Representation of Suffering in Tony Harrison’s Film Poetry”, the author mainly deals with one specific target media product and several specific source media products: Tony Harrison’s film-poem “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, which represents paintings,

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sculptures, pieces of architecture, press cuttings and documentary photographs. While these numerous media products are represented in the film-poem, their media characteristics are simultaneously transmediated. In contrast, Miriam Vieira’s contribution, “Architectural Ekphraseis: Unveiling a Brazilian Wall-Less House in Contemporary Fiction”, thoroughly examines two specific target media products and only one source media product: two different biographic novels representing the Brazilian modernist house “Samambaia” – and simultaneously transmediating its architectural characteristics to written verbal text. In contrast to both Handley and Vieira, Heidrun Führer and Anna Kraus set out to highlight the fact that transmediation is far from always a clear-cut, easily demarcated phenomenon. In their chapter “Leaving the White Cube of Ekphrasis: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersection”, three performances in Paris by Matta-Clark are described as transmediation processes involving several interrelated media products; there is a series of collaborative performances realised by different media types that belong together – but they cannot easily be classified as either source or target media products. Although not stated by the authors, this communicative situation is probably not very dissimilar to transmedia storytelling. Three more chapters also demonstrate different ways of approaching the broad phenomenon of transmediation in terms of media products vs. qualified media types. In “The Logic of Cutting Yourself: From Senseless Chaos to Signifying Order”, Hans T. Sternudd unravels routes of transmediation in a series of closely interrelated media products of different sorts in the setting of self-cutting, from the initial cut to photographs of it being published on the Internet. In such a series of transmediations, the first target medium becomes the source medium of yet another target medium, and so forth. However, Sternudd’s contribution also includes discussions of how these media products gain additional meaning in relation to certain qualified media types that are defined within specific sociocultural contexts. Péter Kristóf Makai’s approach in “Three Ways of Transmediating a Theme Park: Spatialising Storyworlds in Epic Mickey, the Monkey Island series and Theme Park Management Simulators” is quite different. The overall idea is to investigate transmediation from theme parks to computer games. Generally, Makai demonstrates how, for instance, techniques, forms, social significance and the logic of immersion in the qualified media type of the theme park are transmediated to various qualified submedia (game genres) or to certain games. More specifically, he also examines how certain individual media products (whole theme parks or parts of them, such as certain rides) are transmediated to particular computer games. Yet another distinct approach is found in João Queiroz and Pedro Atã’s chapter “Intersemiotic Translation as a Creative Thinking Tool – From Gertrude Stein to Dance”. What the authors call “intersemiotic translation” here is circumscribed, I would argue, as a specific form of creative and artistic transmediation. Mainly,

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but not exclusively, Queiroz and Atã scrutinize transmediation from certain source media products – Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose in general and more specifically certain characteristics of a handful of literary texts – to certain target media products: a pair of dance pieces. The last three chapters in this volume are connected through their focus on representations of the Anthropocene, the idea that the human race has caused the advent of a new geological epoch. Jørgen Bruhn’s “‘We’re Doomed – Now What?’: Transmediating Temporality into Narrative Forms” has a very general approach and largely avoids discussing specific media products. Instead, the chapter unfolds ideas about transmediation almost exclusively among various qualified media types in order to map and clarify different common forms of representing the Anthropocene. Emma Tornborg chooses to be more specific in her contribution “Transmediations of the Anthropocene: From Factual Media to Poetry”. On the source medium side, she examines qualified media types such as scientific articles, documentaries and news programmes. On the target medium side, she analyzes how shared characteristics of the particular qualified media being discussed are transmediated to a couple of particular media products – more precisely, two poems. Finally, Niklas Salmose exposes a broad-ranging chain of transmediations involving specific media products as well as qualified submedia types (genres). His chapter “Three Transmediations of the Anthropocene: An Intermedial Ecocritical Reading of Facts, Sci-Fi, PopSci and Eco-Horror” first demonstrates the transmediation of general characteristics of science fiction literature, comics, TV shows and particularly films of the 1940s and 1950s to Rachel Carson’s written and illustrated popular science work Silent Spring, before it shows how some specific media characteristics of Silent Spring are transmediated to eco-horror films of the 1970s in general – exemplified by a particular filmic media product: Kingdom of the Spiders. We have now reached the end of this examination of transmediation, but this is certainly not the end of transmediation; rather, it is only the beginning. As the contributions to this volume will show, transmediation is a multifaceted yet clearly definable phenomenon that cannot be ignored by anyone trying to understand the intricacies of communication that involves dissimilar media types.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” 261. Clüver, “On Intersemiotic Transposition.” Kress, Before Writing. Gorlée, From Translation to Transduction. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. Schober, “Translating Sounds.” Schober, Unexpected Chords, 77. Elleström, Media Transformation.

Transmediation 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Elleström, Media Transformation. Elleström, Media Transformation, 20–7. Suhor, “Towards a Semiotics-Based Curriculum,” 250. Elleström, Media Transformation, 27–34. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 113–32. However, see Groensteen, “Le processus adaptatif,” 276–7. As discussed by Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting. Lin and Chiang, “Concrete Images and Abstract Metaphorical Extensions.” Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation. Elleström, Transmedial Narration. Ryan, “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 97–8. See, for instance, Ryan, “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality”; Mittell, “Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television.” Scrutinized in Elleström, Transmedial Narration. Krieger, Ekphrasis, 7. Goehr, “How to Do More with Words.” Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis, 8. Explored in Elleström, Media Transformation, 46–61, 86–94. Elleström, “The Modalities of Media.”

Bibliography Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Bruhn, Siglind. Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting. Hillsdale: Pendragon, 2000. Clüver, Claus. “On Intersemiotic Transposition.” Poetics Today 10 (Spring 1989): 55–90. Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 11–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Goehr, Lydia. “How to Do More With Words: Two Views of (Musical) Ekphrasis.” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 4 (2010): 389–410. Gorlée, Dinda L. From Translation to Transduction: The Glassy Essence of Intersemiosis. Tartu, Estonia: University of Tartu Press, 2015. Groensteen, Thierry. “Le processus adaptatif (Tentative de récapitulation raisonnée).” In La transécriture: Pour une théorie de l’adaptation, edited by André Gaudreault and Thierry Groensteen, 273–7. Québec: Nota bene, 1989. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In Selected Writings, Volume 2, Word and Language, 260–6. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. First published 1959.

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Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Updated and with a new Afterword. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Kress, Gunther. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. London: Routledge, 1997. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Lin, Tiffany Ying-Yu, and Chiang Wen-yu. “Concrete Images and Abstract Metaphorical Extensions in the Encounter Between Language and Music: Hsu ChihMo’s Poem ‘Serendipity’.” Journal of Pragmatics 96 (2016): 32–48. Mittell, Jason. “Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 253–77. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” In Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kindt, and Wilhelm Schernus, 1–23. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2005. ———. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34 (Fall 2013): 361–88. Schober, Regina. “Translating Sounds: Intermedial Exchanges in Amy Lowell’s ‘Stravinsky’s Three Pieces “Grotesques”, for String Quartet’.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 163–74. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011. Suhor, Charles. “Towards a Semiotics-Based Curriculum.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16, no. 3 (1984): 247–57.

Part I

Transmedia Storytelling

2

Transmedia Storytelling and Its Discourses Marie-Laure Ryan

The phenomenon of transmedia storytelling1 is currently receiving tremendous publicity due to such megahits as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. In this chapter, I propose to examine, compare and contrast four types of discourse that relate to this phenomenon: the discourse of media theory, the discourse of the industry, the discourse of the fans, and finally the discourse of narratology. My leading question will be how we can free the study of transmedia storytelling from the hype of industry discourse and open it up to narratology.

The Discourse of Media Theory The notion of media stands at the center of the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling. It is difficult to define and categorize, because the term media, or medium, is not an analytic category created by theoreticians to serve a specific purpose, but a word of natural language, and like most words it has different meanings. But by virtue of the principle of Occam’s razor, we should not multiply definitions gratuitously if we can do the job with fewer of them. I have found it useful to build media theory on two definitions proposed by Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary:2 1. A channel or system of information, communication, or entertainment. 2. Material or technical means of artistic expression. While definition 1 concerns the transmission of information, definition 2 concerns the creation of information out of diverse semiotic substances. According to definition 1, examples of “media” are the press, TV, radio, the internet and the various delivery systems made possible by digital technology. According to definition 2, examples of media are culturally recognized forms of expression, such as music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, comics and computer games. The two categories are not mutually exclusive; for instance, digital technology qualifies as a medium in both of these senses, since it has developed new forms of expression, such as hypertext or video games, in addition to functioning as a powerful channel of communication.

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The idea of a medium as a channel of transmission has been criticized, notably by Walter Ong (1982), on the ground that media are not passive pipelines through which information is sent and recovered, unchanged, at the other end. This is why I like to visualize media as the nozzles of pastry bags. The formless substance of the frosting is put into the pastry bag; it is squeezed through the nozzle, and it comes out in a decorative shape. Different nozzles produce different shapes. If stories are conceived as mental constructs, they can exist in the mind as pure meaning – that is, as pure narrative potential; but the act of encoding will actualize this potential by shaping it into a distinct narrative. Selecting a medium for a narrative idea is like choosing a pastry nozzle. Just as some nozzles are better than others for the kind of decoration one wants to create, some media are better than others depending on the type of narrative material one wants to develop and on the effect one wants to achieve. It could be argued that my analogy does not accurately describe the creative process, because most creators specialize in one medium, and they are much more likely to ask “what kind of story is the best for the medium I have in mind?” than “what medium is the best for the story I want to tell?” But in the case of transmedia storytelling, narrative material is given, and the problem is indeed a choice of pastry nozzles, so that the frosting can be used to decorate a wide variety of different cakes. If transmedia is going to be a truly innovative form of storytelling, it should involve media in sense 2, and not simply in sense 1. For instance, a story delivered in book form, as audiobook on a CD, though Amazon’s Kindle and on the Internet would not be a case of transmedia storytelling because all these so-called media are channels of transmission for the same kind of semiotic content, namely text-based storytelling. By contrast, a story told in part through texts, in part through films, and in part through comics, and whose processing requires the consultation of all of these media, would qualify as transmedia because it uses a variety of expressive resources. Henry Jenkins has done more than anybody else to popularize the notion of transmedia storytelling. I will therefore use some of his definitions as the starting point of my discussion: Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels3 for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.4 This definition presupposes that transmedia systems are created from the top down in a deliberate distribution of content across many media. There are a number of projects that use multiple media to tell a story and that are conceived from the top down – for instance, transmedia

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journalism, augmented books, Alternate Reality Games, interactive TV and some digital installations – but most if not all of the great transmedia franchises arise from the bottom up by exploiting the success of an already established narrative. It is symptomatic of the scarcity of topdown systems that when commentators want to illustrate this case, they almost invariably mention The Matrix, a franchise that comprises comic books, computer games, and short animé films in addition to the three feature films. But The Matrix is not fully top down: it started as a successful film, and the transmedia tie-ins were commissioned before the release of the second and third films. The same can be said about Star Wars: it is the response of the fans to the first trilogy that inspired an avalanche of novels, games, comics and more movies about the Star Wars universe. One of the reasons we have so few truly top-down transmedia projects is that producers do not want to take the risk of creating the various media objects and then having the project fizzle out. Because transmedia depends on media that are very expensive to produce, such as a film, a TV series, or computer games, it is not a form of storytelling for creative individuals – it is only affordable for big corporations. Another problem with a top-down conception of transmedia storytelling is the difficulty of justifying a deliberate distribution of content across many media. This idea of deliberate distribution suggests a jigsaw puzzle: you take one piece of the fiction and give it to medium A, then take another piece and give it to medium B, and so on, and you get a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Now if the whole is more than the sum of its parts, people who have not gathered all the parts will miss something important. But this is not how transmedia works in practice. As Jenkins admits, transmedia franchises can become so big that nobody can consume the whole thing. If franchises are too big for anybody to apprehend the whole, this means that the whole cannot be a story, because stories must be consumed in their entirety. They are defined by arcs that lead from exposition to complication to resolution, and people have to follow the whole arc to appreciate the story. It would be very frustrating if a story were cut up and its content distributed among many documents belonging to various media and people had to hunt for these dispersed documents to put the story together. The entity that holds the parts of transmedia franchises together is not really a story, it is a world where many stories take place. Transmedia storytelling is therefore a misnomer. The phenomenon should be called transmedia world-building, but to comply with established usage, I will continue to use the term transmedia storytelling in this chapter. Transmediality can be understood in two ways. The first, which was proposed by Werner Wolf (“The Relevance”), means something like “medium independent” or “above media”. Some entities are mediumindependent because they can be realized in many media: for instance, characters, events, motivations and, more generally, narrative. What enables

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transmedia storytelling to construct worlds full of stories and to use various media to tell these individual stories is the transmediality inherent in narrative and in its basic constituents. By contrast, a cycle of novels that shares a storyworld does not take advantage of the transmediality of narrative elements. But transmediality can be understood in another sense, a sense sometimes called intermediality. In this second sense, trans means across, and it involves a mediation between different media: something travels from one medium to another, creating what Jenkins calls “the flow of content across multiple media platforms”.5 Lars Elleström (Media Transformations) addresses this phenomenon by distinguishing two types of relations between media: (1) transmediation and (2) media representation. Both are defined in terms of a source medium and a target medium. In the case of media representation, a medium is represented within another medium, such as when a poem describes a painting or a film shows characters watching a TV show. This phenomenon is not a defining feature of transmedia storytelling, since it may or may not occur within the individual documents. The other form of “media transformation”, which Elleström calls “transmediation”, is far more relevant to transmedia storytelling. Elleström defines it as follows: “the target medium M2 represents the same media characteristics (C1) as the source medium (M1)”.6 Media characteristics can be understood in a general way, such as when a certain media product tries to imitate the general features of another medium (say a photo that tries to look like a painting); but they can also be understood in a narrow way, as referring to the features of a specific media product. These features may be a matter of form or a matter of content. The most frequent application of Elleström’s idea of transmediation to transmedia storytelling is when the features transferred from M1 to M2 constitute the plot of a story. This kind of transmediation is generally conceived as adaptation, and its best-known case is the adaptation of the plot of a novel into a film. Adaptation plays an important role in transmedia storytelling; for instance, the first step toward turning Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter into transmedia franchises was the adaptation of the original novels into films. Yet, despite these examples, Jenkins strongly opposes the reduction of transmedia storytelling to adaptation. As he writes: “And for many of us, a simple adaptation may be ‘transmedia,’ but it is not ‘transmedia storytelling’ because it is simply re-presenting an existing story rather than expanding and annotating the fictional world”.7 In Jenkins’s view, expanding and annotating the fictional world is far more important to transmedia storytelling than retelling the same story in various media because it provides new information about the storyworld. But these operations do not require different media: a fictional world can be expanded in the same medium in which it was originally created.

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Elleström’s formula presupposes a common form or content shared by two media, with the second medium referring implicitly to the first. But the formula is not meant to describe the case of a media product that adds new content to other media products. To put this differently, it applies easily to the case of a story told in two different media, because the plot functions as C1, but it is more questionable in the case of a medium that adds a new story to a storyworld created by other media products. To fit this case into Elleström’s model, one would have to regard the storyworld as a whole as the transmedial element C1. While Elleström’s theory of transmediation accommodates both selfreflexive and non-self-reflexive instantiations, the main purpose of using multiple media in transmedia franchises is not to invite users to compare the distinctive features of different media (though of course this can happen), nor to reflect on what each medium does best, since there is no guarantee that the various media are used optimally, but rather to offer audiences more chances to immerse themselves in their favorite storyworld, as well as to reach different audiences. People differ in what kinds of media they consume, and the more media are involved, the greater the potential audience. Another difference between transmedia storytelling and Elleström’s conception of transmediation lies in the fact that in transmedia franchises, we cannot distinguish a “source medium” from a “target medium”, even in the case of adaptations, because consumers are not necessarily familiar with the text of the original medium. Many people enter transmedia storyworlds from movies because movies are the dominant entertainment medium of our times. If a distinction should be made between the elements of transmedia story systems, this would be between what the industry calls a “Mother Ship” and the other ships in the fleet. The Mother Ship is the main gate into the storyworld because it provides the most consistent and extensive information about it. Many of the other ships cannot be fully understood by people who do not know the Mother Ship. This is particularly the case with The Matrix. The tieins are largely incomprehensible, and certainly not enjoyable, for people who have not seen the films. (And if you are not interested enough in the storyworld to see all the films, why bother with the tie-ins?) To summarize my point: In contrast to Jenkins’s definition, transmedia storytelling does not exclude adaptation, but in contrast to Elleström’s conception of transmediation, it is not limited to it. Transmedia franchises can be described as a combination of adaptation with another longstanding narrative operation, the operation that Richard Saint-Gelais calls transfictionality. Saint-Gelais defines transfictionality as the sharing of elements, mostly characters but also imaginary locations, events and entire fictional worlds, by two or more works of fiction. This operation normally links literary works, and it relies on three fundamental operations: (1) extension, which adds new stories to the fictional world while respecting the facts established in the original; (2) modification,

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which changes the plot of the original narrative, for instance by giving it a different ending; and (3) transposition, which transports the plot into a different temporal or spatial setting, for instance when the story of Romeo and Juliet is set in New York City in the fifties. Of these three operations only the first is common in transmedia franchises, because it is the only one that respects the integrity of the storyworld. Operation 2, modification, creates noncanonical events that challenge the logical consistency of the storyworld; it is found in fan fiction, but fan fiction by definition is not canonical. As for operation 3, transposition, it conflicts with the main reason for the popularity of transmedia franchises: the loyalty of audiences to a given world, and their desire for more information about this world.8

The Discourse of the Industry One question that I ask myself as a narratologist is what it takes for a story to spread across multiple media—in other words, what it takes for a fictional world and its stories to capture the public’s imagination. To answer this question, I decided to study the discourse of the people who are supposed to know best, the people who write guidebooks to transmedia storytelling. I consulted three of them: The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia, by Nuno Bernardo; A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, by Andrea Phillips, and Storytelling Across Worlds, by Dowd, Fry, Niedermann and Steiff. This last book was the most substantial, but the title suggests transposition, the migration of characters and plot to another world. In the vast majority of cases of transmedia, the storyworld remains constant, because it functions as the container that keeps the various stories and their media together. None of the books told me how to build a blockbuster story or storyworld, because this is a matter of talent and of luck, and as the saying goes, poets are born and not made. But reading the guidebooks provided an excellent opportunity to analyze the discourse of the industry and to distinguish it from the kind of scholarly discourse that narratologists should develop. Out of these three manuals we can extract a rhetoric that is typical of the industry discourse: Hyperbolic praise: thanks to transmedia, storytelling will never be the same. “There’s never been a more exciting time to be a storyteller”.9 Transmedia is “amazing”, “groundbreaking stuff” and a “fascinating idea”10 that will require radically “new ways of thinking” about development.11 The consumers are not readers, players or spectators, but invariably fans, a term that suggests fanatic and uncritical devotion to storyworlds. Capitalist attitude: narrative material and storyworlds are called “intellectual property”. The creators own this property, despite the tendency of fans and other writers to steal from it, and it is the owner’s duty to protect their property. The purpose of transmedia storytelling is to

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“monetize” intellectual property by spreading it across as many media as possible, because each medium has its own devotees and increases the size of the audience. The value of a piece of intellectual property is entirely a function of its popular success: in the entertainment industry, there is no such thing as “success of esteem” and no such thing as transmedia driven by an artistic vision. As Jenkins et al. put it, if your content does not spread, it is dead.12 Emphasis on “giving the audience what they want”: In a study of the relations between speaker and hearer, Karl Renner (“Die Kooperation”) distinguishes a speaker orientation, through which speakers express themselves and the audience must adapt to their individuality, from a hearer orientation, through which speakers adapt to the desires of the audience. While speaker orientation is typical of high art, which is supposed to shake audiences out of their thinking habits, hearer orientation is typical of popular culture. The rhetoric of transmedia falls squarely in the domain of hearer orientation. The needs of audiences are expressed through eating metaphors: as one reads on the back cover of Storytelling Across Worlds, the book gives you the tools to meet the “insatiable demands of today’s audience for its favorite creative property”. The role of the transmedia designer is to create and encourage this craving for more content. Interactivity as a way to save old media: In the digital age, traditional media such as TV, film and books need to reinvent themselves in order to survive, and the way to do so is to become more interactive and participatory. It could be said that the process of jumping from one platform or medium to another is a form of active involvement, but this means that the audience of transmedia is by definition active since users have to consult many documents. But the authors of advice books have in mind more substantial forms of interactivity. According to Dowd et al., transmedia “assumes that viewers/users are part of a growing participatory culture that does not desire just to watch but to interact, comment, help shape the course of the content and look for (hidden) answers”.13 This statement contains two practical pieces of advice. The first, “let users help shape the course of events”, sounds good on paper but in practice it could lead to disaster: As Bernardo observes, if you give your audience power over the story they will get rid of the antagonist, solve all major problems, and erase all the drama.14 The second piece of advice, “have people look for hidden answers”, is much more feasible. The creation of problems to solve will motivate users to get together and to exchange information in order to crack the code. The validity of this advice is demonstrated by the popularity of ARGs15 and by the intense fan activity generated by particularly hermetic narratives such as Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) or S, the brainchild of J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (2013). But these are monomedial works; encouraging audiences to solve problems is therefore not a distinctive feature of transmedia storytelling.

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The Discourse of the Fans vs. the Discourse of the Industry The contribution of the discourse of fans to the development of transmedia franchises has been so well documented, especially by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture, that there is really nothing that I can do here beside restating its importance. Fan discourse takes two forms: a creative one, manifested by fan fiction, remixes, amateur movies and participation in cosplay events, and a critical one, manifested by online discussion groups and by comments on Amazon. Both of these forms demonstrate the power of stories and their worlds to form communities. If today’s culture is participatory, it is as much in the sense of motivating fans to worship together at the altar of a cult narrative as in the sense of collaborative creation. You do not have to write fan fiction to participate in the Star Wars or Harry Potter community. Active fan participation can be either a bottom-up, grassroots, spontaneous phenomenon or a behavior dictated top-down by the entertainment industry through relentless advertising. While it takes the spontaneous discourse of fans to create the kind of cult narratives that make transmedia development profitable, the relations between the discourse of fans and the discourse of the industry has often been strained. Jenkins recounts the efforts by the Lucas company to encourage but also to control and limit fan production through the creation of a website, Starwars.com, where some fan creations are displayed – for instance the movies that won the annual fan movie competition, judged by George Lucas himself. But in submitting their work, fans give up any rights to their intellectual property to the Lucas and now Disney companies. For as Jim Ward, an executive of the Lucas company, puts it, We love our fans. . . . But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.16 The story the way it is (as created by the Lucas or Disney company) is a holy scripture, and it is sacrilegious to change any of it, because Star Wars is more than a story, it is a universal religion, the common mythology of the globalized world of the 21st century. And like any religion based on holy scripture, the franchise finds it of utmost importance to define a corpus of canonical works. When the Disney company bought the right to the Star Wars brand name from the Lucas company, it revised the canon in order to keep track of the facts of the storyworld, which had proliferated beyond control, and it only kept the six movies produced by Lucas, plus a TV series and an animated film produced in 2008, The Clone Wars. Everything else was expelled from the canon, and recategorized as Star Wars Legends. In the parlance of possible worlds theory (Ryan, Possible Worlds), the corpus of the Star Wars Legends represents

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alternative possible worlds, which means descriptions of what could have been, as opposed to the canonical texts that represent the facts of the actual world of the franchise. But just as no religion can prevent alternative cults branching out, the delimitation of a canonical corpus cannot prevent fans from exploring the realm of the “what could have been” and from sharing their counterfactual productions. Meanwhile, the reboot of the franchise has brought an explosion of new films, comics, novels, and computer games (no less than 21 in 2015 alone), all of which are part of the new canon.17

The Discourse of Narratology How can the discourse of narratology distinguish itself from the discourse of the industry? I am not saying that narratology should entirely reject this discourse; the industry has come up with a vocabulary that can be useful to narratology, such as the terms reboot, Mother Ship and tieins, and with new practices involving old concepts, such as the contrast between canonical and noncanonical elements. Thanks to the discourse of the industry it is also permissible again to talk about content, a term that was considered taboo by New Criticism and deconstruction. Narratology should remain skeptical of the hype created by industry discourse and of its claims of radical novelty, but it should also avoid the temptation to declare that there is nothing new under the sun. As a combination of adaptation and transfictionality, transmedia storytelling has obvious roots in the past, and narratology does not need to start from scratch to deal with it; for instance, the principles through which a storyworld can be expanded in the same medium can also operate across media, and we can apply to transmedia most of what Saint-Gelais describes as transfictional practices. I am thinking here of principles such as extending the timeline, creating prequels and sequels, telling the story of secondary characters, extending the geography of the storyworld, telling the story from a different point of view and leaving some unresolved issues that can be answered in another narrative. These principles are timeless and independent of medium. One difficulty for a narratological approach to transmedia is the size of most commercial franchises. As Jenkins observes, transmedia worlds are usually too large for anybody to know them in their entirety.18 The sheer number of elements means that we need the kind of “big data” approaches advocated by Franco Moretti (Distant Reading) rather than the close reading usually favored by literary scholars. Most approaches have been theoretical (such as mine) or enumerative rather than engaged with individual documents. By enumerative I mean approaches that chronicle the number of tie-ins and the development of a franchise over time, but do not go much farther than listing the documents. Examples of this “big data” approach are Colin Harvey’s study of the Doctor Who

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franchise (“A Taxonomy”) and Rüdiger Heinze’s study of the Alien universe (“This Makes No Sense At All”). To restore close reading it will be necessary to focus on the relations among a limited number of documents, such as the relation between the TV series Lost and the ARG devoted to the show, as Jason Mittell (“Strategies of Storytelling”) has done, or the relation between the Star Wars film The Force Awakens and the novel of the same name. The comparison of the novel and the movie should raise questions such as the following: Does the novel help users to understand some obscure points in the plot of the movie? Does it convey more information than the film or does it slavishly reproduce the script in words? Can it stand on its own? How does the order in which users view the film and read the novel affect their experience?19 Given the commercial nature of most transmedia franchises, one possible topic of narratological exploration could be how the Mother Ship document is designed to open opportunities for narrative and transmedia expansion. Take the example of the plot of The Force Awakens, which can be considered the Mother Ship in the reboot of the franchise. It is number 7 of a series of movies, but it takes place some 30 years after episode 6—approximately the same time span that separates the release of episodes 6 and 7. This means that some of the characters from episode 6 are still alive, namely Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia, and the same actors could be used. There is consequently some continuity between episodes 6 and 7, and fans will know that they are in the same world, a sense strengthened by familiar landscapes, technology and musical themes. The Evil Empire of episodes 3 to 6 and its main villain Darth Vader have disappeared, but they have been replaced by equally evil antagonists: the First Order, a Nazi-like organization, and Kilo Re, the son of Han Solo. Just as the real world produced in succession the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge and the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the Star Wars universe will never stop generating evil powers, and we can be assured of an endless number of sequels even after the First Order is defeated. The 30 years between episodes 6 and 7 also allow a new generation of characters to take over the plot. These characters come out of nowhere, and this opens endless possibilities for telling their backstory. Another opportunity for expansion is to tell how the Galactic Empire of the past has been replaced with the First Order of the present. Most of the plot of The Force Awakens revolves around an attempt to find Luke Skywalker. A map revealing his location is hidden in a cute robot named BB-8, which makes a terrific toy to sell. The map was put into BB-8 by a character in the movie, but where the map comes from and who created it remains a mystery: a plot hole that the Disney company will be happy to fill though other money-making products. The film ends when the heroine Rey connects with Luke Skywalker, creating a sense of closure, but this is also an open ending, since we don’t know what she will ask of him or how Luke can help defeat the First Order. Stay tuned for the next film.

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This analysis remains on the level of transfictionality; it does not address the issue of media selection. Ideally, the medium should be dictated by the nature of the content, but with a project as blatantly commercial as Star Wars it is better to invert the question and have the content dictated by the medium. Rather than asking “What is the best medium to tell how young Poe Dameron became a pilot in the service of the Republic”, developers will ask “We need to reach the audience of Superhero comics; what part of the The Force Awakens would make a good candidate?” The answer will be the backstory of Poe Dameron, because of all the characters in the movie he has the best credentials to be a superhero: male, young, handsome, dashing and daring. Another question will be this one: “We need to attract gamers; how do we gamify the plot?” In order to do this, the user will have to be put in the role of one of the characters, or perhaps become an entirely new character, and will be given a series of problems to solve. What kind of problems? How will the game tie in to the movie? Because the storyworlds of most transmedia franchises are fantastic or science-fictional, and because these genres are traditionally rich in action, it should not be too difficult to gamify their stories, since the medium of the video game relies so heavily on fighting, one of the easiest activities to simulate on a computer. Through my discussion of Star Wars I hope to have suggested that even the most blatantly commercial franchises can reward a narratological approach. I envision the contribution of narratology to transmedia storytelling as divided into the following components: (1) a transfictional component that describes how stories belonging to the same storyworld are linked and assesses the consistency of the storyworlds; (2) an adaptive component that studies how narrative content travels across media and how the properties of media affect the stories; this component will ask how the various tie-ins take advantage of the affordances of their medium, and (3) a mythical component that studies what makes stories and storyworlds into cult narratives, since popular success is the prerequisite to the development of transmedia franchises. This component may ask why it is that the worlds of most franchises are either fantastic or science-fictional; why comic-book superheroes are so popular nowadays; whether, when and how Star Wars has become a religion, and what the mythical structures of the Star Wars storyworld are. The final component, (4), is an audiencebehavior component, devoted to what people actually do with cult narratives in general and with today’s transmedia systems in particular. Active audiences are nothing new – there are examples in the Renaissance and seventeenth century of readers playing games based on popular narratives or impersonating fictional characters20 – but participation has certainly taken new forms thanks to digital technology. This component will ask: How many different media do standard audiences consult, compared to highly involved ones? How successful is the transmedia extension of the project? (Consider The Matrix: if the vast majority of fans limit themselves

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to the three movies, as I suspect they do, is the project truly transmedial?) It could be said that this audience-behavior component is more sociological than strictly narratological, but it is the trademark of contemporary narratology that its borders with other disciplines are no longer watertight. What in the end is transmedia storytelling: a new way to tell stories, the narrative medium of the 21st century or a marketing ploy, what The Economist, commenting about Star Wars, has called the “industrialization of mythology”? It may sound strange to regard “transmedia” as a medium, since it would be a medium of media. But if we define media as a means of expression, and if by using documents belonging to various media it is possible to create experiences that cannot be achieved with a single medium, then transmedia could very well be regarded as a novel means of expression, which means that it is a medium in its own right. To achieve this honorary status, transmedia will have to find a way to exploit the resources of the media it uses, and it will have to learn how to distribute narrative content among them without frustrating users – that is, without damaging the integrity of the individual components. At its commercial worst, transmedia is the highly profitable practice of giving audiences more of what they want. At its creative best it could inspire audiences to leave the comfort zone of their favorite medium in order to get a fuller experience of the storyworld, thereby inviting people to reflect on the expressive power of individual media.

Notes 1. I do not make a distinction between transmedial and transmedia. I used transmedial in my early work, but now I bow to the dominant usage and I use transmedia. 2. Ryan, “Introduction,” 14. 3. If Jenkins were familiar with the distinction made by the Webster dictionary, he may not talk about media as delivery channels but about media as means of expression. 4. Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” n. pag., italics in the original. 5. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2. 6. Elleström, Media Transformations, 16. 7. Jenkins, “The Aesthetics,” n. p. 8. Transposition occurs in the weird new genre of the mash-up, represented by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a retelling of Jane Austen’s novel that blends its world with the world of horror stories. 9. Phillips, A Creator’s Guide, xi. 10. Bernardo, The Producer’s Guide, xviii. 11. Dowd et al., Storytelling Across Worlds, 35. 12. Jenkins et al., Spreadable Media, back dust cover. I regard Jenkins’ treatment of transmedia storytelling as more promotional than critical, and therefore as closer to industry than to scholarly discourse. 13. Dowd et al., Storytelling Across Worlds, 31. 14. Bernardo, The Producer’s Guide, 53. 15. ARGs stands for alternate reality games. These are games in which clues to a fictional story are dispersed throughout the Internet and/or the real world,

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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using various media and platforms. Players reconstruct the story by solving riddles, a task that often requires the sharing of information and the formation of player communities. Quoted by Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 149. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_canon. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 95. This may, however, be a purely academic question because nearly all readers will have already seen the film, a fact that the author of the novel may (or may not) have taken into consideration. For instance, in the seventeenth century, one of the Italian aristocracy’s favorite forms of entertainment was a board game known as the Labyrinth of Ariosto, which was based on Ariosto’s poem Orlando Furioso. A variant of the board game Chutes and Ladders, this game invited players to impersonate Ariosto’s characters and to recite or retell the poem when they landed on certain “narrative” squares. See Ryan, “From Playfields.”

Bibliography Abrams, J. J., and Doug Dorst. S. New York: Mulholland Books, 2013. Austen, Jane, and Seth Graham-Smith. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Novel–Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009. Bernardo, Nuno. The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia: How to Develop, Fund, Produce and Distribute Compelling Stories Across Multiple Platforms. Lisbon: beActive Books, 2011. Clark, Brian. “Transmedia Is a Lie.” Facebook, April 12, 2012. www.facebook. com/notes/brian-clark/transmedia-is-a-lie/10150841850433993. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Dowd, Tom, Michael Fry, Michael Niederman, and Josef Steiff. Storytelling Across Worlds: Transmedia for Creatives and Producers. New York: Focal Press, 2013. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Evans, Elizabeth. “Layering Engagement: The Temporal Dynamics of Transmedia Television.” Storyworlds 7, no. 2 (2015): 111–28. Harvey, Colin B. “A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 278–94. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Heinze, Rüdiger. “‘This Makes No Sense at All’: Heterarchy in Fictional Universes.” Storyworlds 7, no. 2 (2015): 75–92. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. “The Aesthetics of Transmedia. Response to David Bordwell.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), henryjenkins.org, September 10, 2009. http:// henryjenkins.org/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i.html. ———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. ———. “The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), henryjenkins.org, December 12, 2009. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html and http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/revenge_of_the_origami_unicorn.html.

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———. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), henryjenkins.org, March 21, 2007. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_ storytelling_101.html. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Mittell, Jason. “Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 253–77. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Phillips, Andrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Engage and Captivate Audiences Across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Renner, Karl N. “Die Kooperation von ‘Sprecher’ und ‘Hörer’.” In Festschrift für Klaus Kanzog, edited by Michael Schaudig, 20–38. München: Diskurs Film, 2010. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “From Playfields to Fictional Worlds: A Second Life for Ariosto.” New Literary History 40 (2009): 159–77. ———. “Introduction.” In Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 1–40. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. ———. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991. ———. “Transfictionality Across Media.” In Theorizing Narrativity, edited by John Pier and José Angel García, 385–417. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. ———. “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34, no. 3 (2013): 361–88. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Saint-Gelais, Richard. Fictions transfuges: La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Scolari, Carlos Alberto. “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 586–606. Weiler, Lance. “Culture Hackers: Lance Weiler Explains Why Film Makers Should Expand their Films into a ‘Storyworld’.” Filmmaker, Summer 2009. www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/summer2009/culture_hacker. php#.VJSNCF4DrA. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge, 2012. Wolf, Werner. “The Relevance of Mediality and Intermediality to Academic Studies of English Literature.” In Mediality/Intermediality: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, edited by A. Fischer and M. Heusser, 15–43. Tübingen: Günter Narr Verlag, 2008.

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Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases Project (2003−2005) Transmedia Storytelling as SelfReference Multimediality Fátima Chinita

The Tulse Luper Suitcases Project (2003−2005) Peter Greenaway devised the project The Tulse Luper Suitcases (from now on TLS) as a means to spread the multitudinous pieces of his oeuvre across a profusion of media channels and to communicate in a more interactive and global way with his followers. He states so in the “Cinema Militans Lecture”, which serves as a kind of personal artistic manifesto and announces this specific project. Greenaway intended to change the viewers’ consumption routines through a reinvented cinema by using a multiscreen language in permanent metamorphic flux and spreading so many narratives that “narrative is often negated by excess”.1 The use, in a type of “anti-camera language”,2 of all types of digital3 and generic material, organized encyclopedically, should induce emotional spectatorial detachment while granting intellectual adherence. This project and its goals had been developing in Greenaway’s mind for a while. Indeed, as early as 1997, long before the publication of Henry Jenkins’s theory of media convergence and transmedia storytelling, Greenaway avowed that he wanted to start catering to different audiences as a way to effect a not-too-radical change of consumption habits. He stated: I know that there is a large audience out there discussing my films in the internet and I want to address them directly in their own medium. I think the interest and the fascination will be how we can bend and organize all this [sic] four different digitally supported media [cinema, television, CD-ROM, and the internet] to interact successfully. A lot of people will go and see the film but never buy the CD-ROM and vice-versa, so that it has to work both ways. I’ve got to make each work autonomously to serve the particular audiences, but also to see if I can find a cross-over situation.4 As a result of his ponderings, Greenaway conceived a historical scenario in which a character called Tulse Luper is followed from the age of 10, in

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1928, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. Luper is a man of many talents and activities: his picaresque adventures, which start after WWI and continue beyond WWII, reflect the instability of the European continent throughout most of the 20th century. At the core of the TLS project, which ran at full throttle from 2003 to 2005, one finds a film trilogy consisting of Part 1−The Moab Story, Part 2−Vaux to the Sea, and Part 3−From Sark to the Finish. Two other films complement this cinematic saga: A Life in Suitcases (2005), which is an abridged version of the nearly six-hourlong trilogy, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Antwerp (2003). The latter pertains only to the Belgian adventures of Tulse Luper and is chronologically placed as an autonomous film between the events narrated in Part 1 and Part 2 of the trilogy. The project also includes original books written by Greenaway himself, which involve the protagonist Tulse Luper and come. Illustrated with images: Tulse Luper in Turin is a story set in the eponymous city; Tulse Luper in Venice involves a Stradivarius violin smashed into 92 pieces, a key number in the trilogy and in the project in general. Originally, there was also a computer game called The Tulse Luper Journey, played by an online community of Tulse Luper fans, in which the gamers were asked to research Tulse Luper in what were actually 92 different games deployed as different game levels. The many webpages of the project available from 2003 to 2005 included the official site http://petergreenaway.org.uk/tulse.htm; www.tulseluper.net, a prologue to the project containing information about the myriad characters; www. tulselupernetwork.com, contained a massive archive of lists and diverse materials; and The Webler Tour, a guided tour through the many prisons in which Luper was incarcerated over time. Most of these webpages have been discontinued or are not maintained anymore.5 Other materials—books, installations, exhibitions, theatrical work and VJ performances—have been added to this enterprise over the years. There are books about some of the issues grappled with in the trilogy: Gold (no date, Dis Voir)6 and The Children of Uranium (2006, Charta).7 The multi-artistic universe of TLS also includes several installations and art exhibitions, such as • • • • • •

92 Drawings of the Mole, drawings exhibited at iconic buildings from 2002 to 2008; Tulse Luper’s Drawings, a pictorial one-man show in Parma, 2000, and Wales and Estonia, 2005; Tulse Luper in Ghent (Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent, Belgium, 2003); Luper at Compton Verney (a historic mansion in Warwickshire countryside, 2004);8 Wash & Travel: Luper at Lille (St. Madeleine Church, Lille, 2004); Tulse Luper VJ Tour, premiered in Amsterdam in 2005 and continued until 2009, with 32 presentations in several countries, including Brazil, Mexico and Australia;

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The Lupercyclopedia Live Cinema VJ Tour, started in 2010 at the Sani Festival in Greece, and repeated, at different venues, throughout 2011.9

as well as the theatrical work Gold. 92 Bars in a Crashed Car (2001), which premiered at the Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt).10 Such a variety of elements was part of Greenaway’s overall conceptual architecture from the start, as mentioned in the “Cinema Militans Lecture.”11 One thing stands out in all this creativity: the permeable nature of the art works that are conceived specifically for one medium, but also materialized in (several) other media.12 The Tulse Luper book experience, film experience, game experience, and internet experience are not necessarily to be experienced by a community with the same characteristics. At first glance, although the original configuration of the TLS project was dropped, the most logical and accessible point of entry into Greenaway’s transmedia storyworld seems to have been the film trilogy, particularly Part 1. In that case, the websites would have served to arouse curiosity about a protagonist that was already known, providing the viewers and internet users with more information about Tulse Luper. The online game could be enjoyed independently of the films and the websites, but it made more sense to play it with some previous knowledge of the main character. However, the book Tulse Luper in Turin was presented at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin on 29 May 2002— that is, before the first film premiered on the theater circuit. The images and the film script contained in that volume are independent of the subject of the films produced, although they share the same protagonist and his picaresque inclinations. To a more scholarly audience this could have been the point of entry, just as for more web-savvy people the game could have been something they stumbled upon by chance, instead of the film(s). An art lover who buys the books does not have to—and probably will not—engage in the experience of playing the game. The books mostly add to Greenaway’s reputation as an author whose art is worthy of an investment. As indicated on the website of the publishing company of both Tulse Luper books, Volumina is “a nonprofit cultural association” whose “aim is to create high-profile artistic and technological events, focusing on interactive exhibitions and art-editorial projects involving important contemporary artists and young creative talents” (www.volumina.net/en/ portfolio-articoli/peter-greenaway/). Additionally, a fan of Greenaway’s films may not be able to afford the books and may consequently be denied that point of entry into the project.13 In other words, there is no crystalclear point of entry into this project and, at a macro-level, as observed by Heidi Peeters, all media complement one other, mostly because of the fragmentary manner in which the narration is constructed.14 Henry Jenkins argues that the success of a transmedia storytelling project consists of providing “repetition with variation,” in order to ensure its

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“potential gross”.15 Writing specifically about TLS, Christy Dena adds that “all of these creative works provide various adaptations and experiences of the same core narrative elements (most utilize the same assets) but they do not replace the film and vice versa, making them redundant”.16 Indeed, some details about the character Tulse Luper are repeated in several, if not all, of the media—for example, his full name, Welsh origin, and hobbies—satisfying the condition of redundancy. On the other hand, there are also narrative gaps in the films that are not entirely filled by the other media, unlike what usually happens in commercial franchises, particularly in the Matrix trilogy, as pointed out by Marie-Laure Ryan.17 For example, why is Tulse Luper bound by ropes when the villain Percy Hockmeister storms into the bathroom of the Antwerp train station where he is being held? There is no hostility on his part towards Figura and Zeloty, his jailers, who, besides, also sit alongside him in the tub and engaging in conversation. How did the Hockmeisters, a Mormon-American family, end up with such an important role to play in the Nazi agenda in Europe? I would venture that most of the narrative gaps, mainly those concerning the 91 characters other than Tulse Luper, were never intended to be filled at all. Redundancy and novelty are not as important in TLS as they are in other transmedia cases because the project was never intended to be a franchise, that is, a profit-making product built via the creation of feelings of identity and ownership in its consumers. In what follows I will argue that the TLS project is a perfect example of transmedia storytelling and probably one-of-a-kind, since it contradicts some of the assertions made by Henry Jenkins and Marie-Laure Ryan about that phenomenon. I will contend that TLS is a top-down transmedia storytelling project according to Ryan’s definition, and, furthermore, of the “artistic” variety that Ryan considers nonexistent in practice. I hope to demonstrate that transmedia storytelling, which is usually relegated to the entertainment industry and considered a marketing strategy pace Ryan, in this case is a lot more than that. Reviewing Henry Jenkins’s two necessary conditions for the production of “good” transmedia storytelling—world building and seriality—I will contend that the most effective operation of the TLS project is the successful marketing of Greenaway’s authoritative voice, his artistic: persona. Regardless of the project’s point of entry, the users’ efforts always lead them to Greenaway in a centrifugal manner, since the TLS project is a mise en abyme of his own oeuvre – that is, a reduplication or mirroring of his entire body of work.

Top-Down Highbrow Transmedia Storytelling Ryan argues that a medium—any medium—is three things at once: first, a given physical material (for example, an image); second, a given technical process (for instance, film); and third, a given apparatus with

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larger implications, either in the activity of spreading news or in artistic expression (for example, cinema).18 Elsewhere she explains that the first feature relates to the semiotic dimension of the medium (time and space, significance and the way it is conveyed, as well as sensorial impact); the second feature pertains to the media technologies (whenever they are used), along with the modes of production and material support;19 and the last feature refers to the cultural dimension of the phenomenon as it “addresses the public recognition of the media as forms of communication and the institutions, behaviors, and practices that support them”.20 Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre evinces an extraordinary media consciousness, along the lines of Ryan’s idea that creativity is intrinsically bound to technology: “All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time and anybody who doesn’t becomes immediately a fossil”.21 In fact, Greenaway tries to bring all art forms (and media) together because he is “a firm believer in the notion that the medium is the message”.22 In the “Cinema Militans Lecture,” Greenaway declared that if cinema was to survive, it needed to “see itself as only part of a multimedia cultural adventure” and to “exist alongside and be a partner to a whole new world of multiple media activities”.23 In an interview with Catherine Shoard, Greenaway claimed to be an artist above all else: “I want to be a prime creator. As every self-regarding artist should do.”24 However, besides being a demiurge, an auctor in the true sense of the word, Greenaway is also a prolific and multifaceted monomedia practitioner: he is a painter, a film director, a writer, an opera librettist, a stage director, an exhibition curator and a visual artist. If anything, his oeuvre is characterized by an incredible porosity of media. An original text (screenplay) often results in a printed product (a published book), which becomes a spectacle intended to gain form either on the screen or on stage (as cinema, theater, and occasionally opera), from which, ultimately, exhibitions and art installations are derived. Not all the works go through the four stages, or not necessarily in this order This is just the most organic course for Greenaway’s creativity to expand. For instance, the script of the film Prospero’s Books (1991) made its way into a book published in 1992 containing other physical material from the same art object, such as Michael Nyman’s music. The film also resulted in another product: the short TV documentary A Walk through Prospero’s Library (1991). On the contrary, 100 Objects to Represent the World (1992) started as an exhibition in Vienna and a catalogue was published in German by Haltje that same year. It would be republished, as a book, in English, entitled 100 Objects to Represent the World: A Prop Opera by Peter Greenaway, the same year that it opened as an opera at The Zeitfluss Festival in Salzburg (1997). Sometimes the book containing the screenplay is published later than the opening of the corresponding film, but at other times the opposite takes place. The script for Goltzius and the Pelican Company, for instance, was published

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as early as 2009 by the publisher Dis Voir, whereas the film was only released to the general public in 2012 and differs substantially from the textual account in print. Dis Voir also published some Greenaway books of unproduced screenplays: The Food of Love (2014), The OK Doll (2014) and Joseph (2016). Thus the TLS project is not only an intensification of Greenaway’s artistic practice in general, but also a strengthening of its transmedia storytelling nature, under the umbrella term “top-down design,” which refers to an “operation that coordinates various media for a global experience”.25 According to Dena, in top-down transmediation projects, practitioners undertake the process themselves or coconstruct the projects to be part of the meaning-making process that takes place across different media and environments.26 In his important book on intermedia relations, Convergence Culture (2006), Henry Jenkins considers the franchise The Matrix as the perfect example of transmedia storytelling in that it was conceived strategically by its creators, the Wachowski Siblings, throughout all of its stages, down to the very commercial end.27 Due to the massive amount of work that the project entailed, the Wachowskis looked for collaborative authorship in the project, working with practitioners “known for their distinct visual styles and authorial voices,” instead of “hacks”.28 The same is true for Greenaway, who has a handful of faithful collaborators.29 The big difference between Greenaway and the Wachowskis is that Greenaway is a prolific artist and an expert in several monomedia, as I have already mentioned. In the TLS trilogy, Greenaway “invokes the medium and/or the environment as part of the meaning-making process”30 to such a degree that the TLS trilogy can be considered a thematization of the transmedia process itself. The films activate an awareness of different media and their interchangeability. For instance, in Part 2 of the trilogy, one of the prisons where the protagonist Tulse Luper is incarcerated is a movie theater called Arc-en-Ciel (rainbow in English) where filmic masterpieces are projected. In Ryan’s opinion, the “top-down” modality of transmedial storytelling is very hard to achieve31 and is the exception rather than the rule.32 In her view, most franchises grow from the bottom up, with several documents (i.e., media installments in different media channels) being added once the core canonical documents prove commercially successful.33 Usually, a film, or a set of films, becomes a box-office hit and from this canonical core stem cross-media adaptations produced by companies contractually linked to the original creator(s), and whose original work is duly licensed, in a typical “snowball effect”.34 I could not agree more with Ryan’s overall argument, but I do have an issue with the idea that “from an aesthetic point of view, spreading a story across as many media as possible is not a valid goal.”35 I aim to prove that TLS is precisely that project: the ultimate—admittedly highbrow—aesthetic top-down transmedia storytelling and is therefore deserving of a place alongside The Matrix, for all the industrial and

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intrinsic artistic differences that distinguish the two projects. In order to do this, however, I must engage with what, from my perspective, is the rub of both Ryan’s and Jenkins’s respective arguments on transmedia storytelling, namely its commercial status. Jenkins himself hints at the lowbrow nature of transmedia storytelling when he claims that “it is hard to imagine an ordinary feature, let alone an independent film, being able to motivate people to track down all these tributary narratives”.36 He defines transmedia storytelling as a story that unfolds across multiple media platforms, but with one proviso: that it must expand the potential gross profit of the overall project.37 Since Jenkins is recognizably probing into popular culture and since his first concern is “media convergence,” it is not surprising that he would come up with a market-oriented description of the transmedia phenomenon: “Transmedia storytelling refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence—one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities”.38 Unsurprisingly, he starts by mentioning that “the art of world making” is secondary in relation to a “collective intelligence”39 and the existence of corporations and consumers, a position he revises later,40 but not completely. Jenkins is concerned only with franchise-like projects, because these require marketing activity, the search for economic opportunities, and the efforts to develop a brand. Ryan uncritically adopts the immediate goal proposed by Jenkins for transmedia storytelling, that is, to entertain the audience through the concerted actions of the entertainment industries across multiple media platforms. She even considers these projects a marketing trick undertaken by the industry: “Their purpose is not artistic but economic: transmedia storytelling is for them [the project developers] just a way to get us to consume as many products as possible”.41 Not only that but they are the first reason she offers to explain why transmedia projects are deemed so popular.42 I argue that the criterion of profit is unsuitable for judging arthouse productions in general, as they do not have—and need not have— the mass appeal of mainstream products. Greenaway’s “cinema of ideas,” as he himself puts it, is very appealing to a scholarly audience but not to the general public. A cinema which is designed to work through “echoes and associations and references,” making no distinction between the visual and the conceptual to the point of showing “how visual thought operates,”43 is anything but blockbuster material. From Jenkins’s perspective, it should be downright “unfranchisable”. Greenaway’s ultimate goal as a filmmaker, which is to examine art in general and cinema in particular, has turned him into a niche filmmaker with growing funding problems, but has not reduced his authorial notoriety and his creative vigor.44 Thus, in order to grant him the status of ultimate highbrow transmedia storyteller, a condition I think he entered into with the TLS project,

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another issue has to be considered: TLS’s storytelling agenda, which is connected to its top-down creative control. Without both of these conditions occurring in conjunction, TLS cannot be considered transmedia storytelling at all.

An Expanding Authorial Narrative Universe According to Henry Jenkins’s development of his own theory, transmedia storytelling entails an “expansion” of the fictional world in different media. This means that one single story is told across different media, in a process made up of several installments.45 According to Jenkins, each installment “adds” new information to the overall narrative experience. Greenaway’s TLS, on the contrary, does not tell one single story across different media; rather, each medium adds new stories to a narrative compendium made from the same storyworld. In Christy Dena’s opinion, however, as long as a project—either a franchise or a large-scale project in general—uses different media and conceives of different environments (i.e., physical places where the project is consumed),46 then it is a transmedia project.47 Dena claims that in transmedia adaptations several “units” of a single project, instead of being self-contained objects, are transposed to other media.48 Jenkins argues that by spreading a story across different media, “new levels of insight and experience” can be attained, but he fails to explain what he means by this besides mere market-oriented consumption. In an art house project, such as Greenaway’s TLS, the whole conception of the project can be considered as promoting new levels of insight and experience. This is, after all, what Greenaway advocated for his film practice in his “Cinema Militans Lecture,” in which he explained what he meant by “present tense cinema,” which prepared the way for the more immersive and interactive practices of his current installations and VJ tours.49 Nevertheless, Greenaway adheres to and intertwines the two “core aesthetic impulses” that Jenkins finds “behind good transmedia works”: world building and seriality.50 As a matter of fact, Greenaway places great importance on art direction to the point of overdesigning an imminently textural world, a trait of many transmedia projects, especially in the realm of franchises, as Jenkins observes.51 According to him, some filmic works are actually more concerned with world building than storytelling.52 Instead, Greenaway is concerned with both. On the one hand, he deploys the condition of seriality: his oeuvre has recurrent characters and situations that form a network of narrative material. On the other hand, he says that “anything that moves through time necessarily has some sort of narrative.”53 In his oeuvre, “plot is disrupted in two contradictory ways: by the reduction of narrative to a system—the alphabet, or a countdown—still a narrative, but no longer a plot; and, perhaps, at the same time, by a picaresque overflowing of stories within stories, often

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highly unlikely, of diversions growing like ivy over ruins”.54 TLS exposes and overemphasizes the artifice of narration, multiplying it both in quantity and in quality. Indeed, in Part 3, turned into a “Gulag Sheherazade” reminiscent of The Arabian Nights, Tulse Luper is forced to tell a colossal number of stories in order to stay alive while guarded by his Soviet captors. There are also many other storytellers in the trilogy, the second most important one being Charlotte des Arbres, who is labelled as the Storyteller in the film proper and who voices a refrain about “a young woman who loved unwisely”. These stories are conveyed as very short and incomplete tales, and are perceived by the film viewers as mini-narratives that scroll up on the screen. I will now approach world building and seriality separately and in greater detail, as do both Ryan and Jenkins. Regarding world building, Ryan posits that for a deliberate top-down transmedial storytelling project to exist as a new art form, three conditions have to be met: (1) the project has to create a compelling story world; (2) it has to engage people in a given world (for instance, through the use of mystery); and (3) it has to tell as many stories as possible about that storyworld.55 All of these conditions are met by Greenaway in the TLS project. First, the story world is compelling, although in a different narrative way than usual. The apparent absurdities of this eminently abstract world are related either to the absurdities of war itself or to the self-reflexivity of the project, which is highly allegorical. In TLS, the use of tableau-like settings resembling theatrical environments sculpted with artificial light and color and permeated with props from past decades activates the senses and is haptically engaging.56 The storyline, the protagonist and the cast of supporting characters are mythical and archetypal, as is the case with The Matrix.57 Tulse Luper is a chameleon-like character, an archetype of Everyman, but he is also an enigma. He is posited both as the eventual savior of several communities of people across the decades and as a man to be deciphered and speculated about. Furthermore, the storyworld is also engaging because it develops in length as well as breadth, generating immersivenness.58 The fact that Luper, despite his condition of “professional prisoner,” moves around (or is moved) from one incarceration site to another adds manifold possibilities for the creation of other characters. As ratified by one of the lists written on-screen in the film trilogy, the project TLS has exactly 92 characters and their status as supporting cast to Luper is given prominence in the fictional casting sequences that form the visual basis for the opening credits of each film.59 Second, the TLS universe is mysterious inasmuch as it is “a text that promises a bottomless pit of secrets”.60 Although Ryan does not envisage the reconstruction of a story out of disseminated facts as a premise of the storyworlds in transmedia storytelling,61 she does acknowledge that immersion in the imaginary world is a crucial factor of the global experience provided by the different media channels62 and that this can be

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attained through the extra motivation needed to solve a mystery (as long as it is not actually solved).63 As she observes: “The theme of conspiracy particularly encourages detective activity, because it suggests that, under the overabundance of information that the story world throws users in seemingly random fashion, there is a meaningful trail of signs that leads to a rational understanding of reality”.64 TLS is filled with mysteries, imaginary journeys, ambiguous incidents, and open-ended conspiracies. Indeed, the game Tulse Luper Journey was conceived as an investigation of Luper’s 92 suitcases, and its goal was to gather information on Tulse Luper with the help of a community of gamers. Arguably, this is the very aim of the trilogy itself. The films could be seen as the decoding of the life of one man, Tulse Luper, who seems to be at the core of the most important (and conspiratorial) events in Europe for several decades. Third, in contradistinction to what Jenkins says about the expansion of a storyworld through the creation of installments,65 but complying with Ryan’s observation that “transmedia storytelling is not a serial; it does not tell a single story, but a variety of autonomous stories, or episodes, contained in various documents,”66 in the TLS project the multiplication of stories and the unrelenting storytelling can be perceived in many ways and through several devices. For instance, in the films, fictional expert commentators—92 in total, presented as talking heads— speak about Luper’s life episodes and offer opinions on him, fragmenting the films and turning the protagonist into a human kaleidoscope. Cinema and the arts, like history and personal stories, all have one thing in common: they are unreliable. Greenaway’s dictum that “there is no History, only historians” is not a blasé comment meant to shock; rather, it should be taken literally, as a metanarrative remark. The physical world is irreproducible and any effort to do so becomes a forgery, merely a possible version of the real. Greenaway delights in either lying or planting doubt; sometimes he even conjoins both practices. Let us consider the surprise strategy on which the trilogy is based. In the first episode of the film, set during Luper’s childhood in Wales in the aftermath of WWI, he and his best friend, Martino Knockavelli, write their names on a brick wall that suddenly collapses on top of Luper. The boy emerges from the rubble and the saga continues. In the last episode of the trilogy, when a seemingly “lost film” directed by Luper is found and watched by the two main diegetic Luper specialists, as well as other anonymous viewers, a revelation is made for all to see: Luper had, after all, succumbed to the collapse of the brick wall and had died aged 10. This revelation affects the entire content of the trilogy and its intradiegetic authority, as Luper’s so-called artistic productions cannot be attributed to him. Luper becomes a metaphoric ghost. The narrative structure of TLS and the questionable nature of the manifold storytelling makes it possible, at least in theory, to extend this story world ad infinitum. In a transmedia context, one immediately thinks of

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a possible flow of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. However, in the context of the TLS universe, expanding the timeframe through prequels and sequels would destroy the purposely abstract nature of Luper’s character as well as his archetypal and heroic picaresque nature; allowing for spinoffs, centered around other characters, would destroy his mythical status. According to Ryan, in transmedia storytelling, apocryphal productions created by fans, which run parallel to the project and in different media avenues, are virtually uncontrollable, but they are very rarely integrated into the overall architecture of the project (i.e., system).67 However, when they are, those productions become interactive and are controlled from the top down by the system creators lest they change the global storyline and the narrative coherence. Granted, in the TLS project the video game had a forum and a blog where consumers could post comments, but creative input that added to the storyworld and its enigmas was discouraged from the start by the very media resources that, for example, prevented the fans from adding new games. The general premise and Tulse Luper’s omnipresence remained untouched. I contend that the amount of fragmentation imposed by Greenaway on the (anti-)hero Tulse Luper, across all media employed in the project, was at just the right level to endow the character with a mythical aura without the creator losing control of his existence and his main symbolic role in the project. Further contributions by third parties that could have obliterated the “meaning” of the character Luper were firmly controlled by Greenaway on all fronts in order to prevent the architecture of the project from collapsing like the diegetic brick wall. However, because it is a top-down art-house transmedia storytelling project, as I have been arguing, TLS strays from the usual path in one way: none of the installments has “a reasonable reasonable closure to satisfy the users who stick to their medium,” and “the various media [do not] stand to each other in a relation of competition,” as Ryan contends about such projects.68 In fact, TLS, which is not a fantasy or a science-fiction storyworld, manages to provide the same level of user immersion—or more—as those more typically artificial universes privileged by Ryan.69 The world is paramount here, more than the story.

Seriality as Identity: A Network of Self-Referencial Multimediality I contend that seriality, which pertains to the second core condition that Jenkins attributes to “good” transmedia projects, is present throughout the TLS storyworld. In TLS, especially in the film trilogy, several characters reappear in different periods in various countries, as a sort of human recurrence not necessarily logically motivated. An example of this is when one diegetic Luper expert claims that the protagonist, in Rome, becomes the lover of a decaying Lephrenic, who thus far had been his  nemesis;

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another is when the three sisters who had kept Luper company on the deserted island on which he was stranded end up as corpses in the Budapest morgue. There are also running narrative motifs, such as the story that is told of another trio of sisters, who kept pushing throughout Europe prams with potatoes covering stolen gold until they disappeared. There are many different types of recurrences, including the repetition of frames in composite editing. However, I argue that the true nature of seriality is better imparted through some of the saga’s main characters, in both the TLS project and in Greenaway’s oeuvre in general – particularly since the former is a reflection and aggregate of the latter, as the filmmaker himself claims in his “Cinema Militans Lecture.” In the BFI edition of Greenaway’s early works—composed of two discs sold separately, and flashing the sentence “There is a New Luper Authority” on the menu page and in the introduction to the films—Greenaway acknowledges the existence of a personal mythology, which I think can be considered a creative substratum: Two films which I think are precursors to what was to happen later is the film Vertical Features Remake and a much longer saga, encyclopaedic project, called The Falls. . . . The academics and scholars represented created a bunch of people, Tulse Luper, Lephrenic, Van Hoyten, who began very seriously to people my particular mythology. And these characters now, after lying dormant for about ten years, are about to be resurrected in a brand new film called The Tulse Luper Suitcases. In a sense, all the germs and all the ashes of the films are always contained in all the other films.70 Tulse Luper could almost be considered Greenaway’s pseudonym. He appears or is mentioned in several early Greenaway films: in Vertical Features Remake (1978), Tulse is a researcher and filmmaker working for a mysterious landscape project called Session Three; in Walk Through H—The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1979), he is a cartographer and the author of a book on ornithology entitled Birds of the Northern Hemisphere; he pervades the film The Falls (1980), being explicitly referred to, in different capacities, in 17 of the 92 mini-biographies that form the 3-1/2-hour long feature.71 Tulse Luper is also on the list of subjects mentioned by the girl who is skipping rope at the beginning of Drowning by Numbers (1988). One of the expert commentators in TLS— Part 1 relates that as an adult, Tulse Luper was to become, almost by default, a writer. Maybe he was to see himself primarily as a naturalist. He was trained as an archeologist. Perhaps it is important that he is primarily seen as a collector. He said of himself that he was a kind of clerk. He reserved a special admiration for collectors, dictionary makers, encyclopaedists

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and those who tried very hard to put the things of the world in one place, into one system. He enjoyed making lists, he collected, and collated and classified names, images, events, experiences, characters, people, prisons, suitcases . . .72 Indeed, Tulse Luper is not only a man, a character, Greenaway’s prominent alter ego; he is also a human conundrum, a complete mystery and possibly an invention even within the fictional universe(s) he is made to inhabit. He fully represents the spirit of Greenaway’s enigmatic and ambiguous oeuvre. As pointed out by Bouchy, in relation to the films, Luper and Cissie Collpitts, his female counterpart and lover, do not have formally established personalities; rather, they are malleable, since they are a superposition of traits existing in several films: “There is a coexistence, in all the characters, of all the other moments, spaces, and environments. The new traits enforced at each repetition add, little by little, to the character’s nature in a building process filled with possibilities and potentialities for one single entity”.73 In the TLS films, Luper is conceived not only as a construct of other people, but as equally multiform. Actually, many of the things reported about him are not even recounted as facts, but rather as possibilities. At best, he remains elusive until the big disclosure (the collapsing of the brick wall), and even then he persists as a myth as much in the imagination of film viewers as in the storyworld proper.74 Some of Greenaway’s earlier works, in which Luper is a character are invoked in the TLS trilogy. For example, in Part 1, the short films Vertical Features Remake (1978) and Water Wrackets (1975) are referenced in relation to Luper’s activity of photographing and filming in the Moab desert. Viewers actually get to see Luper using a 16 mm camera to film Knockavelli talking a bath, so that Luper is acknowledged as having filmmaking skills. A Luper specialist observes that the footage of the former film “was damaged or lost in the 1950s, only to be remade in the 1970s by admirers” and that the substance of the latter film was “later made from Luper’s research in the 1960s”. Vertical Features Remake, explicitly authored by Greenaway, is actually a mock documentary about “Tulse Luper” and his making of a lost film entitled Vertical Features. Both the nature of Luper and his film are questioned in this work by none other than Lephrenic and other recurring Greenaway characters. The visual content of Greenaway’s Vertical Features Remake as quoted in TLS does not consist of images of a desert, as it would if the character Tulse Luper had directed it while in the Moab, thereby negating Luper’s direct authorship of it. Even though the titles coincide completely, these are two different films. The ironic self-quotation not only transforms Luper into an ubiquitous and gifted jack-of-all-trades, but, most importantly, envelops both him and Greenaway in a mythic mantle. Greenaway is implicitly referred to throughout as a remaker of Luper’s work, when in fact it is

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his work that is fictitiously attributed to Luper. The reference “remade by admirers in the 70s” is both applicable to IRR, the diegetic institute that is credited for remaking Tulse Luper’s film Vertical Features and to Greenaway, who remains in the shadows as a sort of silent partner. Several other Greenaway films are imputed to Tulse Luper throughout the TLS trilogy by means of film clips introduced by a specialist speaking in an inner frame: A Zed and Two Noughts, The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Baby of Mâcon [referred to as the Baby of Strasbourg], Prospero’s Books, and so on. One of them—The Belly of an Architect—is even quoted more than once. By and large, the TLS trilogy is a gigantic Greenaway mise en abyme and the same may be claimed about the whole TLS project. Miriam De Rosa, writing about Greenaway’s VJ tour Lupercyclopedia (2010–2012)—a TLS installment that came a long time after the main project-calls attention to the way it summarizes both Tulse Luper and Greenaway. During the course of the performance, materials are remixed and projected by Greenaway from a central position in front of a hemicycle of screens, which contributes to his own magnification through images, sounds and data belonging to his favorite character. This permits to those of the public who do not know the director’s poetics, to approach his work embracing a historical perspective; in other terms, it gives the opportunity to re-present and go through this organized, accurate, archival universe in order to try to reconstruct a system, starting from traces and clues.75 Following this lead, I wish to go farther on the authorial path I have been following in this chapter and contend that in the TLS project, what is most successfully marketed is not the story, the storyworld, or even Tulse Luper, but the director Peter Greenaway himself as an established arthouse filmmaker. In the case of the TLS project, unlike what happened with The Matrix, the “consumers,” as Jenkins refers to the saga’s fans, do not “track down data spread across multiple media, scanning each and every text for insights into the world.”76 Rather, they track the works and websites to know Greenaway better. In The Matrix of transmedia storytelling, which I call centrifugal, the need for profit spreads the franchise across multiple delivery channels, usually starting with an original concept film (such as The Matrix) or evolving from pre-existing comics (such as in the case of the Marvel Universe, which in 2019 owns the rights to several franchises). The goal in this model is to make the consumers look for the other environments where clues about the storyworld and gaps within it might be hidden. Multiplicity of media in this case equals potential economic gain, as already mentioned. This contrasts with the type of transmedial storytelling practiced by Peter Greenaway, which I consider to be centripetal in nature. Everything in the multiplicity

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of media used in the TLS project pulls us back to its creator, rather than spreading us out through the media he employs. Certainly, this could be said to happen, in a mild form, in all art-house films or, as David Bordwell calls them, art-cinema.77 Inasmuch as the film director controls the creative decisions made during all stages of filmmaking, and in particular its aesthetic core—the mise-en-scène78—all films refer to their directors, and all the more so in a European context. Peter Wollen, writing on the auteur theory and taking Howard Hawks and John Ford as examples, claims that the conceptual cohesiveness of a director is apparent in his world vision and enters the director’s oeuvre via a pattern of intertwined thematic concerns, recurrent leitmotifs and visual style.79 Moreover, some film directors are self-reflexive addressing explicitly their own cinematic praxis. In fact, Claude Chabrol is reported to have said that “a filmmaker [cinéaste] does not deserve to be called so until he knows what he is doing”.80 This consciousness, or intentionality, reinforces the self-endorsing nature of some directors’ work, especially when they write and publish their own cinematic theory. Although Greenaway is not a writer of theory, he has consistently argued in support of his theoretical views across media outlets in a similar way. Where Greenaway excels compared to his colleagues, though, is in his way of making narration itself his main artistic theme, around which all the others revolve like satellites. Greenaway’s “marked self-consciousness of art-cinema”81 does not involve engaging with cinematic images at large or with some other director’s, for that matter. His quotations are taken strictly from his own films, and he only interrupts narration (as Bordwell perceives the story in the fictional films of the art-cinema variety) to better reinforce his own artistic narration (i.e., his authorial enunciation and related artistic skills), not cinema in general. Put another way, the more art forms are evinced in The Tulse Luper Suitcases project, the more the audience remembers Greenaway for the multi-faceted artist that he is; the more technological novelty and experimentation is applied to the non-linear storytelling, the more the viewers are reminded of his exercises in written and cinematic style, used in shorts such as Dear Phone (1976). Greenaway’s usual motifs and obsessions are everywhere (beyond the content of the suitcases and other lists),82 only here they are presented as being Luper’s obsessions, quirks or mere jolts of fate. Greenaway’s cinematic self-quotations are an effective way to educate people in his oeuvre or to remind the British filmmaker’s aficionados of the several “episodes” that it comprises. Although this evocative strategy opens toward something that is placed outside the trilogy and the whole project (Greenaway’s artistic life work), the fact is that it points to what is placed at its core: Greenaway himself as an artist. This could be considered a metaphorical hyperlinking, rather than the one, as advocated by Lev Manovich.83 The difference is that whereas in real digital

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hyperlinking, the appearance of a film title in the screen would lend itself to interaction between the film viewer and the platform conveying the film viewed, as the user could click on the title to access the film directly, here this is not possible. The viewers cannot choose to click on the link and watch Greenaway’s films as they are mentioned or seen (in excerpts) in TLS. However, this may trigger reactions that lead to the same outcome. Viewers who have not yet watched those Greenaway films will probably be curious about them, which may then lead to their artistic consumption; those who have already watched the films may feel the urge to watch them again as a form of recollection. Such is the mechanics of Greenaway’s artistic marketing. In this manner The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy and related films may eventually work as a point of entry, not to the TLS project but to Greenaway’s oeuvre as the ultimate art-house transmedia storytelling accomplishment.

Acknowledgements This chapter was financially supported by the Foundation for Arts and Sciences (FCT, Portugal), under the Post-Doctoral fellowship programme SFRH/BDP/113196/2015.

Notes 1. Greenaway, “Cinema Militans Lecture,” 8. 2. Greenaway, “Cinema Militans Lecture,” 11. 3. Lines of moving text, titles, subtitles, intertitles, animated diagrams, animated maps, talking heads, split-screen, and so on (“Cinema Militans Lecture,” 10). 4. Luksch, “Interview with Peter Greenaway,” n.p. 5. The trailer for the game can still be consulted here: www.youtube.com/watch? v=zqcsnVTI2zw. The game is no longer active, nor is its message forum. In fact, the winner of the game’s main prize, a tour around the world, was announced in November 2007. 6. A collection of 101 short stories with gold as a common denominator, written in the same style used by the protagonist to voice his mini-narratives in Part 3 of the film trilogy. 7. The text and the images are derived from a theatrical work, which was presented twice: in 2005 (The Museum of Modern Art/-Villa Groce, Genoa) and 2006 (Palazzo delle Arti, Naples). 8. For this particular event, see Elliott and Purdy, “Man in a Suitcase.” 9. For this event, see De Rosa, “Lupercyclopedia.” 10. Much scattered information on the original TLS project and its later ramifications exists in articles and interviews, but the most updated sources are probably the website www.luperfoundation.com and Marc Orel (2011). 11. “The project is manufactured for exploitation in the cinema, on television, on one or more websites, as a serious collection of DVDs and in association with a library of books, with links to the making of theater and opera, exhibitions in museums and galleries” (“Cinema Militans Lecture,” 8).

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12. The existing project was severely cut down in size: the 16 television series episodes, the CD-ROM and 92 DVD’s that Greenaway had conceived were never produced. 13. The edition of both books was kept at 460 numbered and signed copies, leather bound. The selling price of Tulse Luper in Turin (2002) is €800 at the time of writing, 2019 (for 126 pages) and Tulse Luper in Venice (2004) is priced at €500 (for 134 pages), yet both publications are out of stock. 14. Peeters, “The Tulse Luper Suitcases,” 325. 15. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 98. 16. Dena, “Transmedia Practice,” 147. 17. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 7. 18. Ryan considers media to be art forms as well: Ryan, “Keynote Speech at the Rethinking Intermediality in the Digital Age Conference of the Intermedial Society for Intermedial Studies.” 19. Not all technical processes are necessarily technological, although that is becoming more and more the case. 20. Ryan, “Story/Worlds/Media,” 29–30. 21. Shoard, “Peter Greenaway’s Pact with Death,” n.p. 22. Luksch, “Interview with Peter Greenaway,” n.p. 23. Greenaway, “Cinema Militans Lecture,” 1. His film work has always been intermedial, drawing on other media and art forms. Some of his films are explicitly (i.e., thematically) about other arts: painting (The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982; Nightwatch, 2007), writing (Prospero’s Books, 1991; The Pillow Book, 1996), theater (The Baby of Mâcon, 1993), music (The Death of a Composer: Rosa, a Horse Drama, 1999), architecture (The Belly of an Architect, 1987), and dancing (M Is for Man, Music, Mozart, 1991). 24. Shoard, “Peter Greenaway’s Pact with Death,” n.p. 25. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 6. 26. Dena, “Transmedia Practice,” 108. 27. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 95–134. 28. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 109. 29. The producer Kees Kasander, the cinematographers Sacha Vierny and Reinier van Brummelen, the production designers Jan Roelfs and Ben van Os, the calligrapher Brody Neuenswander, the editor Chris Wyatt, the composers Michael Nyman and, more recently, Louis Andriessen. Some of these collaborators worked on TLS. 30. Dena, “Transmedia Practice,” 58. 31. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Myth or Reality?,” n.p. 32. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 6. 33. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 370–1; “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 6. 34. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 370. Complemented by apocryphal material produced by the fans. 35. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Myth or Reality?,” n.p. 36. Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia,” n.p. 37. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 97–8. 38. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 21. 39. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 4. 40. Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia,” n.p. 41. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 384. 42. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 384. 43. Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead, 35–6. 44. This explains why he needs funding from several European countries to be able to undertake his projects. The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy, for instance, was

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45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Fátima Chinita produced by companies in eight countries: The United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Russia, Hungary and Germany (although not all the countries financed Parts 2 and 3). Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia,” n.p. A movie theater, an opera house, a gallery, the living room where a book is read, the office where the internet is surfed (either on a laptop or a smartphone), etc. See Dena “Transmedia Practice,” 69. Dena, “Transmedia Practice,” 98. This is quite different from what Ryan considers an adaptation: that is, a narrative retelling that occurs in the same medium as the original work, or takes place across different media but not through a deliberate decision on the part of the original creators (Ryan “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword”, 2). Actually, this version of adaptation is closer to an appropriation, rather than a lawful expansion by the same author(s) that she argues for elsewhere (Ryan “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality”, 365, 368). His “present tense cinema” deliberately uses texts as images; abounds in multiscreen language, condensing in one single frame, in layers, several times and spaces in constant metamorphosis; registers performances of “passionate detachment” from the actors; and breaks all Aristotelian unities (time, place, subject) while making use of a myriad animated elements. Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia,” n.p. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 117. Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia,” n.p. Quoted in Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead, 23. Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead, 182. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Myth or Reality?,” n.p. According to Ryan, imaginary worlds involve multiple senses, namely touch (Revising Imaginary Worlds, 9–10). For information on this, see Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media and Chinita, “I Sing the Body Synaesthetic: Cinematic Embodiment in Peter Greenaway’s Goltzius and the Pelican Company,” 86–107. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 96–7. Again, Ryan claims that imaginary worlds have great immersive power due to the nature of the medium and the size of the conceived world (the larger the world, the more it offers a broad field for characters, landscapes and events) (Revising Imaginary Worlds, 10). Incidentally, while obeying the first condition of transmedia storytelling advocated by Ryan, the trilogy also complies with the three other conditions that Henry Jenkins borrowed from Umberto Eco: the project is a completely furnished world, highly quotable by fans and encyclopedic (Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 99). Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 101. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 4. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 5. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 384. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 384. Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia,” n.p. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword,” 4. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality”; “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword.” Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality,” 381. Ryan, “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality”; “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword.” Greenaway, referring to his own films.

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71. In biographies nos. 2, 7, 9, 16, 34, and 91, Tulse Luper is a storyteller, credited with writing several fictional works: the stories The Cassowary, The Photographer’s Dog and Sparrow Week; a book of collage entitled Tulse Luper and the Centre Walk, about a look-alike, and Quadruple Fruit, whose fictional content is hard to ascertain. Leasting Fallvo, the subject of biography no. 91— like Luper and Greenaway writes plots, fictions, lyrics, and narratives; among his works in English one finds A Walk Through H and The Tulse Luper Suitcases (besides other titles related to some of Greenaway’s obsessions: Birds of the Eiffel Tower, The Dogs on Bardsley Island [in the film trilogy a dog keeps Luper company on a deserted island and, after his death, his remains form the content of one of the suitcases], and The Missing Composer. The two recurring images of Tulse Luper used in Greenaway’s films are also seen in The Falls, namely in biographies 18, 56, 67, and 91. In addition, Tulse Luper is mentioned as a linguist (biography 5), an academic, author of the bogus Olduvai Papers (biography 23), a cartographer (biography 39), an ornithologist, author of the book Birds of the Northern Hemisphere (biography 49), a filmmaker (biographies 81 and 83), a cataloguer of the very VUE event that afflicts all the subjects of the film The Falls, which makes him a self-reflexive master author (biography 87). Alternatively, he is mentioned as the subject of a supposedly diegetic work, coincidentally entitled A Walk Through H, or The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist—which may never have existed (biography 56), as Tulse Luper himself may just as well be a figment of someone’s imagination (as is claimed, at some point in another Greenaway film: Vertical Features Remake). 72. Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Part 2. 73. Bouchy, “Let’s Make a Renewal,” 5, my translation. This is also applicable to Erik van Hoyten and Lephrenic, two of the characters from the TLS project who appear in other Greenaway works but are not Greenaway’s alter egos (Bouchy, “Let’s Make a Renewal,” 3). 74. The character of Tulse Luper as an adult is inexplicably, at least from a strictly diegetic point of view, played by three different actors, two of whom appear together in the same film frame: J. J. Feild (Part 1 and Part 2), Roger Rees (Part 2 and Part 3), and Stephen Billington (Part 3). 75. De Rosa, “Lupercyclopedia,” 50. 76. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 97. 77. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 205–33. 78. Aumont, Les théories des cinéastes, 5, my translation. 79. Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 81–90. 80. Aumont, Les théories des cinéastes, 3, my translation. 81. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 209. 82. Voyeurism, scatology, death, nakedness, corporeality, torture, religion, Heaven and Hell, forms of spectacle, audiences, books, art, nature mortes (still lives), water, light, ruins, architecture, animals, maps and games (Woods, Being Naked Playing Dead). See Marc Orel (Towards an Encyclopedia as a Web of Knowledge) for a complete alphabetical list. Although Orel does not use this division, Greenaway’s motifs may be classified under the following headings: anatomy, art, death and violence, elements, fauna and flora, games and conspiracies, history, maps and landscapes, mythology and religion, sex and scatology, and writing. 83. “Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items with every item possessing the same significance as any other” (Manovich, The Language of New Media, 218).

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Bibliography Aumont, Jacques. Les théories des cinéastes, 2nd ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 2011 [2001]. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge, 2008 [1985]. Bouchy, Karine. “‘Let’s Make a Renewal,’ Répétition, multiplicité, bifurcations: les stratégies de Peter Greenaway.” Image [&] Narrative, August 12, 2005, unpaginated. www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/tulseluper/bouchy.htm. Chinita, Fátima. “I Sing the Body Synaesthetic: Cinematic Embodiment in Peter Greenaway’s Goltzius and the Pelican Company.” In Yearbook of Moving Image Studies #2, special issue Image Embodiment: New Perspectives of the Sensory Turn, edited by Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse, and Norbert M. Shmitz, 86−107. Darmstadt: Büchner Verlag, 2016. Dena, Christy. “Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World Across Distinct Media and Environments.” PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2009. https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/biblio/biblio_pdf/Christy_ DeanTransm.pdf. De Rosa, Miriam. “Lupercyclopedia: Moving Image and Living Archive.” Comunicazioni Socialy 5 (2011): 45−54. http://comunicazionisociali.vitaepensiero. com/scheda-articolo_digital/miriam-de-rosa/lupercyclopedia-moving-imagesand-living-archive-001200_2011_0012_0005-225726.html. Gras, Vernon, and Marguerite Gras. Peter Greenaway: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Greenaway, Peter. “Cinema Militans Lecture: Towards Re-Invention of Cinema.” Talk delivered on September 28, 2003. http://petergreenaway.c.uk/essay3.htm. ———, The Falls. 1980. In The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 2. BFI Video Publishing, DVD, n.d. ———. The Tulse Luper Suitcase: Part 1−The Moab Story. Fortissimo Films, DVD, 2003. ———. The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Part 2 −Vaux to the Sea. Fortissimo Films, DVD, 2004. ———. The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Part 3−From Sark to the Finish. Fortissimo Films DVD, 2004. ———. The Tulse Luper Suitcases Journey, 2004. www.tulseluperjourney.com/ game/ ———. Vertical Features Remake. 1978. In The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 2. BFI Video Publishing, DVD, n.d. ———. A Walk Through H−The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist. 1979. In The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 1. BFI Video Publishing, DVD, n.d. ———. Water Wrackets. 1975. In The Early Films of Peter Greenaway 1. BFI Video Publishing, DVD, n.d. Jenkins, Henry. “The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Two).” Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), September 13, 2009. http:// henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i_1.html. ———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Updated and with a new Afterword. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Laera, Margherita. “Towards a Present Tense Cinema: Interview with Peter Greenaway.” London Theatre blog archive, August 14, 2008. www.andreweglinton. com/ltbarchive/2008/08/14/towards-a-present-tense-cinema-interview-withpeter-greenaway/.

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Luksch, Manu. “Interview with Peter Greenaway, 1/97.” Telepolis, February 13, 1997. www.heise.de/tp/features/Interview-with-Peter-Greenaway-1-973445945.html. Luperpedia Foundation. n.d. Accessed March 14, 2016. www.luperpediafoundation. com/peter-greenaway/. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Noys, Benjamin. “Tulse Luper Database: Peter Greenaway, the New Media Object and the Art of Exhaustion.” Image [&] Narrative, August 12, 2005, unpaginated. www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/tulseluper/noys.htm. Orel, Marc. “Towards an Encyclopedia as a Web of Knowledge: A Systematic Analysis of Paradigmatic Cases, Continuities, and Unifying Forces in the Work of Peter Greenaway.” PhD diss., University of Wien, 2011. http://othes.univie. ac.at/16445/1/2011-06-10_0109708.pdf. Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Peeters, Heidi. “The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Peter Greenaway’s Left Luggage.” In Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/-Poststructuralist Cinema, Revised ed., edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway, 323−38. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a MediaConscious Narratology.” In Storyworlds Across Media: Towards a MediaConscious Narratology, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 25−49. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. ———. “Transmedia Storytelling: Myth or Reality?” Talk delivered at the Conference Rethinking Intermediality in the Digital Age, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, October 24−26, 2013. www. youtube.com/watch?v=zqFsg8zqcLA. ———. “Transmedia Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34, no. 34 (Fall 2013): 361−88. www.researchgate.net/publication/256599856_Transmedial_ Storytelling_and_Transfictionality. ———. “Transmedia Storytelling: Industry Buzzword or New Narrative Experience?” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 7, no. 2, Transmedial Worlds in Convergent Media Culture (Winter 2015): 1–19. www.jstor.org/ stable/10.5250/storyworlds.7.2.0001. ———. “Why Worlds Now?” In Revising Imaginary Worlds, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 3–13. London: Routledge, 2017. Shoard, Catherine. “Peter Greenaway’s Pact with Death.” The Guardian, March 18, 2010. www.theguardian.com/film/2010/mar/18/peter-greenaway-nightwatching. Volumina. n.d. Accessed March 14, 2016. www.volumina.net./en/portfolioarticoli/peter-greenaway/. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, and Mary Alemany-Galway, eds. Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/-Poststructuralist Cinema, Revised ed. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

4

The Gamification of Cinema and the Cinematization of Games Doru Pop

The major assumption dominating the theoretical fields of cinema studies and game studies is that the two media are today amalgamated at a profound level. The explicit interchanges between movies and games are often used to prove that transmedia experiences have become the prevailing forms of expression in our contemporary culture. With the increased number of movies released recently as adaptations of their game counterparts, it would seem that this hypothesis can be confirmed. However, when taking a closer look at the specificity of games and cinema, these “gamified” movies also provide the arguments for raising some major questions. Are the transformations taking place in the visual and narrative structures of movies caused by the influence of gaming practices on the cinematic? Can we simply transfer elements that are specific to game-fictions onto the cinematic screen and, for that matter, into other types of media experiences? Can we describe a distinct “gaming mode”, as opposed to a “cinematic mode”, or a wider transformation of our cultural interactions that leads to the blending of their respective modalities? While some authors indicate that games have become increasingly “cinematic” because the digital technologies used in movies are now available in video games,1 pointing to the transmedial relationship between the two media, others claim that a multimodal turn is taking place. Several confusions stem from the various uses of the concepts of mode and modality, and we need to deal carefully with the shared qualities of different media. As noted previously by Lars Elleström,2 they might lead us to quickly identify the manifestations of “intermediality”. As further elaborated on by Elleström, while each medium has a specificity, manifested in four particular modes of media expression (material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic), each medium also maintains its own modality even when shared “modality modes”3 allow transmediation. My understanding is that modalities are forms of articulation that make specific media discourses recognizable, while modes are linked to material manifestations, in terms of both production and consumption. The concept of media modality must also be used differently from the philosophical or linguistic definitions, which can add to the confusion

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in terminology. Also, because some media share modalities (such as the visual modalities in television and cinema), their modes might appear to be common, but they are not. The cinematic mode, as indicated in the classic work of Noël Burch,4 must be understood via the institutional and material forms of representation that are specific to the film industry. More importantly, consumption practices have a modal dimension, extremely different when it comes to their use in various media. Casetti5 links cinema modalities with the movie theatre projection practices, pointing to the relevant distinctions between cinema, theatre and literature. These are the conceptual foundations of my discussion and the differences between cinematic and gaming modes and modalities and their implicit modal and multimodal interactions. As detailed by Bateman, Wildfeuer and Hiippala,6 it is clear that different forms of media can be naturally combined. By contrast, even when particular modalities (visual or textual) sometimes cross over from one medium to another, their modes do not overlap.

Cinematization and Gamification The relationship between the cinematic and the gamified is apparent when looking at Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018), one of the most recent examples that reveals how contemporary movie directors use game-fictions in cinematic settings. However, the game activities that are described and placed at the centre of the movie experience are neither specifically cinematic nor based on game modes. This film is an adaptation of the popular novel written by Ernest Cline featuring the story of a future humanity driven by a global gaming culture. It is remediated in an amazing visual mode, and Spielberg’s story offers the viewers a complete cinematic spectacle made possible by digital movie making and extraordinary special effects. The film is also filled with innumerable cultural references from other media, such as cartoons, television programmes, movies and popular music, in a remarkable fantasy. At this level, the movie appears to be an example of how transmedial transformation can cross the traditional boundaries between various content-creation production modes. Clearly developed as a multimedia object, the movie also takes us to the limits of gamification practices in contemporary cinema. The main narrative, constructed as a mystery game, has the heroes search for clues and “keys” as they try to solve a quest created by the dead game developer James Halliday. Next, the movie accelerates into multiple action scenes, often mimicking simulation games (such as car chases) or depicting massive multiplayer war games (such as the final battle of avatars). In fact, the undesirable result is that most of the movie ends up looking like a cinematic intercut of multiple video games. This excess of gamification generates an oversimplified form of cultural integration of the game experience, probably designed to cater to the needs

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of a new social group dominating the global markets, yet fundamentally altering the nature of the cinematic. When examining the consumption statistics, it would seem that the parallel universes of the gaming worlds described in Ready Player One are already at work today. Almost half of the population of the planet owns a game, and in 2016 a record 200 million people were playing games simultaneously in North America alone, with more than 912 million doing the same in the Asia Pacific region. In the US, 64 percent of the population are gamers,7 which makes gaming the predominant human activity, with unprecedented effect on the behavior of our species. The gaming industry is also one of the fastest growing sectors worldwide, with video-game sales globally of $116 billion surpassing those of many of the traditional media. In Asia the sales related to gaming were estimated to be $51.2 billion in 2017, followed by North America with revenues of $27.0 billion and the European Union zone with $26.2 billion. However, almost 30 percent of these games are played on smartphones, that is, outside of the house.8 Spielberg creatively takes this contemporary reality and projects it into a menacing, dystopian future. Planet Earth is now overcrowded and the derelict reality is almost totally replaced by a 3D video-game environment. In 2045 humans live in cramped slums and are escaping into a virtual utopia by playing in a game-world called OASIS. Here the story is centred around a young hero, Wade Watts, who is immersed in this game-like experience via an avatar named Parzival. Gathering points and searching for the ultimate prize, the supreme “Easter Egg” left behind by the creator of this virtual world, Parzival unites a group of friends called the “High Five” (Art3mis, Aech, Daito and Sho) and joins a revolution against the evil corporation appropriately called “IOI”. At the end of this “Holy Grail” quest, the hero saves OASIS, wins the Golden Egg and inherits the fictional virtual reality. Transparently mythologizing the new media environment and using gamification to attract young audiences into cinemas, the acclaimed movie director showcases some of the most important gamification processes influencing cinema. While this type of cinematic exploration of the game-world experience had already been used in many other movies, such as Tron (1982), probably the first “gamified” movie, or Ender’s Game (2013), we need to ask how and why gamification keeps expanding into cinema. The process began more than three decades ago, with innumerable games turned into their cinematographic versions. This has allowed a multitude of academic studies to be published ever since that elaborate several theories about the relationship between movies and video games. First and foremost, many authors quickly identified the interchange between the two media as inevitable, pointing out the obvious cinematization of games and the gamification of cinema. This is why, before moving forward with clarifications of the differences between the modes and modalities of cinema and video games and

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their particular development of fictional worlds, a couple of distinctions should be addressed; most importantly, we need to define the conceptual uses of cinematization and gamification.

Everything Will Be Gamified Gamification has become a concept that is seen as comprehensive and that is used generally to describe all the practical applications of game mechanics in various ludic experiences. From marketing to education, “gamification” techniques are implemented today as instruments for attracting younger audiences to “older” practices. Even the most banal social interactions get a “gamified” makeover, with innumerable domains of public life being blended with elements of animation, filled with socalled gaming rules and presented as innovative. Gamification is a readymade term for any form of interactivity. Some practitioners of business gamification,9 like the prophets of game mechanics Zichermann and Cunningham, consider that some of the basic tools of game interactions can be expanded into market-driven environments. For the purpose of this discussion we can reduce these basic elements to two major components: obtaining rewards and passing levels. These authors, like many others who encourage the use of gamification to motivate involvement in various social fields, are announcing a “gamification revolution”. This would allow the improvement of all social activities and, more importantly, business. The use of the game-like experience is believed to increase the efficiency of workers, their interaction with customers and the ability of managers to be efficient. However, when analyzed beyond this extremely pragmatic perspective, gamification becomes a form of exploitation of basic human desires for corporate profits. This justifies the observation of Ian Bogost, who radically dismissed gamification practices, considering that they have nothing to do with games. In a negative definition, gamification is only a fake promise created by business consultants10 that is designed to manipulate the social reality of employees. There are many examples11 of how game elements can be used in “serious” contexts with positive results. However, most of the studies published on this topic do not take into consideration the basic fact that their approach is limited by the narrow understanding of what video-gaming practices are about. As pointed out earlier, gamification is more or less treated as synonymous with engagement and ludification and exercised in various forms of corporate team-building activities. Yet the complex issues of involvement and immersion are deemed to be secondary to the pragmatic dimensions of game mechanics. In my opinion, this is fundamentally wrong and perverts the understanding of the process of gamification. Other problematic dimensions of these approaches appear when the concept of gamification, coupled with video-game mechanics, is expanded

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in controversial contexts. Perhaps some of the most questionable dimensions are the gamified practices of military training and political decision making. Applying the rules of gaming to areas that should not be connected with the ludic makes things extremely dangerous and often inhuman. While using gamification to stimulate consumers or to increase marketing outcomes might have benign dimensions, when contemporary politics is gamified, and when killing people with drones through a game-like console is made possible, the consequences are troublesome. Although some authors12 suggest that the mechanics of games can be integrated into almost all political and social situations, claiming that an increase in democracy will result from the expansion of such practices, the “digitalization” of democracy and the gamified version of elections point to more negative dimension of game-like practices. These are all interesting directions of analysis, but in the following interpretations the video–ludic dimensions of gamification will be the narrow focus point. Also, in order to navigate among the variety of definitions, gamification is understood here as any use of game elements in non-gaming environments. Thus, gamification basically means the repurposing of gaming experiences in contexts that are not specific to video and computer games.

The Cinematization of the Imagination Cinematization is also used as an umbrella concept, and it needs to be briefly overviewed. Whenever elements specific to cinema are repurposed in various cultural practices that are not cinematographic, that is, when the codes specific to cinema operate outside the boundaries of the medium, the result is described as cinematization or filmization.13 Again, some of the best examples are provided by the “cinematization of games”, which is one of the most commonly used phrases when exemplifying how contemporary transmedia manifestations work. Cinematization accounts for how media-specific techniques developed by cinema appear to be easily adaptable into video-game environments. As with similar expressions, such as the “cinematization of television” or the “filmization of radio”, several confusions arise from such amalgamations of definitions. When indiscriminately used, cinematization and the cinematic, just like gamification and the gamified, are conceptually counterproductive. Many authors14 are inclined to suggest the existence of an overall “cinematic philosophy”, which encompasses all contemporary cultural practices related to visual communication. These authors claim that almost all ideas can be manifested “cinematically”. In accordance with the view of Norman Denzin, who argues that the amplification of the “cinematic gaze” has created a global “visual economy”, the obvious visual monopoly on our imagination which resulted from the creation of a “cinematic

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society”15 is not necessarily based on innovative modalities of visuality, but rather on technological developments. In fact “the cinematic”, as we experience it today, is probably part of an older predisposition of our brains. As explained by Merlin Donald, who has identified a deeper dimension of the “kinematic imagination” in the ancient mimetic reproduction of reality,16 we are using an advanced technology to satisfy a far simpler need. The ability to represent our world by visually dynamic means is the result of neurological functions manifested in almost all cultural practices. This is why we must question whether there really is a “cinematic modality” that is different from the visual experiences generated in television or in video games. More importantly, there are different modes of image making, based on various cultural forms, such as animation, painting and even literature. The philosophical views about the cinematic are commonly based on a media myth, which claims that cinema is currently dominating society through its pre-eminence in cultural industries. This is contested by data – cinema is no longer generating the biggest global revenues, with total sales estimated at $39.9 billion in 2017, while the video-game industry estimates for 2018 are more than $138 billion.17 The acclaimed expansion and influence of cinema into all areas of contemporary visual culture is not overwhelming. The reality is that games are more important than cinema in the global competition for visual domination and any apprehension of global cultural phenomena must include this predominance. Another illustration of this underwhelming effect of cinema is represented by the excessive number of movies based on game-fictions, which shows that cinema has become a secondary form of content creation. This is why, when trying to comprehend the processes of cinematization, broadly understood as the generation of meanings through moving images, we must contradict the most important approaches in academic research that have been developed around such theoretical observations as those proposed by Jonathan Beller. Suggesting that our collective unconscious has been cinematized, Beller presumes that the cinematic is the predominant form of cultural production.18 However, all the processes that Beller describes as the “cinematicization of the visual”,19 which could make the cinematographic mode of production the most powerful form of expression, influencing other modes of representation (such as television or video games), are no longer supported by data and cannot be considered as the dominant media modalities. While Beller’s careful analysis indicates that the cinematic is just a mode of cultural production and consumption, the idea of cinematic domination has been further developed by authors such as Berys Gaut. They argue that the development of digital technologies allowed cinema to expand its borders. Using a philosophical approach to filmmaking, Gaut also includes video games in his definition of the overall cinematic experience.20 Ignoring the specific modes and modalities of games, Gaut

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considers that the cinematic medium now contains all forms of interactive games, such as World of Warcraft (WoW) or The Sims, thus accounting for the expansion of cinematic practices into the gaming world.21 This author ascertains that the visual displays of dynamic images in games represent proof enough for the evolution of the medium into a broader manifestation described as interactive cinema. This cinematization of video games represents validation for Gaut22 of his proposed confinement of games as part of the cinematic mode. The combination of cinematic codes with the interactivity of games has supposedly created a completely new mode of cinematography, which makes the “non-interactive” cinema (that is, “traditional” filmmaking) and the presumed “newer” modalities of the cinematic (visible in computer games) part of the same experience. Many other academic works have taken these suggestions even further. Various concepts have been proposed to connect all intermedial manifestations of the cinematic into a single modal form of expression. Ignoring any media specificity, many studies link the magic lantern experiments with the literature of James Joyce, iPhone movies and fantasy films, computer games and classical cinema. These approaches describe a specific “cinematic quality” – or “cinematicity”, as defined in the collective work edited by Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau – which is recurrent in games and in other media as a “mode of mind” or an “experience” that goes beyond the technologies of film production.23 These interpretations offer the basis for associating various media productions into a single modality, most often reduced to cinematization. The main conceptual framework for such theoretical accounts is provided by the notion of the “digital revolution”, which is constantly presented as a driving force that has changed all the cultural practices of humanity today. As suggested by Lev Manovich, one of the most popular prophets of the new media, cinema has always been the ultimate “new media”, and the generation of computer-based movies has only fulfilled the promises of the “old” cinematic art. For Manovich and his followers, the cinematic mode of representing the world has now been extended into computer-based creativity, which has become a generalized cultural interface.24 Another correlation is proposed by Norman Taylor, who claims that the development of the cinematic apparatus has been prolonged because it is taking place in contemporary digital technologies.25 Others, like Markos Hadjioannou, believe that cinema has entered a “new age”, one in which the digital environments have transformed the very nature of the cinematic. Basically, the “old” medium of cinema (which has been developed for only a century) has been completely transformed into the new media, and this modification has resulted in an ontological transformation of the cinematic itself.26

Is There a Game-Cinematographic Mode? This “digital dogma” was quickly adopted by many practitioners working in the gaming industry. Some even proposed a transmedial reconceptualization

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of “game cinematography”,27 designed to distinguish the use of filmmaking tools in game-play environments from the classic cinematic techniques. Such understandings further illustrate the stretching of the cinematic, which gives cinematization a gaming dimension. Burelli claims that when the gamer influences the movements of the camera, he is in fact offered a “personalized cinematographic experience”.28 Another major confluence of cinema and games is provided by the extensive use of camera angles and movements in game visuality. These cinematic codes allow the gamer to emotionally interact with the gaming environment and thus game producers often strive to incorporate similar cinematic techniques into their work. The result is the claim that the techniques used in cinema have now become an integral part of gaming experiences. Nevertheless, these “cinematic secrets” of including various camera movements and angles, framing shots or the use of “epic music”,29 considered to be important in developing a supposedly filmic experience desired by the players, are not specifically cinematic. The creation of “cinematic games” might be a creative goal for some game producers, yet the gamers themselves often avoid or skip the cinematic parts of their favourite entertainment. More importantly, such practices are not really cinematographic, since the movements of the virtual camera and the experience provided by the movie projected onto the computer screen are offering completely different sensations from watching a film in a movie theatre. The corporeal practices in computer games are completely different from those provided by cinema, and thus the modes of engagement and immersion are so radically different that the overlapping of cinematization and gamification must be rejected. These issues must be further analyzed by discussing particular case studies of games adapted into movies. An important clarification that needs to be addressed derives from the fact that cinematization and gamification are today highly hybridized forms. As Bateman and Schmidt argue, the “cinematic mode”, which is fundamentally a multimodal manifestation,30 includes several modalities that are non-cinematographic. Elements such as music, text and various other graphic forms included on screen are clearly non-specific. Without insisting on the complex issues involved in cinematic essentialism when trying to define what is specific to cinema, the very existence of a cinematic art with distinguishing characteristics remains highly disputable. Clearly, many of the elements used by cinema are simply borrowed from other media (such as photography) and other art forms (such as literature and theatre). Framing, angles and compositional codes are inherited by cinema from its non-cinematic ancestry. Only the habitus of cinema seems to be a distinct mechanism, yet it also makes cinema similar to other publicly displayed arts. So, while the visual modality of cinema can be shared with other media, the cinematic mode is based on a form of public leisure activity which evolved from forms of collective amusement, made possible by the theatre auditorium. Along with camera recording

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and projecting devices, these “cinematic” elements can exported to the game experience or to multimedia representations. Still, the modal contrast is amplified when acknowledging that playing games provides an experience for the user which is based on a completely different mode of consumption to cinema. The cinematic visual dimension, common in video games and movies, is subverted by the particular mode of watching a movie in a dark room in a detached way and is not shared by the gaming world. Michael Newman, who has described the contemporary culture as an “Atari Age”, identifies an important component in the cultural history of video games that must be linked to the specific evolution of the machines of games that makes them “non-cinematic”. Newman argues compellingly that the specific medium of experiencing game-fictions is the television screen.31 If anything, video games have inherited their “cinematic” dimension from another visual medium. Games evolved and were developed in connection with various types of screens (television, computer or phone screens). As these visual platforms grew in capabilities and size, the games themselves were transformed. Thus, the mode of games is less cinematic and more televisual, and this is coupled with an inherent modal interaction based on computers. Statistical data confirm that television is truly the dominant media industry today – out of the global revenues of the cultural and creative industries of $2,250 billion, $477 billion is generated by television. This is why the materiality of games (either in classic arcades or on contemporary consoles), which induces a physical state in the gamer, must be linked to a different mode than that generated by the interaction with the technology of visual projection allowed by cinema. Often described as an interactive or participatory experience, the way any game is exercised is as important as the gaming world itself. Acclaimed as the newest of new media, games apparently take the human being outside the confines of “passive” usability. The modal interaction of the gamer with playing and the “game magic” are dependent on what can be called “the console mode”. Thus, the illusion of dynamic encounters and the apparent freedom of movement prove to be based on false choices, as they are both determined by the creators of the environment. Captive in another form of Plato’s cave, the gamers are not living a personal cinematic experience, since most of the camera options in video games are pre-determined. Real dynamic cameras that work independently inside the game-worlds are still to be developed, and however interactive a game might be, the camera moves are operating as already edited forms of reality. Finally, as many authors have pointed out, there is a typical gaming modality, one that causes a form of electronic addiction often described as the “Tetris effect”. Unlike the phantasmic attraction of movies, games have a pharmatronic32 influence on the brains of the users. While both movies and games are immersive environments, the fascination for each is

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different. There are two modalities which cannot be limited to immersion or even interactivity, and both are the objects of the following discussions.

Beyond Amalgamization: The Cinema of Games Although games are easily transformed into movies and game-like practices can be integrated into cinema, I suggest we take a critical stand when dealing with these exchanges. First and foremost, a gamer experiences the reality of the game-world in a modality that is incompatible with that provided by movies. The two types of media appear to be similar, yet the important distinction between the cinematic modality and the “gamer model”33 is made explicit by analyzing recent examples of movies adapting game experiences. Productions such as Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Warcraft (2016) show the limits of video and computer games and the fact that movies are fundamentally based on different modes of participation and representation. First and foremost, we need to reject the indistinct mixing up of cinematic and gaming characteristics in terms of practices. While some authors suggest that a “videogamization” of cinema and television is happening and that an overall “gamization” results in society, such innovative concepts claiming to explain the constant gamification of movies and the cinematization of games are just confusing. When taking into consideration the widespread practices of the contemporary film industry, among them the use of games as a source of cinematic inspiration and the amplification of video narratives in games, we must first acknowledge that all cultural forms are multidimensional and multimodal. In the particular case of the relationship between these two types of media, the resulting interchanges are nothing more than crossfertilizations. As is the case of the Temple Run game, which shares characteristics with the Indiana Jones movies, movies like The Matrix, which use the idea of humanity trapped inside a computer game, or the trope of reality working like a game-fiction, the fascinating intersections between films and video games do not alter their specificity. Other accessible similarities result from their common sensorial modalities – sight and sound are simultaneously used by games and movies. In terms of basic human communication, there are multiple junctions between other modalities, such as verbal interactions, written displays and musical meaning making. Yet when we describe modality as linked to the overall processes of making meaning, games and cinema are clearly manifested as different modes of expression. The basic concept of modality markers, proposed by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuven,34 makes it clear that the reality cues in games and movies are divergent. Although cinema and games are multimodal by nature, as argued in another important study by Kress and Van Leeuwen, their respective modalities are fundamentally different.35 Visually, the games are artificial environments:

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their colours and illumination, their depth cues and representations, and their characters and backgrounds are computer generated. And although movies are increasingly including computer-altered realities, their main modality maintains a profound connection with reality that is captured in a direct mode. Doug Liman’s Jumper (2008), a movie in which the viewers are presented with the story of an extraordinary character, a young man with the capacity to “jump” through space and time, thus moving from one location to another, is exemplary here. Just as the gamer can “jump” from one episode of a game to another, the cinematic modality appears to allow the same experience. Some suggestive comparisons taken from recent movies such as Jumanji 2 (2017) and Warcraft (2016) disprove such associations. In fact the cinematic mode does not allow the same way of interacting as game-specific activities. For example, in Jumanji 2, where the characters physically “fall” into the game, or in Warcraft, where the orc clans move from one scene to another, the movies are developed as linear experiences. The narrative time and the cinematic experience are limited by the medium itself. In cinema, spatial and temporal jumps are possible only by cutting and editing reality, and a fractured reality is made possible by the embodied experience of the viewer. In the gamified experience, the difference from the cinematic mode is offered by the fact that gaming functions as a “mod”, an opened reality offering the players the ability to directly intervene in the space–time development of the respective fictional world. The gamers are able to operate modifications, for example to choose one particular character trait, and they can alter geography and easily “jump” from one identity to another. Unlike literature or cinema, the gaming “mod” presents a higher level of interactivity within the fictional world than within the cinematic mode. Such differences are more explicit when comparing the experience of playing the World of Warcraft game and watching the Warcraft movie, directed by Duncan Jones. While intermediality is clearly at the foundation of the development of both these fictional worlds, as observed by many authors the entire WoW plot is extremely close to that of the Lord of the Rings novels. This in turn makes the Warcraft movie visually similar to the Lord of the Rings movies, allowing a multimodal transference and making visible the modal differences. WoW, today one of the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) environments, provides a type of involvement impossible in any cinematic or literary mode. The level of control that the gamer experiences during his immersion in the game when carrying out the various tasks involving exploiting resources, planning expansions, managing interactions and enhancing character abilities is unprecedented and impossible in other media. In turn, the movie, while developing visually attractive creatures and extraordinary computer-generated effects and worlds, is constrained by its own modes and modalities. In the fictional world of Azeroth in WoW,

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which is already divided between the Horde and the Alliance, the player can choose which factions he joins, while the movie director is compelled to split the movie into two narrative components, each with its own preestablished order. In the first part of the movie, the viewers are following an account of the story from the predominant perspective of the orc. The second part is designed to offer the human standpoint. These “cinematic” renderings give the movie a certain gamified look, yet Warcraft becomes a coalescence of cinematographic sequences (similar to those that gamers usually avoid watching). A comparison between WoW and Warcraft also shows that many markers of modality recurrent in various categories of games are different from their cinematic versions. There is a vast variety of video games and it is extremely complicated to follow a particular distinction in such a diverse display of examples; nevertheless, the gaming modality provides a unified experience of the medium itself. The modality is the same in single-person and multiplayer social games, in individual and MMOG’s, in online and offline games, from computer to video games and from first-person shooter games to world-building or action games. Even if we are talking about simulation and strategy games, sports-oriented games, games in arcades or mobile phone games, there is a shared characteristic of all these game-worlds: the immersion they allow. This physical modality of all computer games is derived from various forms of console- based mechanics. Through a joystick or a mouse, the engagement of the player depends on this “hand-to-fiction” relationship, and the techno-physical connection of movements, allowing bodily reactions and decisions made possible by tactile extension, generates a sensorimotor involvement that is radically different from the moviegoing experience. Several authors have tried to reduce the essence of games to their basic traits, often identified at the mechanical level and manipulable, like any engineering project.36 The “rule and goal”-driven dimension, the ability to provide feedback or the voluntary participation are obvious characteristics that make games a participatory experience.37 For McGonigal and many others, this immersive ability and the high level of involvement are the main attributes of the gaming process. Unfortunately, providing such definitions reduces the role of two other important modalities. The first is the narrative modality of game-fictions, described simply as a contextual component, and the other major trait of immersion is the ontological modality. They deserve a more careful explanation, as they represent fundamental components that show how cinematization and gamification work differently.

Narrative Modalities in Cinema and Games When dealing with the relationship between games and movies, their specific narrative modalities, coupled with the modes in which their

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particular fictional worlds are built, become relevant. At the simplest level, the distinctions between modality and mode in various media refer to the basic “how” of the cinematic and the gamified. And, although the storytelling appears similar, their respective visual representations do not follow the same mode. Even when movies and games are “shot” from the point-of-view perspective, their particular modes cannot be experienced similarly because gamers and spectators have totally different ways of interacting with the respective medium. Narrative theories trace the commonalities between the various forms of storytelling that reveal the profound desire of humans to access fictional worlds. Some authors use the classic concept of suspension of disbelief38 to show how the centuries-old experiences of literature can be similar to the believable experiences developed by any virtual environments. This makes possible a connection between the enchantment provided by reading books and the effect of computer-based narrations. Nevertheless, there are several differences that remain unaccounted for in this approach, and the most important is not acknowledging that each medium has narrative modalities that are incompatible with those of other media. The direct involvement of the users as gamers, who sometimes take part in generating their fictional worlds (by creating maps and selecting characters), makes gaming a particular form of participation, different from that of a spectator in a dark cinema or the experience of a reader intimately engaged with the words on a page of a book. For our present discussion, we need to reject the overarching definition that considers all art forms as manifestations of a type of “game” and which allows some narrative theorists to describe books, movies and games as if they provide the same experience. Marie-Laure Ryan, for instance, uses the concept of mimetic immersion to argue that all forms of narrative eventually lead to a similar type of identification. Thus, the connection between video games and the most primitive forms of storytelling is the resulting immersion. The exploits of a character in a literary mode apparently provide the same form of fictional involvement as that offered by a hero in a movie, or even in paintings.39 When Ryan overviews the strategies of narrative immersion, she reaches the conclusion that as they all build “possible worlds”, they therefore share similar characteristics. My contention is that we must separate the agency of cinema and the modalities of action in the digitally ludified media, as well as the emotional connections provided by reading. This is made explicit when comparing Warcraft (2016), the cinema version of the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) World of Warcraft (WoW), and the dozens of World of Warcraft novelizations. Although based on the same storytelling structure, their respective modalities suffer major transformations when translated from one medium into the other. When playing the WoW game, two of the most important elements of immersion are the ability to exercise control over resources and to make strategic decisions. All of the

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abilities of players in the game (to mine ore and collect wood and then to administer the effect of having resources, for example) have narrative functions, yet are impossible to replicate in books or in movie adaptations. Trying to capture the essence of the game in gamified cinematic environments compels the movie director or the screenwriters to revert to narrative modalities specific to their medium. The particular diegetic mode of cinema is made transparent in cinematizations of literary works. Many movie adaptations are reductionist interventions because the screenwriter downplays the literary complexity in order to fit the story with the cinematic mode, which has a clear spatiotemporal limitation. Classical film theories have accounted for this modality enablement in cinema as being a result of film story schemata. The narrative dogma advanced by Bordwell states that movies are time-limited forms of storytelling40 and thus their dominant narrative modality is conventionally simplified and tightly unified by causality. At a certain level, the mechanism is visible in Warcraft (2016), since the story is based on a dualist conflict between the orcs and humans; this follows the principle of cinematic simplification, which maintains plot coherence. The game itself is also narratively simple; it is located in a fantasy world very similar to another classical story dominated by the conflict between orcs and humans. As noted by several authors, the game-fiction plot in WoW is a reduced version of “Lord of the Rings” (LotR). As the saga written by Tolkien exercised a major influence on other neo-medieval games (such as Dungeons and Dragons), it is important for the current discussion about modality to indicate that a massively imaginative narration like LotR, driven by a modality of textual amplification and built using extensive dialogues, complex characters and expanded depictions, can be revised in the game narrative only by reshaping its usage mode. Playing an online game 18 hours a day, or watching a movie like Warcraft, and reading a 600-page book involve dissimilar experiences. While Taylor41 and many others identify video-game immersion with the early cinematic experiences, using the highly disputable example of the spectators running out of the movie theatre when they see a train approaching on the screen, there cannot be a common immersive action between the two media. When selecting a character in an online game and when immersing in a character-driven narrative, or experiencing the pre-established narrative identification provided by the cinematic modality centred on a dominant character, the obvious observation is that they are all based on different mechanisms. Although the connections between various narrative immersions might be accepted because they apparently share similar processes of mental absorption, we can identify these particularities in gamification: these processes are different from those we find in cinematization or literarization. Using the suggestions of Norman Denzin,42 who describes the experience provided by cinema as “reflexive-voyeuristic”, making a major distinction

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between a voyeuristic mode, specific to the movie-going audience, and the sadistic inclinations of the video-gamer is important. We can identify the functions of cinema and video games as different by comparing action movies and action video games. While Gaut and other authors equivocate over the imaginative identification in these games with that in movies, a close interpretation of Tomb Raider the game and the Lara Croft movies highlights the major separation. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – Cradle of Life (2013), with Angelina Jolie in the main role, are movies that were criticized for their voyeuristic dimensions, showing that the cinematic prevailed. The 2018 prequel, with Alicia Vikander in the main role, downplays the sexual features of the heroine and accentuates the gamification features. Yet, no matter how profound the transformations of the action-packed movies into a series of gameplay sequences, the direct and purposeful connection between Lara and the viewer cannot be driven by the interaction achieved in the gaming mode. Lara is described by many authors as activating a “Run, Jump, Shoot, Kill and Gather” mechanics, so the player experiences his relationship with the main character differently in the games than in the movies. Even when the new Tomb Raider adds innovative dimensions, for example the parkour-style cinematic, the mode in which the spectator connects with the story remains voyeuristically visual. In the 2018 movie, Lara races through the city on a bike and, after finishing her task, she returns to the more quiet quest game, trying to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance; she then enters the typical Indiana Jones tomb-raiding scenes, deals with traps and solves puzzles, and fights off an arch-enemy and his armed goons while gradually transforming into the seductive female adventurer. The gaze of the spectator substitutes for the haptic experience provided by the game. The gamified relationship describes the dynamic between the player and the game hero. While in games the players collect points and fulfill various tasks together with the main character, in cinema the heroes are conditioned by their predetermined scenarios. Although some interpreters have compared, for example, movies such as Die Hard with the logic of levels in games, since the tasks of the hero grows in complexity as the story progresses,43 the cinematic mode clearly prevents the spectator from experiencing such possibilities. When watching a movie, viewers cannot move from one level to another, nor can they select the character types or choose from various identities. Gamers can decide to be killers or explorers,44 while in the cinema the camera always places the viewers in fixed positions. Another set of explanations, provided by Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, considers that games such as Lara Croft display “modality markers”45 that generate a specificity with a cultural demarcation. Some consider that games provide an experience that is bracketed from life and which separates the game-worlds and the gameplays from reality,46 while other authors claim that there is a dynamic modality that is made possible

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in game experiences by using cinematographic tools, such as the long shot and the tracking camera. Assassin’s Creed (2016), another movie that adapts a famous game, provides some relevant examples of these issues. This Ubisoft bestseller offers gamers the possibility of immersing themselves in a so-called sandbox environment, where the freedom of choice between characters, spaces and missions takes gaming to another level. The players are part of fast-track action in a visually appealing environment, and this has allowed Assassin’s Creed to evolve into one of the most popular forms of computer-generated entertainment. Its visual modality, already in existence in games such as Prince of Persia, indicates the limits of cinematic transmediality. The camera follows the main character, apparently just as in a movie, yet the gamer cannot take active decisions. What seems to be a cinematic long shot, with the travelling camera moving innocuously into the visual field, provides a completely different sensation from the one that the moviegoer experiences. Hardcore Henry, the 2015 film directed by Ilya Naishuller and produced by Timur Bekmambetov, exemplifies this contrast between visual modalities. Promoted as a “revolutionary movie experience” in which the main character records his adventures as if he is a hero in a game, the use of GoPro cameras generates a continuous point-of-view experience. In an effort to create a gamified cinematic experience that targets a young demographic used to this type of visuality, the excess of subjective identification produces a negative, almost nauseating effect. Hardcore Henry shows that a visual modality which works properly in a game, on the computer screen, becomes counterproductive when exported into the cinema. The cinematic point of view and the first-person mode in shooter games are different modalities of recreating reality; both are predetermined by the presence of the camera, but more importantly by the mode established by the screen. This is where the similarities between the cinematic and the gamified become divergent. The close connection to the computer screen and the framed visuality, with the forms of control permitted by the console, allow games to function in a way that movies cannot reproduce. However, not even the basic correspondence of the over-the-shoulder shots, specific to third-person games, and the cinematic code of the camera in the game-world move according to the locomotor decisions of the user. If first-person shooters use the cinematic point of view to provide a subjective experience, as is the case with Doom, the game-like sensation cannot be exploited for a long period of time in the movie. The unchanged point of view and the subjective camera shots generate a haptic connection, altering the representational regime of the movie.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete Ontology and the Gaming “Mod” Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) illustrates the major ontological modal difference between games and cinema. “Modality”, as defined by

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generative grammar, allows the identification of the actions or attitudes of a speaker, and gaming modality can be used as a marker for the relationship between the playable character and the gamer. The innovative element of the “gaming mod” introduced in Jumanji 2 is the exploitation of the live and relive modality, which is specific to games. Having multiple lives and the possibility of recovering despite mistakes made during the game experience is completely different from anything else we encounter in other media modes of consumption. While in the cinema watching a character performing a given action is non-negotiable, the video game gives the characters the ability to return to the screen. In the movie, this is done by having the heroes physically falling from the sky to rejoin the action after they die. With three “lines of life” tattooed on their forearm, each character can repeat some actions or can reappear in the story. These possibilities alter our entire connection with the reality described on the screen, creating a form of thinking that is based on fluid decision making and where the consequences of our actions, ethical decisions or moral acts (such as sacrifice and giving up one’s life) become less valuable, or are even used for comic relief. Many authors, when trying to identify the media specificity of games, have described the ability of the gamers to endlessly reload and redo the same actions as “the misery of repetition”.47 In turn, this ontology of replay, with characters dying and then being reinvigorated by various methods (health packs, magical spells, energy tools), has influenced cinematic narratives. Some of the earliest examples are Run Lola Run (1998), The Matrix (1999) and, more recently, Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and the TV series Altered Carbon (2018), which all borrow the typical logic of any game-fiction based on the principle illustrated by Doug Liman’s movie: “live, die, repeat”. This video-game experience has an irresistible attraction, with some psychologists arguing that the “replay mode” is changing our ability to have empathy and reduces our level of compassion. Obvious in shoot-’em-up activities driven by destroying and killing, the make-believe allows the resuscitation of the character despite the performance of the most atrocious acts. In cinema and other visual narratives, such as the recent TV series Westworld, this gamified ability to “restart” a character must be done through narrative interventions. Either the hero is a robotic creature or there is an external ability to transfer identity from one body to another, but this ontological problem cannot be resolved as it can in gameplay. This brings us to another modal difference, which is made explicit when comparing various media experiences. Just as reading a book is different from watching a movie based on that book, playing a video game and playing a traditional board game are different. In Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018), the main characters, who also have a never-ending lifespan in their virtual world, are able to choose their own race and gender, and then the “players” transfer their gamified fantasy to the viewers.

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Each player in the movie gets a game identity and maintains a “reallife” identity, a gaming technique also used in Kasdan’s film Jumanji 2. Here the characters adopt new characteristics and once they enter the game-world, they become immersive substitutes for real identities. A young computer geek becomes a strong archaeologist–detective (played by Dwayne Johnson) and his shy girlfriend is transformed into a martialarts, dance-karate-fighter version of Lara Croft. The problem of player identification, which is often dealt with as a general experience and is based on the theory of the poetics of immersion, is central in terms of modality. A player’s identification with a character of her choice in a game and a spectator’s connection with a cinematic hero are not similar in all “games of make-believe”,48 as not all simulated worlds work in the same way. The problem with the theory of general ludic immersion is that different media use their own mechanisms of psychological substitution, and this works in a completely different way when it comes to the gamified experience of entering fiction worlds by proxy. Movies can depict immersive substitutes for real or invented games, such as Tron (1982) and Tron: Legacy (2010), yet they indicate how the gamification mode is incompatible in cinematic modes. Movie heroes can often be trapped inside games by some form of supernatural intervention, and they are compelled to act in a ludic manner in order to finish a specific task. Or, as is the case with Ender’s Game (2013), such forms of gamification apparently take the viewer into a participatory game-fiction. While game environments can be replicated in cinematic modalities, as, for example, in Gamer (2009), where the main character is shown performing actions within an online game, physically controlled by other “gamers”, these mechanisms of gamification do not generate the alteration of the cinematic experience. The viewers cannot emulate the ludic activity of the actual playing of a video game.

Gamification and Cinematization in Transmedial Contexts Finally, the possible transmediation of game-worlds into other media must be addressed. One of the most popular explanations for the relationship between cinema and games is provided by Henry Jenkins, who proposes the concept of transmedial storytelling. When describing The Matrix, Jenkins49 quite rightly points out that a natural convergence of various media is inevitable (he identifies this as the basis of convergence culture). Contemporary cross-media convergences involving almost all forms of cultural productions appear to further support this premise. However, the most relevant issue for understanding how gamification functions has to do with the specific modality of each cultural practice. Whenever a game is transferred into a different medium, the redesigning of the modality is compulsory. Whenever games, novels, cartoons, online and offline games, comics and graphic novels, interactive media

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platforms, and toys and other merchandise share their storytelling or content, their conceptual translation is easily lost. Yet animations, games and movies are not based on similar modes and modalities. Perhaps one of the best illustrations of such distinctions is provided by the cinematization of a popular casual game such as Angry Birds. Created by Rovio Entertainment, a Finnish video-game developer that is specialized in ludic mobile phone applications, Angry Birds remains an incredibly versatile product, with dozens of versions (the platform even offers Star Wars and Transformers editions). Anyone who became a “victim” of the unconscious desire to destroy green pigs by mindlessly throwing coloured birds at them can grasp the difference between different modalities of immersion. As I have pointed out the tactile reaction of the gamer, made possible by the touchscreen technologies available on smartphones or tablets, offers the gamer an incomparable physical modality. When Angry Birds was turned into a feature film and a series of animated cartoons, several major issues raised by gamification and the visual modality of cinema became apparent. As in the case of other classic games, such as Space Invaders, the mechanics of the keyboard or the console connection couple the sensorimotor actions with the imaginative experience. When cinema tries to exploit the attraction of Angry Birds, we can easily observe that empathy is produced by a different sensorial substitution, one which requires both emotional immersion and narrative elaboration. The cinematization of the game, in both the Angry Birds Movie (or simply Angry Birds (2016)) and the preceding Angry Birds Toons, launched as an animated TV series, is based on these two elements. In the movie, “Red” becomes the main character of the story, and this maladjusted bird, who has anger management issues, is joined by other feathered companions who are also well individualized – Chuck the yellow speeder, Matilda the hippie hen, Bomb, the Blues and Terence, the large, awkward bird. They work together to protect the eggs of the community against the evil Bad Piggies. These narrative expansions of the game-fiction, which give life and character to the birds and which are easily catapulted into one of the most downloaded games in history, prove to be very important for our understanding of the differences between gamification and cinematization. Red needs a backstory, so he becomes the unadapted flightless bird who is living in a peaceful community on Bird Island, where only the Mighty Eagle can fly. As the spectators are to be emotionally connected to the characters, Red is transformed from an outcast to a hero who is integrated into the community, and thus his adventures follow the classic formula of the “departure and return of the hero”. The cinematic buildup also transforms the otherwise objectified animals into fully developed and anthropomorphized creatures. If the gamer does not care about the identity of the birds, she can project them as objects, but this narrative modality allows the spectator in the

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cinema to enter their fictional world. Even the most simplistic animated cartoons, which are based on their own reductionist modality, must allow storylines to develop, which means partly following the mechanics of the game. So, any cinematic transmediation is compelled to embark on a narrative re-elaboration. In the Angry Birds Movie there is even a justification for the overall conflict between the birds and the green pigs, as the imperialistic pigs invade Bird Island under the false pretext of bearing gifts; they then mesmerize the innocent birds, taking over their homes and stealing their eggs. A moral incentive is given to the gratuitous projectile-like flightless creatures, using the revenge of the exploited as an emotional hook-up. To conclude, the transmedial dimensions of the modes and modalities of games and movies must maintain their respective particularities. Games can be described as providing a high degree of kinetic connection within the fictionalized world, while movies are based on a modality dominated by emotional and visual rewards. Just as the players get satisfaction from completing tasks or fulfilling various objectives, a process sometimes identified with interactivity (although it is only possible to achieve a true interactive mode through a computer interface), the immersive mode of cinema is based on vicarious projections. And until the cinematic is able to adopt all the playable modes and modalities of games, including a functional media bridge between various modes of audio-visual storytelling, gamification remains the most important instrument for transmedial experiences, yet distinct from the cinematic.

Notes 1. Jonathan Mack, “Evoking Interactivity: Film and Videogame Intermediality Since the 1980s,” Adaptation 9, no. 1 (2016): 98–112, https://doi. org/10.1093/adaptation/apv031. 2. Elleström, “The Modalities of Media,” 14–15. 3. Elleström, Media Transformation,” 37–8. 4. Noël Burch, Praxis du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 5. Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 51–5. 6. Bateman, Hiippala, and Wildfeuer, Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis, 9. 7. “2019 Video Game Industry Statistics, Trends and Data,” WePc online (updated May 2018), www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/. 8. McDonald, “The Global Games Market Will Reach 108.9 Billion in 2017, with Mobile Taking 47%.” 9. Zichermann and Cunningham, Gamification by Design, 1. 10. Bogost, “Why Gamification Is Bullshit,” 65–80. 11. Stieglitz et al., Gamification: Using Game Elements in Serious Contexts. 12. Lerner, Making Democracy Fun, 27–8. 13. Metz, Language and Cinema, 116. 14. Shamir, Cinematic Philosophy. 15. Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 19–20.

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16. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 271. 17. Tom Wijman, “Mobile Revenues Account for More Than 50% of the Global Games Market as It Reaches $137.9 Billion in 2018.” Newzoo, April 30, 2018, https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-reaches-137-9billion-in-2018-mobile-games-take-half/. 18. Beller, The Cinematic Mode, 18. 19. Beller, The Cinematic Mode, 2. 20. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Chapter 1. 21. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 12. 22. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 13. 23. Geiger and Littau, “Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media,” 3. 24. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 87. 25. Taylor, Cinematic Perspectives on Digital Culture, 13–14. 26. Hadjioannou, From Light to Byte, 2. 27. Burelli, “Game Cinematography,” 183. 28. Burelli, “Game Cinematography,” 189. 29. Newman, Cinematic Game Secrets for Creative Directors and Producers, xii. 30. Bateman and Schmidt, Multimodal Film Analysis, 75. 31. Newman, Atari Age, 11–12. 32. Goldsmith, “This Is Your Brain on Tetris.” 33. Juul, Half-Real, 36. 34. Kress and Van Leeuven, Reading Images, 161. 35. Kress and Van Leeuven, Multimodal Discourse, 55. 36. McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, Chapter 2. 37. McGonigal, Reality Is Broken, 21. 38. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 136–8. 39. Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, 15. 40. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 34. 41. Taylor, Cinematic Perspectives, 27. 42. Denzin, Cinematic Society, 2–3. 43. Flanagan, “Get Ready for Rush Hour,” 106–7. 44. Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds, Chapter 3. 45. King and Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders, 20. 46. Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds, 21. 47. Bogost, How to Talk About Games, 2. 48. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 11–12. 49. Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 93–130.

Bibliography Bartle, Richard. Designing Virtual Worlds. Berkeley: New Rider Publishers, 2004. Bateman, John A., Tuomo Hiippala, and Janina Wildfeuer. Multimodality: Foundations, Research and Analysis: A Problem-Oriented Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017. Bateman, John A., and Karl-Heinrich Schmidt. Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean. Routledge Studies in Multimodality. London: Routledge, 2012. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Interfaces, Studies in Visual Culture. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.

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Bogost, Ian. How to Talk About Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. ———. “Why Gamification Is Bullshit.” In The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, edited by Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding, 65–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Burelli, Paolo. “Game Cinematography: From Camera Control to Player Emotions.” In Emotion in Games: Theory and Praxis, edited by Kostas Karpouzis and Georgios N. Yannakakis, 180–96. Vol. 4 of Socio-Affective Computing. Switzerland: Springer, 2016. Denzin, Norman K. The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze. Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Donald, Merlin. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Flanagan, Martin. “Get Ready for Rush Hour: The Chronotope in Action.” In Action and Adventure Cinema, 103–18, edited by Yvonne Tasker. London: Routledge, 2005. Gaut, Berys Nigel. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Geiger, Jeffrey, and Karin Littau. “Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media.” In Cinematicity in Media History, edited by Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, 1–18. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Goldsmith, Jeffrey. “This Is Your Brain on Tetris.” Wired, May 1994. www.wired. com/1994/05/tetris-2/. Hadjioannou, Markos. From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska. Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Edward Arnold, 2001. ———. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Lerner, Josh. Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Marach-Francino, Cathie, and Eric Brangier. “The Gamification Experience: UXD With a Gamification Background.” In Information Resources Management Association, Gamification: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. Hershey: Information Science Reference, 2015. McDonald, Emma. “The Global Games Market Will Reach 108.9 Billion in 2017, with Mobile Taking 47%.” Newzoo, April 20, 2017. https://newzoo. com/insights/articles/the-global-games-market-will-reach-108-9-billion-in2017-with-mobile-taking-42/.

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McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Penguin, 2011. Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema. Approaches to Semiotics, 26. Translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press, 1997. Newman, Michael Z. Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Newman, Rich. Cinematic Game Secrets for Creative Directors and Producers: Inspired Techniques From Industry Legends. Independence: CRC Press, 2017. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Shamir, Tal S. Cinematic Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Stieglitz, Stefan, Christoph Lattemann, Susanne Robra-Bissantz, Rüdiger Zarnekow, and Tobias Brockmann. Gamification: Using Game Elements in Serious Contexts. Cham: Springer International, 2017. Taylor, Norman. Cinematic Perspectives on Digital Culture: Consorting With the Machine. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Walz, Steffen P., and Sebastian Deterding, eds. The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Zichermann, Gabe, and Chris Cunningham. Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, 2011.

Part II

Ekphrasis

5

The “Unflinching Gaze” The Representation of Suffering in Tony Harrison’s Film Poetry Agata Handley

In his poem “Facing North”, Tony Harrison describes “the act of poetic composition” as a “luminous O of . . . light, itself illuminating” darkness.1 For the author, the process of creation is, first of all, the act of seeing, rendered metaphorically in the poem through the opposition between light and darkness. The circle of light shed by a lamp hanging over the poet’s desk marks the boundaries within which his writing takes place. The light enables the speaker to “make things happen in its O”,2 but it is the surrounding darkness that creates the definition as a circle. This image may be seen in the context of Harrison’s belief that the poet’s “unflinching gaze”,3 the continuous observation of reality, must be maintained even in the face of atrocities. Harrison is preoccupied in his work with the representation of suffering. His writing acquires much of its form from the pressure exerted by the shadows of history or, as Spencer puts it, from the “continuing exposure to the chilling but bracing challenge”4 he sets for himself – to tackle relentlessly the most difficult subjects. Harrison’s work is strongly associated with the English North, but Spencer argues that the “North” acquires a more universal meaning in the poem. It encompasses an “older, more archetypal image of all that has immemorially threatened human comfort, not to say complacency”.5 From this perspective, “facing North”6 can be understood as a metaphor for gazing into dark and impenetrable aspects of the human condition. His dark writing room becomes “a metonymy for Harrison’s continuing – intermittent but unbreakable – commitment to facing the puzzlement and anguish by which humanity has always been beset”.7 This commitment is expressed in the poem through the metaphorical interdependence of light and darkness; they are mutually exclusive but influence each other. Darkness exerts pressure on the circle of light, but the light illuminates the darkness as well, disturbing its depth. The tension created by this clash of opposites is what interests Harrison most – his poetry always probes boundaries and analyzes liminal experiences, doubting the power of language and yet never abandoning it as a tool of resistance. Emmanuel Levinas uses the image of light and illumination to evoke the act of cognition. In Time and the Other, he writes: “The interval of

78 Agata Handley space given by light is instantaneously absorbed by light. Light is that through which something is other than myself but already as if it came from me.”8 Harrison’s image of the swinging light may be compared with the 2012–13 multimedia installation by Iranian artist Farideh Lashai (1944-2013) When I Count, There Are Only You .  .  . But When I Look, There Is Only a Shadow. The installation – Lashai’s last completed work – combines layers of video projection, still images and sound. In it, Lashai enters into a dialogue with one of the most famous artistic depictions of suffering caused by war, Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810– 1820), the series of etchings by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) that “depict the atrocities perpetrated by Napoleon’s soldiers who invaded Spain in 1808 to quell the insurrection against French rule”.9 Spectators are presented with 80 original photo-intaglio prints, each referring to one of the prints from Goya’s series. However, the human figures are removed from Goya’s spectacles of horror, leaving only empty wastelands as silent witnesses of human suffering. If we remember the original prints, we might be able to fill these spaces imaginatively with the figures that have been eradicated and acknowledge the full horror of the atrocity, even without any help from the artist. However, Lashai does not leave us with empty settings. Instead, she projects animated figures onto each of the landscapes by using a floating spotlight. For brief moments, as the constantly roving light passes over the images, the viewer catches glimpses of partially reconstructed, animated war atrocities superimposed on the empty landscapes; and in this way, Lashai returns the horrific action to the still frames and focuses the viewer’s gaze. The scenes seem to be extracted from the surrounding darkness by the luminous circle, which can be associated with a camera lens, the human eye or a stage light and which makes the figures visible and recognizable, but only fleetingly. They flicker and disappear in the shadows with an almost spectral quality. In Lashai’s installation, light illuminates the spectacle of atrocity, the precarious bodies torn to pieces by the machine of war. What is illuminated comes from her (it is her artistic creation), but it is also something Other than the Self: The images are taken from Goya’s work, and he in turn based them on historical events – that is, on the actual suffering of strangers. We may say that what Lashai captures in the circle of light – the circle of our gaze – is the suffering of the “other’s Face”.10 This does not mean “face” in the usual sense of “the central zone of the body where .  .  . the play of features takes place”, but rather the “wider, more emphatic, meaning”11 suggested by Levinas, which foregrounds the Otherness of the one we encounter. As Bernhard Waldenfels explains: Levinas’s ethics are rooted in a phenomenology of the body . .  .  . It is the hungering, thirsting, enjoying, suffering, working, loving,

The “Unflinching Gaze” 79 murdering human being in all its corporeality (Leibhaftigkeit) whose otherness is at stake. The otherness does not lie behind the surface of somebody we see, hear, touch, and violate. It is just his or her otherness. It is the other as such and not some aspect of him or her that is condensed in the face. So the whole body expresses, our hands and shoulders do it as well as our face taken in its narrow sense.12 Lashai’s installation can be read as a call for the ethical recognition of the Other. What appears in the circle of light is an image of human suffering salvaged from the shadows of history. The question which looms over any work of art that encompasses suffering of an extreme order is the im/possibility of representation: in other words, the need to exert the requisite artistic control, to find a form for what appears indescribable or beyond representation. * Concerned as he is with the im/possibility of representation through language, Tony Harrison has created some of his most powerful works in the form of film-poems, which, as we will see, focus the viewer’s gaze on the “suffering .  .  . human being in all its corporeality”.13 The filmpoem employs the synchronic use of multiple media forms; as a genre, it occupies a liminal position between literature and the visual arts, that is, between words and image. This chapter examines the way in which this synchronic use of verse and image creates a multilayering of voices and perspectives and engages the viewer on different levels simultaneously. The discussion begins with an analysis of the film-poem as an intermedial form, as developed by Harrison, and subsequently I look at one of the works he created in cooperation with producer Peter Symes, “The Gaze of the Gorgon” (1992), focusing in particular on the use of ekphrasis. From the very beginning of his career, Harrison has stressed the oral qualities of verse, or (to use Robinson’s phrase) he has created a “sense of orality”.14 It is evident not only in his use of the vernacular, so that some of his poems can only retain their true form if read aloud in the original dialect, but also in his belief in the importance of public readings and his conviction that poetry is written to be heard, realized temporally as much as frozen on the page. As Symes observes, it is “not surprising” that Harrison turned to “the world of film and television”15 as a public space; the move is in accordance with his broader poetic and political strategy of producing poetry that is responsive to the wider social context and to changes in the environment and that is, above all, public, “accessible and inclusive” and infused with what Robinson terms a “sense of shared intimacy”.16 As Robinson explains: The second part of the phrase, “intimacy,” relates to the way in which the poet strives to create an act of emotional engagement on the part

80 Agata Handley of the viewer/reader as a result of their act of empathy. Indeed, Harrison’s work explicitly invites an emotional response, something apparent in the direct appeals that many of the films make to the viewer. The aim is that the films might thus create a bond, a sense of being part of something greater than the individual, as a result of this shared experience. In this way the public poet, Harrison, intends to put a sense of the communal back into the concept of the public, to show that the public and the private are not separate spheres but two points of the same continuum.17 Harrison’s choice of intermedial forms of artistic expression, then, is not accidental. He believes that poetry should be encountered in the same way that news stories are, on the front pages of newspapers; like news stories, it should be concerned with the issues that shape our existence on an everyday basis and that evoke an immediate response. He argues that the medium influences the message and “makes a difference about what stories can be evoked or told, how they are presented, why they are communicated and how they are experienced”.18 Viewing Harrison’s film-poems, we are forced to acknowledge that different media “are not hollow conduits for the transmission of messages but material supports of information whose materiality, precisely, ‘matters’ for the types of meanings that can be encoded”.19 In his thesis Verses in the Celluloid: Poetry in Film 1910–2002, Robert Scott Speranza argues that Harrison has a deep understanding of “the visuality of verse and its natural inclination towards cinematography”20 and so his film work is, as Speranza notes, an example of “art within art: a poem that is a film”21 and also a film that is a poem. Consequently, “the poem can be recognized as independent work without special filmic significance, but it should not be: the two forms of expression are designed to be seen together”.22 The written text functions independently, in fact, in the publication of Harrison’s Collected Film Poetry (2007), which gathers scripts created over a 25-year period. In the introduction to the book, however, Symes observes that, while the “scripts” deserve to be preserved, “reading them is a poor substitute for seeing and hearing them. . . . As you read them, never forget that this is work that is designed to be seen and heard. It has been especially constructed with pictures in mind.”23 In an essay which opens the same collection, Harrison goes a step further and claims his texts will “always require the films . . . to be fully understood”, since they constitute their “organic” part.24 The viewer is given a work of art that engages multiple senses and, despite the fleeting experience of film in time, develops at different levels and incorporates allusions and references to cultural and historical contexts that are distant in time and space. Peter Atkinson, who classifies many of Harrison’s filmpoems as “verse-documentaries”,25 notes that they are always produced as a collaboration between the poet and a filmmaker or filmmakers; they

The “Unflinching Gaze” 81 emerge as a result of research in which the poet is involved; and the poet is also involved in the final editing of the work.26 It seems justifiable to argue, then, that in the case of the Harrisonian film-poems, it is not only the final product that can be called intermedial; the very process of its creation also bears features of intermediality, or what Werner Wolf calls “multi – or plurimediality”.27 In his introduction to The Collected Film Poetry, Harrison points to the way in which, through the combination of film and verse, the “most apparently prosaic can be made poetic. The camera’s eye can make the most familiar or disregarded object or person worthy of new attention and regard.”28 The use of the camera’s eye as a “light” to redeem that which dwells in the shadows is comparable to Lashai’s method of salvaging suffering bodies from darkness. Making the object or person visible is thus understood by both artists as the first step in evoking the viewer’s concern. The artistic gaze, although never free from an element of voyeurism, becomes a tool for forging “ethical solicitation” (to use Judith Butler’s words).29 To see and to see again, and to never lose sight of the precariousness of the human body, is the challenge that both artists undertake and invite the viewer to take on. The camera’s eye, in Harrison’s film-poems and in Lashai’s beacon, is used to create a communal act of seeing. “The Gaze of the Gorgon” is a film-poem concerned with death, loss and the reification of the human body that involves physical and psychological violence that renders people mute. It uses the myth of Medusa as its structural backbone and shows how different repressive regimes and ideologies “impose linguistic silence on their victim”;30 it is as if they are turned to stone by a metaphorical deadly gaze. The idea of petrification is present in the film-poem from the very beginning, in two of the epigraphs chosen by Harrison that are taken from Simone Weil’s The Iliad (1940) and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872): To the same degree, though in a different fashion, those who use force and those who endure it are turned to stone. SIMONE WEIL: The Iliad, or the Poem of Force Art forces us to gaze into the horror of existence, yet without being turned to stone by the vision. FRIEDRICH NIETZCHE: The Birth of Tragedy31 Although neither of these quotations refers to the figure of the Gorgon directly, each points to an element of the myth that plays a crucial role in the development of the film-poem: the idea of seeing and being seen. There are multiple images of Gorgons’ heads in the film. Essentially, however, the Gorgon functions here as a sign or metonym for the relentless power of war and the reach of violence, that is, the completeness of destruction. Malignant and uncontrollable, it ventures freely “as gazers freeze

82 Agata Handley in stony sleep”.32 In some versions of the Gorgon myth, the power of the creature’s gaze survives its death. After she is beheaded by Perseus, her eyes can still petrify all who look at her directly. Fixed on Athena’s shield, the head becomes a weapon which helps the Goddess to conquer her enemies. In the film-poem, the gaze also seems more powerful than the creature itself, —in the sense that it can never be defeated once and for all. It destroys “Those who endure and those who use/ the violence”33 across the infinite span of time and is continuously reincarnated in new forms. In accordance with this idea, “The Gaze of the Gorgon” covers a range of issues and a vast span of time in a condensed form: “its main subject is no less than the totality of twentieth-century European history”.34 As a result, the film-poem may seem fragmentary, as the numerous images of atrocity surge in front of the viewers’ eyes, as in a grim kaleidoscope. As Robinson observes, some critics read the fragmentary, dense and whirling construction of Harrison’s film-poems as their weakness. Features such as the use of “repetitions, apparent meanderings and the non-linear narrative style” are misunderstood, according to Robinson, when the work is studied as a book-bound text and not as a multimedia production.35 In fact, the kaleidoscopic construction of “The Gaze of the Gorgon” was a deliberate strategy. In one sequence, “the Trojan War, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Hitler, Wilhelm II and Second World War concentration camps are conjoined in a dizzying and ingenious sequence of montage”.36 As the camera eye jumps from the bodies of soldiers contorted in the mesh of barbed wire to the bodies of prisoners thrown into mass graves and subsequently to other scenes of mass destruction, the viewer loses his/her orientation. Images of historical symbols such as the Nazi swastika are juxtaposed with images from other times, such as a Greek war helmet; in this way, violence and war do not have precisely determined time boundaries, but on the contrary, seem everlasting and all-encompassing. To paraphrase T.S. Pearce: all wars become one war, all battles one battle.37 Harrison sees the montage form as appropriate for the struggle to confront “a mass contemporary audience” with a “radical theatre of atrocity”.38 As we can read in the project files preserved in the Tony Harrison archive, which document the initial stages in the film-poem’s creation, the film is to “unveil the century as a battleground”39 populated by ghosts that will continue to haunt future generations. If it seems that there is no coherence and no center in the tumultuous accumulation of images and verses, it is because we are gazing into the “darkness” that lies outside the ”light”, a darkness which can hardly be deciphered, represented or interpreted. Numerous images in the film show the aftermath of military conflict: soldiers carrying bodies on stretchers, unburied carcasses consumed by insects and processions of wounded victims, all of them anonymous and multiplying. A comparison may be drawn with a scene from the Orson Welles film Chimes at Midnight (1965), which depicts the aftermath of

The “Unflinching Gaze” 83 the Battle of Shrewsbury (fought in 1403) and which Mark Cousins sees as an image of the nightmarish entanglement of war: There’s no horizon here and there’s no heads. Three men have fallen and two more seem to be on their way down. Before fighting started, their knitted tunics, metal armour and leather boots will all have had different textures, but now everything’s the same, covered in mud as if some ash cloud from a volcano has cast a pall upon them, a reminder of Leonardo da Vinci’s advice to artists painting war: “Make the dead partly or entirely covered with dust.”40 If Harrison’s film-poem is to “unveil the century as a battleground”,41 it may very well be comparable to the image Cousins is writing about – “a snarl of dying” where “all markings are erased”.42 Harrison indeed follows da Vinci in showing the contorted bodies of the dead as if cloaked in ash – their individuality erased. Like the “broken faces”43 of WWI, they no longer possess distinct features. In “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, the 20th century as a whole appears as a continuous, unsettled, fragmentary battleground that seems to extend into infinite space and time. “The Gaze of the Gorgon” is full of ekphrastic images: Its fragmented composition relies heavily on the employment of various representations of paintings, sculptures and architecture, but also press cuttings and documentary photography, all of which existed prior to the creation of the film-poem. Harrison’s use of ekphrasis falls into at least two broad categories. The first of these is exemplified by a definition coined by Leo Spitzer, whose work, according to Killander, Lutas and Strukelj has been crucial in developing the discourse on ekphrasis in modern theory.44 He defines ekphrasis as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art”.45 In this definition, language constitutes the target medium in which ekphrasis can be realized. Other scholars have followed with their own definitions. Heffernan describes ekphrasis as a “verbal representation of a visual representation”,46 Mitchell as “the verbalisation of a graphic representation”47 and Clüver as “the verbalisation of a real or fictitious text composed in a non-verbal sign system”.48 As Lars Elleström states: Clüver emphasised that both the representing and the represented text may be nonartistic, that the represented text may belong to an extensive range of media types, and that the represented text may be fictitious.49 In this way, Clüver is extending the notion of ekphrasis. However, in this definition, “the target medium is still considered to be verbal . . . whereas the source medium may be any type except verbal”.50 “The Gaze of the Gorgon” is a poetic creation partly realized in language, and this is foregrounded by the publication of Harrison’s Collected Film Poetry (2007),

84 Agata Handley which cements the independent existence of the written text. Even if it is viewed with caution by the creators of the film-poems themselves, who argue that the texts should not be experienced without the visual component, the book continues to be read as a poetry collection in its own right. However, due to the liminal character of the form, “The Gaze of the Gorgon” allows for yet another, expanded reading of ekphrasis, which discards the idea of language being “the only acceptable target medium”.51 In light of the way in which works of art are introduced in the film-poem, through both language and image, it seems justifiable to analyze Harrison’s ekphrasis in the context of definitions that challenge Spitzer’s more limited use of the term and that crucially “include non-verbal media as Targets”.52 Siglind Bruhn offers one of the “most radical re-definitions”53 of ekphrasis as a “representation in one medium of a real or fictitious text composed in another medium”. This means that the “recreating medium need not always be verbal, but can itself be any of the art forms other than the one in which the primary ‘text’ is cast”.54 Particularly interesting in the context of a discussion of the Harrisonian film-poems are those academic voices that “consider as ekphrases cases where cinema is the target medium”.55 Agnes Pethö, for example, stresses the uniqueness of cinema stemming from its complex mediality: [F]rom the media theory point of view, the moving picture as a medium can remediate all other media forms used by human communication. The mixed mediality of cinema . . . is not a result of an additive process (a unity of moving pictures, language, sound and so on), but consists of a very unstable set of interrelations that have undergone many changes in its configuration throughout its technical and stylistic history.56 Ekphrasis, as defined by Pethö, is “a case of media being incorporated, repurposed by other media”,57 and it can contribute to this interrelational quality. She refers, for example, to the remediation of poetic texts by Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Valéry in Jean-Luc Godard’s films Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le fou (1965). The presence of poetic text (introduced by voice-over) creates an additional layer of meaning, enriching and complicating the visual level of the film. Another scholar exploring cinematic ekphrasis is Laura Sager Eidt, who, expanding on definitions by Bruhn and Clüver, sees it as “the verbalization, quotation, or dramatization of real or fictitious texts composed in another sign system”.58 She proposes “four categories of Ekphrasis in literature and film” that differ in “degrees and kinds of involvement with or of the visual arts in the text or film”.59 Two of these categories are especially relevant for understanding the use of ekphrasis in “The Gaze of the Gorgon”. The first one is the so-called interpretive category, which can take the form of “a verbal reflection on the image, or a visual–verbal

The “Unflinching Gaze” 85 dramatization of it in a mise-en-scène tableau vivant”.60 It involves a “degree of transformation”61 and broadens the possible meanings and ramifications of the original. In “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, “quoted” images (sometimes very recognizable and associated with particular historical moments), often “function as springboard[s] for reflections that go beyond . . . [their] depicted theme”.62 This happens, for example, with the photographs of WWI combatants, which, taken out of their postwar medical context, metamorphose in the film-poem into representations of poet-witnesses who, although speechless, still have the power to give their testimony. The visual-verbal dramatization is complicated by the fact that the images of war combatants are not only seen in the context of modern warfare but are also linked to ancient phenomena concerning the Greek mask. In this case, the ekphrastic process is in fact already evident in Harrison’s working notebooks for “The Gaze of the Gorgon” and then continues and is extended in the film-poem. On one page of the notebook, there is a fragment of poetic text, full of breaks and spelling errors, that is apparently still under construction: Once you have seen such things they stay forever in the he and waht can you ever say about such horrors and what can be said when your liposhave been shot away. I don t envy poets since the Kaiser s day It was bad enough even in my own but since he dug it up the Gorgon s gaze turns all the singers of old songs to stone (sic.).63 On the opposite page in the notebook, and hence coterminous with the text, there is a photograph of a disfigured human face—one of many faces of WWI combatants who returned from the battlefield changed beyond recognition by “guns of artillery warfare” that could “atomize bodies into unrecoverable fragments”.64 The face, with its scars displayed and its lips and eyes disfigured, is captioned by Harrison with a single word,” Poet”,65 scribbled underneath. Here, in accordance with Sager Eidt’s commentary on interpretive ekphrasis, “the verbalisation of the image . . . add[s] further nuances to it”.66 However, we may also say that the poet decides to “emulate the picture’s formal construction”.67 Although Sager Eidt’s remark Although Sager Eidt’s remark does not refer to a photograph but to a painting, it still applies here: the “visual style” of the image is represented in the very “structure of the poem”,”68 and the “crippled” form of the text corresponds to the “crippled face” in the image. Gaps in the lines and clusters of letters respond to the silence of the mouthless face and its amalgamated tissue. The writer’s struggle with words matches the injured soldier’s struggle to speak through his deformed mouth – and to

86 Agata Handley bear witness. We might say that the face belongs to someone who was, to use Primo Levi’s term, a “complete witness” – one “who saw the gorgon” and “returned mute” and whose “deposition would have a general significance”.69 Images of mutilated faces recur in Harrison’s notebook for “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, and also feature in the final version of the film-poem. “As every image is an invitation to look”70 (to use Susan Sontag’s words), they attract the viewer’s gaze, asking him/her to acknowledge the inflicted violence and the precariousness of the body, but also to testify to the difficulty of looking. Sontag herself acknowledges this difficulty in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), when she comments on 24 photographs of WWI combatants with facial wounds, originally published in Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege! (1924), “a powerful, anti-war” pamphlet that “consisted mainly of photographs depicting the destruction wrought by the First World War”.71 Those “heartrending, stomach-turning pictures” are, according to Sontag, “the most unbearable pages in the book”.72 One reason for the fear they evoke, as Marjorie Gehrhardt points out, is their equivocal status: “they belong to living persons but have been altered beyond recognition, even to evoking the idea of death rather than life”.73 In this, they resemble death masks. The mouthless face of the soldier depicted in Harrison’s notebook also seems mute, like a death mask, unable to speak about the horrors he has witnessed. Its silence is, however, questioned by the way Harrison, in both the film-poem and the notebooks, has juxtaposed the disfigured face with the image of a Greek mask held by the statue of Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, in Corfu, Greece. The text that accompanies the camera image does not describe the details of the mask but asks the viewer to make a connection between its “singing” lips and the mouth of the WWI soldier: Tragedy’s masks have changed their style. Lips like these won`t sing my lieder. . . . What poems will this mouth recite? There’ll be no Schumann song from this Before these Germans went to fight They’d been beautiful to kiss.74 This connection between mask and soldier should be seen in the context of a broader thematic strand in Harrison’s oeuvre, which explores the complicated dynamic between face and mask. In “Facing Up to the Muses”, for example, he juxtaposes the “naked human face”75 with the tragic mask: 1. What does a human face do, what do we tend to do, when we’re presented with .  .  . blood, death, violence and terror? We tend to close our eyes in psychic self-preservation. . . .

The “Unflinching Gaze” 87 2. What does the human face do, what do we do, when we gaze on such terrors? We become silent. We are speechless with anguish or grief. We have no words to describe them. . . . The mask, facing up to the Muses, refuses to surrender emphasis. 3. What does the head do when it suffers or witnesses suffering? It tends to bow down. . . . If a mask gazes on the same horrors, the same terrors, it goes on gazing. It is created with open eyes. It has to keep on looking. . . . Words never fail it. It goes on speaking.76 In the case of “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, the juxtaposition of the soldier’s disfigured face with the Greek mask undermines any element of voyeurism in the viewer’s gaze and introduces a sense of timelessness and continuity by locating one soldier’s tragic experience in a classical context. Moreover, the face is transformed from a symbol of suffering into one of resistance and the “refusal to surrender”.77 Together, image and text turn the mute face into the “Poet”,78 the witness who goes on speaking and whose profession compels him to maintain “constant singing from the flames”.79 It should be noted that the paradox of creating poetry out of silence or crippled speech is a recurring motif in Harrison’s work – shown, for example, in his references to the great orator Demosthenes, who allegedly had a stammer, and to the author of Syphilis, Hieronymus Fracastorius, who, as Harrison informs us, “was born, as perhaps befits a true poet, without a mouth”.80 It can be said that the superimposition of face and Greek mask, and the resulting multiplication of interpretative possibilities, is forged in the film-poem by the process of ekphrasis, which enables a vocalization of “the call to memorise and visualize history”.81 Another category of ekphrasis that Sager Eidt developed, termed “dramatic”, can also be found in the film-poem. In this category, “the images are dramatized and theatricalized to the extent that they take on a life of their own. . . . In terms of frequency and distribution, this type of ekphrasis will occur at the central moment in the work and for an extended period of time”.82 The most extended ekphrastic gesture in “The Gaze of the Gorgon” is achieved through the choice of the German poet, Heinrich Heine, as “narrator”. Multiple images of the poet appear throughout the film (such as the Heinrich Heine Memorial in Frankfurt), but there are recurring shots of one statue in particular, which had a pivotal role in the composition of the film-poem. This statue was originally commissioned by the Empress Elisabeth to be placed in her palace, Achilleion, in Corfu (built in 1890). As Symes writes: Strangely for a member of the Establishment, the Empress had taken a fancy to this dissident Jewish poet, but when the German Kaiser arrived to take possession of her summer retreat after her assassination

88 Agata Handley in 1898, Heine was the first person he evicted. The statue shipped back to Germany, occupied an ignoble position in a coffee house before being moved again when the Nazis started to deface it. It stands now in a little park in Toulon, virtually unknown and unrecognised, having survived the war hidden in a crate.83 The creators of the film-poem reconstruct and expand on the statue’s peregrination. The figure of Heine becomes, in fact, the guide who leads the viewers through the darkness of the twentieth century, inviting them on a journey not unlike the one undertaken by Dante into the underworld. The statue comes to life and “speaks”, in a text that follows the octosyllabic arrangement of Heine’s verse. It is both shown visually and described. We learn, for example, that the statue clutches the text of his own poem in its left hand; but it is also animated and dramatized through the montage of “wide-angle, close-up and detail shots”,84 as well as through the spoken text. The film-poem also utilizes a poem, “Was will die einsame Träne?”, which was set to music by Robert Schumann. Sung in German, it is “played in various arrangements by . . . composer Martin Kiszko”85 and performed at the end of the film-poem in an altered form, with Heine’s words rewritten by Harrison, therefore inscribing Heine’s story into the narrative of the modern warfare and its aftermath: The closing century’s shadow has darkened all our years and still the Gorgon’s filling my empty sockets with tears.86 The historical significance and status of Heine’s statue has changed with time, but its use in the film-poem places it in new contexts and further expands its range of possible meanings. Heine, a Jew suffering from antiSemitic persecution in a particular period, becomes a representative of all artists whose voices continue to be silenced in contemporary times. The technique of ekphrasis links past and present and connects the deeds of the German Kaiser, who ejected the “marble Jew”87 from the Achilleion, with the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust and the suffering of victims of the Gulf War. We may compare Harrison’s use of Heine’s statue with the artistic gesture performed by the poet and playwright Rafael Albreti in his drama Noche de guerra en la museo del Prado (1955/56), in which characters from paintings by Goya and Velazquez “step out of” their frames. In Harrison’s work, as in Albreti’s, the “animation” of the art work (be it a sculpture or a painting) not only unveils the “absurdity of war, especially modern warfare”, to use Sager Eidt’s phrase, “but also underscore[s] . . . the lack of progress or improvement in humanity, thus highlighting the relevance and ability of the old masters to teach the viewer about his or her own times”.88

The “Unflinching Gaze” 89 Elleström sees ekphrasis as a representative of “complex representation of media products”.89 When discussing Elleström’s model, Killander, Lutas and Strukelj explain that simple representation occurs when “the media product is briefly referred to or quoted in a different media product”90 and that representation is “complex” when it is “more developed, elaborated and accurate, in other words if a larger amount of media characteristics are transferred from the source medium to the target medium”.91 They argue further that in order for “simple media representation to become ekphrasis”,92 additional conditions have to be fulfilled: [A]n ekphrasis occurs when one media product (the source, for example a painting) is represented in a different media product (the target, for example a photograph) with a certain degree of elaboration (energeia), including the repurposing of the source – for instance through a semiotic process – and eliciting enargeia in the receiver.93 In “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, Harrison introduces a painting by Franz Matsch, The Triumph of Achilles (1892), which may be seen as an “elaboration in the representational process (energeia) and the repurposing of the source”.94 The viewer/reader first encounters the fresco in its original surroundings, in the upper hall of the Achilleion palace in Corfu, Greece. It is an “action” image: the foreground is occupied by Achilles dragging the body of the defeated Hector behind his chariot; he holds Hector’s helmet in his upright hand—it is empty now that the warrior’s head lies buried in the dust, out of the viewer’s sight. Subsequently, however, there is a “spatiotemporal dislocation”95 of the source that results in its “repurposing”.96 The fresco reappears in the film in fragmented form, through close-ups on details, allowing the viewer to obtain different perspectives on the painting. Our sight is not drawn toward the titular triumph of the victors but to the vanquished citizens of Troy, who would hardly be visible to the viewer standing and admiring the fresco in the Achilleion’s interior. This technique transforms the fresco in a way that may be compared to Peter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where the viewer is invited to focus on seemingly less important details rather than on the “main” action. Subsequently, Harrison’s text associates these two ways of looking with the points of view of two characters: the Kaiser and Elisabeth. The Emperor loathed the victims and held the weak in contempt: “For him the focus of the painting/ was triumph, not some woman fainting.”97 For Elisabeth, the fresco told a different story: she directed her gaze towards Hector’s wife, faced with the horror of her husband’s body hauled round the walls of Troy by Achilles. One particular detail is taken out of the fresco and reimagined by the creators of the film-poem: Hector’s helmet. As we know from The Iliad, the helmet is first taken by Hector from the body of the slain Patroclus; it is reclaimed by Achilles as he avenges Patroclus’ death. Toward the end

90 Agata Handley of the film-poem, the camera captures the hollow sockets of the helmet and looks inside them. There is then a cross-fade: the camera seems to pass through the helmet orifice and emerge onto a scene of the desert in the Gulf War, with a burning pillar of fire looming large against the sky. The helmet that was worn by Achilles, Patroclus and Hector becomes a gateway to another military conflict, emphasizing the relentless procession of slaughter through the ages. This is a relation of endless reincorporation, where one war is always embedded in another war and suffering breeds suffering; and it has its formal counterpart in the gesture of ekphrasis. The Triumph of Achilles is itself an ekphrastic work, as it presents a scene from The Iliad. Homer’s description of the triumph of Achilles is also referenced in the text of the film-poem, and his epic is described as “the steadiest gaze we’d ever had”98 in the history of war representation. At this moment in the film-poem, then, one ekphrasis is set against another, offering a mirroring, self-reflexive effect of a kind resembling the technique of mise en abyme. Homer and his work are being reflected cyclically, transferred and elaborated over and over again by the painted image and the cinematic image. The scene is presented in the medium of the painting; it is then captured and transformed by the cinematic medium, which in turn sends the viewer back to the literary medium. The process has no beginning and no end; it continues indefinitely. In the film-poem, then, Harrison employs the figure of the “poet” as one that possesses a steady, one may say ”Homeric”, gaze: the one who seeks to witness and to speak, even in the face of atrocity. As we have seen, in his work, the act of representation remains a possibility, and never a certainty. The engulfing “darkness” of the crimes and “catastrophes”99 of the twentieth century threatens to extinguish all artistic endeavor: In the Theogony Hesiod describes the flow of sweetness of the Muses as “inexhaustible” but nearer our time Byron called the Muses “the weary nine”. . . . How much wearier the nine will be . . . in the latter end of the twentieth century, how much darker the summit of the Muses’ haunt.100 Nevertheless, this darkness is continually and unflinchingly challenged by Harrison, as it is by Lashai in her installation, with a spotlight—a vigilant eye, which keeps searching in the darkness, piercing it to reveal frightening images of human suffering. This is the eye of the artist around which the fragmentary, tumultuous structure of “The Gaze of the Gorgon” is organized; it is the artist who decides where our focus will be and who shows us glimpses, flashes, of atrocity. Harrison’s fragmented form may be said to reflect the fragmentation of the image in the age of the hyperreal, and the endless circulation of the images pouring out through the “global circuits” of “contemporary communication”;101 and yet he also forces the viewer to stop and pay attention. First broadcast in 1992,

The “Unflinching Gaze” 91 the film-poem ends with a warning and a direct address to the viewer: the narrator/“Heine” states that the monster’s gaze “remains unburied in your day”.102 Some of the last images in the film are those of the 1991 Gulf War. One lingering shot depicts an empty landscape with human remains in the foreground. Scorched by the sun and half-covered in sand—as if in accord with Leonardo da Vinci’s advice—the remains would not have been recognizable as human if it was not for the presence of a skull. The camera image, carefully composed in the frame, brings to mind the vanitas paintings by Rembrandt or Cezanne. The whiteness of the skull’s forehead seems almost radiant compared to the blackness of its eye sockets and to the palette of browns and greens in the surrounding desert-scape. The scene changes to a close-up of a Trojan helmet, held aloft in the hand of Achilles in Franz Matsch’s painting The Triumph of Achilles (1892), an echo of an earlier shot that appeared in the film. The eyeholes of the helmet match the eye sockets of the skull in the desert. The words of the text that are heard over the shot continue to refer back to the previous shot of the skull—which remains, then, as a lingering “afterimage”: The empty helmet of one whose eyes have gone to feast the desert flies, the eyes of one whose fate was sealed by Operation Desert Shield. They gazed their last these dark dark sockets on high-tech coalition rockets103 There is, again, a juxtaposition of different times—past and present, classical and contemporary—not just in the images but also in the language (e.g., the association of “helmet” and “Shield” linking the Trojan War and the Gulf War). The camera zooms into the dark sockets of the helmet, and in the darkness there is a shot of burning oil wells in the desert, a familiar image from the Gulf War. It is as if the viewer now sees what this classical/contemporary warrior gazed at in the moment of death – the (after)image seemingly “burned” forever into the empty skull. By ending the film with images of the first Gulf War, Harrison implies that it is the continuation of the “century as a battleground”.104 The Gorgon continues to fill the “empty sockets” of Heine’s statue “with tears”;105 the horror goes on. The ending may be read, in part, as a response to Jean Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (1991), which saw the war “as a media event”106 happening only on the virtual level, in which the sides never meet and which is experienced by the “audience” as a spectacle. Arguably, both Harrison and Lashai strive to foreground the existence of the particular form of “ethical solicitation”107 that images of suffering represent, regardless of the time when and place where they occur. As we have seen, Lashai separates Goya’s images of

92 Agata Handley “dehumanization and dismemberment”108 from their particular historical context. Her roving spotlight emphasizes war as eternal return; these scenes of horror could be occurring at any moment in time – or rather, perhaps, as if in one simultaneous here and now. Her animated figures may also be said to represent the violence of the twentieth century as one long “battleground”.109 In “The Gaze of the Gorgon”, Harrison rips scenes of violence from their historical contexts in order to evoke a cumulative impression of the horror of war and to turn the viewer into a witness who has to share in the poet’s struggle, to continue to face the Gorgon in their own time.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Byrne, Poetry, 177. Harrison, “Facing North,” 218-19. Harrison, “Inky Digit of Defiance,” 472. Spencer, Poetry, 100. Spencer, Poetry, 100. Harrison, “Facing North,” 218-19. Spencer, Poetry, 100. Levinas, Time and the Other, 64. Sontag, Pain of Others, 39. Waldenfels, “Levinas,” 66. Waldenfels, “Levinas,” 64. Waldenfels, “Levinas,” 65 (italics in the original). Waldenfels, “Levinas,” 65. Robinson, “Mythical Method.” Symes, “It’s All Poetry,” xxxii. Tony Harrison, in conversation with Peter Robinson at the Hull Literature Festival on November 20, 1993; quoted in Robinson, “Shared Intimacy,” 5. Robinson, “Mythical Method.” Ryan, “Introduction,” 18. Ryan, “Introduction,” 1–2. Speranza, “Verses in the Celluloid,” 168. Speranza, “Verses in the Celluloid,” 168. Speranza, “Verses in the Celluloid,” 168. Symes, “It’s All Poetry,” lxv (italics in the original). Harrison, “Flicks,” xxx. Atkinson uses the term in relation to a specific type of work created between 1986 and 1996 for British television, and points to Harrison as the main representative of a particular style of documenting reality. Symes also refers to the term in his introduction to The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (Faber & Faber 1995), where he acknowledges John Betjeman as perhaps one of the most diligent producers of verse documentary; however, unlike Harrison’s verse, his was created for a film that was already cut. In the introduction to Collected Film Poetry, Harrison himself mentions another film, often remembered for its use of verse, entitled Night Mail (1936), which he saw early in his life and which features six stanzas of W.H. Auden’s poem. In this case, the act of conceiving the poetry preceded the making of images. In the projects in which Harrison has been involved, writing and film production have gone hand in hand.

The “Unflinching Gaze” 93 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Atkinson, “Poetic License,” 62. Wolf, “Intermediality,” 252-6. Harrison, “Flicks,” vvviii. Butler, “Precarious Life,” 135. Rowland, Tony Harrison, 69. Harrison, “The Gaze of the Gorgon,” 253. Harrison, “Gaze,” 168. Harrison, “Gaze,” 168. Rowland, Holocaust, 69. Robinson, “Mythical Method.” Rowland, Holocaust, 70. Pearce, T. S. Eliot, 95. Rowland, Holocaust, 74. Harrison, “Violent Century.” Cousins, Story of Looking, 134. Harrison, “Violent Century.” Cousins, Story of Looking, 134. Gehrhardt, Man with Broken Faces, xi. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 10. Spitzer, “Content vs. Metagrammar,” 72. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation,” 297. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 35-36. Clüver, “Quotation, Enargeia,” 35-36. Elleström, Media Transformation, 32. Elleström, Media Transformation, 32-3. Killander, Lutas, and Strukeli, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 10. Killander, Lutas, and Strukeli, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 12. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 17. Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis, 7-8. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 12. Pethö, “Media,” 211. Pethö, “Media,” 213. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 19. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 44. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 50. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 50. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 51. Harrison, “‘Gorgon’ Notebooks” (spelling and form as in the original). Aleksander, “Faces of War,” 74. Harrison, “‘Gorgon’ Notebooks.” Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 51. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 51. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 51. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 70. Sontag, Regarding, 40. Reed, “Ernst Friedrich.” Sontag, Regarding, 13. Gehrhardt, Man with Broken Faces, 181. Harrison, “Gaze,” 171. Harrison, “Facing Up,” 445. Harrison, “Facing Up,” 445-6 (italics in the original). Harrison, “Facing Up,” 446. Harrison, “‘Gorgon’ Notebooks.” Harrison, “Fire Eater,” 182.

94 Agata Handley 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

Harrison, “Travesties,” 32-33. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 51. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 56-57. Symes, “It’s All Poetry,” liv. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 59. Symes, “It’s All Poetry,” liii. Harrison, “Gaze,” 175. Harrison, “Gaze,” 175. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming, 57. Elleström, Media Transformation, 32. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 13. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 13. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 14. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 14. To illustrate their statement, Killander, Lutas and Strukelj offer an analysis of a sequence from the 2012 film Barbara, directed by Christian Petzold and set in 1980s East Germany. One scene features Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). The authors undertake a detailed analysis of the “relation between energeia, as a potentiality in the object (the media product), and enargeia, as an actualisation in the head of the subject (receiver)” (Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 14). A similar analysis of viewer response to the use of a painting in “Gaze of the Gorgon” is, however, beyond the scope of this article. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 17. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 16. Killander, Lutas, and Strukelj, “New Look on Ekphrasis,” 17. Harrison, “Gaze,” 168. Harrison, “Gaze,” 166. Harrison, “Facing Up,” 435. Harrison, “Facing Up,” 434-5 (italics in the original). Butler, “Precarious Life,” 137. Harrison, “Gaze,” 175. Harrison, “Gaze,” 176. Harrison, “Violent Century.” Harrison, “Gaze,” 175. Baudrillard, Gulf War, 10. Butler, “Precarious Life,” 135. Cousins, Story of Looking, 133. Harrison, “Violent Century.”

Bibliography Aleksander, Caroline. “Faces of War.” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2007. Atkinson, Peter. “Poetic License: Issues of Signification and Authorship in British Television Verse-Documentary, 1986–96.” Studies in Documentary Film 5, no. 1 (2011): 61–74. Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Bruhn, Siglind. Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 135.

The “Unflinching Gaze” 95 Byrne, Sandie. H, v., & O:The Poetry of Tony Harrison. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Clüver, Claus. “Quotation, Enargeia, and the Functions of Ekphrasis.” In Pictures Into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, edited by Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel, 35-6. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit University Press, 1998. Copley, Hannah. “From Baghdad to Sarajevo to Beeston: The War Poetry of Tony Harrison.” English Studies 99, no. 1 (2018): 19–33. Cousins, Mark. The Story of Looking. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2017. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. London: Palgrave Pivot, 2014. Gehrhadt, Marjorie. The Man With Broken Faces: Gueules Cassées of the First World War. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Harrison, Tony. “Facing North.” In Collected Poems, 218–19. London: Viking Penguin Books, 2007. ———. “Facing Up to the Muses.” In Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies I: Tony Harrison, edited by Neil Astley, 429–54. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991. ———. “The Fire Eater.” In Collected Poems, 182. London: Viking Penguin Books, 2007. ———. “Flicks and This Fleeting Life.” In Collected Film Poetry, vii–xxx. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. ———. “The Gaze of the Gorgon.” In Collected Film Poetry, 151–76. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. ———. “‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ Notebooks.” University of Leeds, “Leeds Poetry 1950–1980” collection, BC MS 20c Harrison/03/GAZ, 1992–2009. ———. “The Inky Digit of Defiance.” In The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016, edited by Edith Hall, 457–82. London: Faber and Faber, 2017. ———. “Travesties.” In Collected Poems, 32–3. London: Viking Penguin Books, 2007. ———. “The Violent Century/‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ Project Files.” University of Leeds, “Leeds Poetry 1950–1980” collection, BC MS 20cHarrison 04/ GAZ/01. Heffernan, James. “Ekphrasis and Representation.” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 297–316. Killander, Carla Cariboni, Liviu Lutas, and Alexander Strukelj. “A New Look on Ekphrasis: An Eye-Tracking Experiment on a Cinematic Example.” Ekphrasis: Images, Cinema, Theory, Media 12, no. 2 (2014): 10–31. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pearce, T. S. T. S. Eliot. New York: Arco, 1969. Pethö, Agnes. “Media in the Cinematic Imagination: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of the In-Between in Jean-Luc Godard’s Cinema.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 211–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

96 Agata Handley Reed, Susan. “Ernst Friedrich and His War Against War.” Last modified June 5, 2018. http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/06/ernst-friedrich-and-his-war-againstwar.html. Robinson, Peter. “Facing Up to the Unbearable: The Mythical Method in Tony Harrison’s Film/Poems.” In Tony Harrison’s Poetry, Drama and Film: The Classical Dimension, edited by Lorna Hardwick. Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1999. Accessed August 28, 2018. www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/Colq99/colq99;www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/greekplays/publications/ tony-harrisons-poetry-drama-and-film/harrisons-mythical-method. ———. “Shared Intimacy: A Study of Tony Harrison’s Public Poetry with Specific Reference to His Poetics, the Political Status of his Work and his Development of the Genre of the Film/Poem.” PhD diss., University of Hull, 1998. Rowland, Antony. Tony Harrison and the Holocaust. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Introduction.” In Narratives Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 1–41. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Sager Eidt, Laura M. Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Spencer, Luke. The Poetry of Tony Harrison. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Speranza, Robert Scott. “Verses in the Celluloid: Poetry in the Film from 1910– 2002 with Special Attention to the Development of the Film-Poem.” PhD diss., University of Sheffield, 2002. Spitzer, Leo. “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ or Content vs. Metagrammar.” In Essays on English and American Literature, edited by Anna Hatcher, 67–97. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Symes, Peter. “It’s All Poetry to Me.” In Collected Film Poetry, xxxi–lxvi. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Levinas and the Face of the Other.” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 63–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 252–6. London: Routledge, 2005.

6

Leaving the White Cube of Ekphrasis Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersection Heidrun Führer and Anna Kraus

Conventional Ekphrasis Commonly, academic discourse defines ekphrasis as referring to visual artistic representations, such as paintings and sculptures, vividly imagined by the reader of a literary text.1 This modern convention imposes limitations on the broad sense of ekphrasis to suit modern scientific notions and methodological concerns.2 Within the concepts of media reference and media transformation or transmediation, contemporary usage of ekphrasis is a logical consequence of a scholarly struggle to define abstract and imagined objects by means of structuralist methods.3 In the first half of the 20th century, New Criticism introduced the notion of ekphrasis into the scholarly discourse by outlining it as a poetic genre and defining it with respect to its topic: the contemplation of visual art and, specifically, the difference between an artistic expression rendered in the visual and verbal arts.4 The subject of ekphrastic discourse, the absent other, had to be a painting or a sculpture that appeared in front of the reader’s inner eyes as a result of enargeia—a notion either eliminated or translated as “vividness” and “sensuous word painting”. Enargeia was reduced to a mode of writing in literary language. The etymology of ekphrazein (tell/show in full) “proved” the primacy of a dichotomy – silence and speech – which was projected, retrospectively, onto the categories of literature and visual arts that had not existed in the era of classic rhetoric. In a similar manner, the discourse established a genealogy for ekphrasis. Achilles’s shield in Homer’s Iliad became the ancient (literary) prototype of a “notional ekphrasis”, translating purely mental imagery into words.5 The distinction between actual and notional ekphrasis echoes the distinction between fact and fiction, reality and mimesis: the latter conceived of as a representation of a given “outside” world.6 Famous modern examples of this lineage with a “real” reference are Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux-Arts.”7 Seen in this way, ekphrasis was entirely dependent on the “literariness” of the verbal text, the latter appearing to be distinct from the “realistic” referential or everyday language. The theoretical concern was to invent

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and abstract a unit or a matrix and to use it to analyze art/media products within the “culture as text”,8 where ekphrasis had its place in the idealized grammar of quasi-syntactic abstractions. In this view, categories such as poetry and visual art, divided by static boundaries, were considered to be self-contained, self-referential aesthetic objects, extracted from their sociohistorical context, for collection and canonization in a verbal “white cube”.9 The debate about old and new paragone helped to stabilize the abstract “law” of ekphrasis as “double representation”. The emphasis on rivalry and media specificity also implied a disregard for cultural or historical differences. Tracing the interrelationship of the idealized sign systems in Word and Image Studies was influenced by G. E. Lessing’s distinction between spatial and temporal media, with time and space considered as universals.10 Literary/verbal ekphrasis should translate the spatiality of the source medium into the sequentiality of its own sign system, which implied that narrativity is a precondition for all verbal texts, including poems.11 Using structuralist methods, distinctions were made between the perceptible and measurable signifier (expression-form) and the signified (content-expression) of a mental image (of a painting, for example). The mental image in the reader’s mind should match the aesthetic object contemplated by the imagined spectator.12 Ekphrasis, understood as “double representation”, intensified the idealized process of an “intersemiotic transposition”. Thereby, the assumed intersubjective transfer of “meaning” marginalized the mental process of a creative visualization and its individual and sociohistorical conditioning. Even after the decline of both New Criticism and Saussure’s semiology, the focus of ekphrasis studies remained on tracing, “translating” or adapting one isolated artwork as a visual source (word/image) into an aesthetic “target” medium of another sign system, whereby the concept of ergon, work, influenced the concept of medium as “a conventionally and culturally distinct means of communication” due to its representation of a make-believe world.13 At present, ekphrasis studies include media products outside the word/ image dichotomy and the traditional system of arts as source and target medium. While outlining ekphrasis in film, music, video games, comics or digital art,14 these studies tend to subscribe to a “transhistorical” concept of ekphrasis that underplays the sociohistorical problem of constructing classifications, rationalized theories, abstract intersubjective sign systems and old dichotomies, such as art/media vs. nature/life/reality. Seldom are performances, conceptual art or architecture included. While the insideoutside opposition excludes affect, it also reproduces the Enlightenment’s subject-object and mind-body divisions, the structuralist idealized abstractions and the myth of scientific objectivity.15 Instead of following this well-trodden path, we apply contemporary agential realism and new materialist thinking as more akin to the ancient participatory concept of mimesis and poiesis. Moreover, we take a performative approach to “the

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sign” as “an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with its legendary status”.16 It operates in comprehensive, open-ended processes by entangling agencies in and through material-discursive apparatuses.17 Within agential rhetoric, ekphrasis is considered to be a performative process of pro-ducing and performing something for an audience in the flow and entanglement of signs. We exemplify such a becoming of ekphrasis in Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect as a performance that qualifies presence between here and there, now and then in the heterotopia of the historically situated cityscape of Paris.18

Performativity of Ancient and Agential Rhetoric Ancient rhetoric unfolds ekphrasis with no other overarching principle than the generalized idea of “making the absent vividly present to the eyes of witnesses”.19 Reframing ekphrasis, in its modern shape, within performative and embodied communication means embedding it in poststructuralist rhetoric and agential realism,20 while reclaiming the ancient, philosophically interlinked concepts of mimesis, poiesis, ars and techne. Rather than separating specific cultural objects that signify and mimetically represent the world, all these complex notions together highlight, etymologically, the human ability to make, to perform, to “pro-duce something into presence” or “to cause it to appear”. Thereby, techne is the skill that guides embodied knowledge and practical logic.21 Rather than tracing the deep structure of given units in language, this thinking attaches greater significance to the process of form-giving than the paradigms of an 18th-century dichotomy of art versus craft or a modern distinction between (media) technology and (natural) life allow for.22 Moreover, as rhetoric is not limited to written language as a verbal means of representation, neither is ekphrasis limited to being the reference of a (given or imagined) mimetic artwork/representation, qualified as a cultural media product that imitates an external reality (nature).23 Ekphrasis unfolds a performative event of presencing: an active form marked by an intensification of affect that does in effect pro-duce a presence. Intensifying the sensuous experience, ekphrasis entangles subject, object and the environment in a process of becoming by enhancing “agential qualities in the unfolding bodies”.24 A kinship appears between ancient rhetorical praxis, which engages affect, memoria and phantasia in bringing something (e.g., clothes, stones, weather, human artifacts, etc.) to life, and the conceptual grounds of posthumanist rhetoric and agential realism. Posthumanist rhetoric foregrounds these mutually interdependent agencies of matter and material discourse. It does not follow the humanistic model of intentional persuasion that presupposes a free subject facing a passive object/matter.25 In agential realism, “matter does not refer to a fixed substance, rather, matter is a substance in intra-active becoming–not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency”.26 Rather than regarding the

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conventional division between subject and object, agential cuts generate the boundaries between what become perceived as discrete entities. Ontological units are constituted by phenomena and are only distinguishable amid agential cuts performed in a world of “inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy”.27 In posthumanist rhetoric, ekphrasis – making something absent present – produces agential cuts, making something unseen perceivable in the sense of Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible”.28 Within the performativity of agential realism, ekphrasis illuminates questions of perception and provides an audience with a significant formative event whose features include unpredictability and ambivalence.29 Ekphrasis – with its potential to become, to shed light on something, and thus to change a thought, a feeling or even an action – excludes the notion of an objective observer and intersubjective knowledge. We analyze a series of performances staged in a specific urban architectural environment. Both the live and recorded performances can become ekphrastic events in the entanglement with an audience. Their experience of the aliveness of “things” or “bodies” is constitutive of the becoming of an ekphrastic event. Speaking about ekphrasis as an event rather than a re-presentation or transmediation draws from new materialist vitalism the idea of “thing-power” and “vibrant matter”,30 and allows for the rhetoric of ekphrasis to stress “the significant, active role that nonhuman things play in collective existence alongside a host of other entities”.31 As an agency in its own right, able to entangle with environmental forces, the power of “things’” and “bodies’” is presenced through ekphrasis in the altering process of performing agential cuts. Eschewing any simplistic distinctions between mimesis and nature, poiesis and life or reality, ars and techne, and subject and object, we argue that ekphrasis strives to presence an “absence” within the world as matter with agency. Ekphrasis, as a performative agency of becoming, pro-duces a vivid zone of openness, balancing between bodies or things and their environment. Thus, it challenges the expectations of a stable perception-image outside of ourselves. When the observer and the observed entangle in the living presence of an event, they generate material consequences – things experienced as having come to life and acting freely. Distinct from the actual, the affective force of ekphrasis pro-duces new entities. Enargeia is thereby the nonverbal, light-shedding and form-giving force for presencing something: it pro-duces and per-forms, in a process of form-giving, an alternative or virtual reality. This intensive, presubjective force and affect, evoked in the practice of ekphrasis, is more than a vivid poetic description. The performativity of enargeia is a form-giving process of intra-action that emerges from within.32 Involving the performative element of human and nonhuman agency, ekphrasis sheds an enchanting light on an alternative reality by blurring the boundary between subject and object, body and mind. In the visual salience, it

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guides the embodied bystanders toward an alternative mode of perception, one that “brings absent things [such as events, objects, states, or humans] to the present”.33 This effect of presencing the entanglement of presence and absence is not necessarily limited to what is called the “representation” of artworks.

Cutting Holes: Absenting Matter – Forming a Presence Gordon Matta-Clark, a New York-based architect and artist, was known for producing spectacular architectural events before he performed Conical Intersect.34 This provocative art activism consists of three live performances and multiple durable media products. In the artistic frame of the Paris Biennale that took place from September 24th to October 10th, 1975, the live performances were set in the public frame of two dilapidated 17th-century buildings at 27-29 rue Beaubourg in the eponymous district (Beautiful Village). While occurring on the unstable stage of public space, the Biennale provided the institutionalized frame that stabilized the performances as artistic events, without which they’d have been regarded as illegal actions. The verbally and visually well-“documented” main performance of Conical Intersect put the fate of the two 17th-century buildings center stage to illuminate the production and the experience of space. With a team of coworkers employing simple work tools, Matta-Clark made several cuts and holes in the walls, floors and roofs of the buildings, intersecting the ground and the sky, the inside and the outside of the rooms. Citizens and tourists casually “strolling” along the Seine and visiting Notre Dame and Les Halles became the audience of an urban spectacle in which two shabby and dark buildings transitioned from being background props to acting as tragic “heroes” on the “city stage”.35 For several days in 1975, a cone-shaped hole mystified the old houses. Suggesting multiple shapes, views and narratives, new sights appeared in front of the audiences’ eyes which, as they peered in and through the houses’ dark interiors, commingled with distant landmarks of the new and old Paris – the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou. As agencies of a physical dramaturgy, their destabilized construction influenced the collective, habitual views of Paris, the “City of Light”.36 The architectural event violently cutting of “holes” by Matta-Clark’s artistic group establishes an ekphrasis. As it balances between demolition and construction, mass and weight, past and present, presence and absence, and life and death, it draws “attention to what is not there, what has been removed, what is lacking – what has been destroyed, erased, or blacked out in order for what remains present to look permanent”.37 Playing with light, voids and surfaces creates an intense ambiguity when seeing and grasping the performance.38 The effect of wonder, thauma, aggravates the ekphrastic rhetoric: the observers are drawn into the event and

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experience embodied forces. As opposed to the objectifying position of a distanced spectator, passersby engage, intra-acting directly with human and nonhuman agencies of the three different performances enacted during the Biennale. Ekphrasis takes a “form” by means of enargeia and imagination (phantasia), as it presences more than is visible at first glance: “Form-giving is life, while Form in itself is death.”39 By performing as agencies and becoming entangled with other agencies, this art of space-taking “makes something absent present”. The houses and their absent inhabitants become a “matter of concern”. In becoming exhibited, the absent inhabitants, the houses and the city come to life as actants with performative qualities and meanings amidst a network of entangled agencies. The mediating process of perceiving the ambivalent and unpredictable performance of the remarkably violent act on the buildings evokes countless emotional reactions, framed and informed – depending on the spectators’ background and perspective – by personal and cultural memories of, not only the city’s historical sites in general, but also the housing problems suffered by poor workers – victims of a hegemonic, capitalist urban architecture. In the medium of the city, this artistic architectural intervention questions not only the static equilibrium of the buildings but also the major political and architectural power system.40 Aiming at unfolding visuality beyond the visible, Matta-Clark’s ekphrastic performances literally shed light onto some of the darkest spaces in the houses and, broadly, in the “City of Lights”: the private rooms of poor, anonymous workers of Les Halles – those forgotten, invisible inhabitants and their decrepit, marginalized spaces. Making cuts by physically removing matter strongly recalls the implication of Walter Benjamin’s idea that “it is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned”.41 The stark contrast between the poor dwellings of the “old Beaubourg” and the future-oriented project of the “new Beaubourg” is especially apparent in a view toward the Centre Pompidou, whose exterior, made of cast-steel tubes, cabled joints and colored skeletons, suggests the storehouse of a petroleum refinery.42 Frederic Jameson’s question “Is space political?” seems to receive a poignant answer in the juxtaposition of the dark and bright sites under construction.43 Visualizing the tension between the architecture of individual buildings and urbanism, which had become increasingly responsive to market demands, Conical Intersect attends to new spaces of identity formation and to forces of “systematically disempowering and disenfranchising marginalized social groupings”.44 Today, we experience the ekphrastic effect of Conical Intersect by means of material discourses, considered to be durable media products, and the ongoing art-historical discourse. Still, none of them corresponds with the conceptual framework of a “double representation” ruled by the word and image dichotomy. This is why we have chosen to unfold

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the performativity of ekphrasis in the three live performances belonging to Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural intervention in the city. As unstable media products they are usually contrasted with the “durable” media products of the photos and the film by Matta-Clark and Bruno de Witt (1975).45 Avoiding the idea that the three live events of Conical Intersect are primary and more “real” than the “secondary” and somehow “artificial reproductions”, we argue that both modes of performativity unfold the same agential rhetoric of playing with light and shadow to presence what has been absent. Simultaneously produced in the same historical context, all of the performances apply different skills and technologies to set matter, light and other actants to work.46 Rather than foregrounding the durable materiality of film and photography, we point to the performativity of material discourses, which perform and pro-duce a process of “social interventions and renewal”47 within their apparatus that inscribes light to stimulate multiple levels of social experiences of time and space. The still or moving images presence the virtual so that it is actualized as a time-limited ephemeral sign by the perspective-bound spectators.48 This possible reading of the performance unfolds in the title of the film Étant d’art: pour locataire: Conical Inter-Sect. In the form of a pun, it reveals the sociopolitical dimension of its aesthetic: while étant d’art translates as “being of art (for the dweller)”, its homonym étandard means “flag, banner, standard (for the dweller)”, a symbol of a cause for which one fights. The wording of the film title plays self-referentially with the difference between written words and their embodied sound/vocalization and with the space in-between presence and absence. In this in-between space, (minor) artistic and political engagement intersect. Evoking the image of a political banner, the title charges the film with the force of enargeia: the latent slogan (the words) in the film’s title is open for each participant’s/ spectator’s visualization/imagination. Indeed, Conical Intersect performs an intersect(ion) and imbrication of time(s) and space(s), symbolized by the ephemeral existence of a coneshaped hole. By absenting matter, the performance presences the invisible: the abstract political framework in Henri Lefebvre’s abstract space. The power of presencing and absenting matter illuminates the multiple layers of experiencing time and space in the cultural capital – Paris – with respect to different social and political perspectives. Conical Intersect absences and blows away the accepted values of “modernizing” the space of the everyday social sphere in a city, that – in repeating Haussmann’s “radical urban surgery” – is reconstructed in the manner of Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture. The Biennale provided a time-spatial frame for Matta-Clark’s mostly nonverbal “minor” rhetoric of accusing “major” architecture, the traditional “art of articulating space”, of disrespecting the historical and social aspects of giving space to minorities.49 Matta-Clark’s architectural voice may be thought of as shedding light on the possibility of the impossible, the integration of the non-integrable,

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and of revolution and messianism when he produces and recodifies spaces as ongoing, situated and containing relational tensions between different forces. Drawing on Lefebvre’s socio-spatial theory, space becomes recognizable as a construct that is fluid and charged with emotions and memories.50 The ekphrastic event of the architectural intersection unfolds a desire to see more, deeper, higher and in different directions in the intraaction with the apparatuses of different media. The performance becomes an ekphrastic event for those who intra-act and imagine the cultural history of the space and the political impact of the time (kairos). By applying the powerful rhetoric of ekphrasis, all performances actualize matter, not as passive or dead but as an intra-active performance.51 While the main event unfolds in several material discourses, the same insight becomes present: it absents physical matter in a provocative anarchitectural rhetoric that destabilizes conventional modes of perception. The marginalized fate of the community of former inhabitants of the houses is presenced both for the mediating “eyes” of the passersby and through the technological “eye” and “framing” (photo/film). All of the performances focus on the effect of liveness when dramatizing the fate of the twin buildings about to be demolished and stimulate a perception that includes reflection on the paradoxical entanglement of presence, absence and representation in Derrida’s sense of presence and in terms of Lefebvre’s triadic concept of socially produced space.52 Conical Intersect is famous for the complexity of the (agential) cuts and their anthropomorphizing effect on the two houses. Seen from the street, the big hole on the black front of one of the houses takes the shape of an eye, staring back at the pedestrians. In its significant Gestalt, the eye animates the object and blurs the borderline between subject and object. Seen from an abstracted site of observation, the conical hole recalls the shape of an optical device such as a spyglass, a sniper’s nest, a telescope or a periscope.53 While this ocularcentric technology enhances the capacity of the human eye and facilitates the communicative and symbolic activity of showing absent things, it also recalls the limiting impact of modern technology: the spectators are forced into the role of distanced observers striving for domination and control over objects and persons.54 Matta-Clark’s sketch of the hole suggests both the aesthetic of its sculptural form and the tension between embodied and disembodied viewing as its methodological and epistemological practice. This ambivalence is crucial for approaching ekphrasis and enargeia: beyond Kantian rationalized aesthetics and the epistemological tradition of the scopic regime, it even captures a “reality”, mediated by imagination and memory in the process of visualization. Not only does ekphrasis enhance the spectators’ sensitivity to a latent “reality” made visible in the event of reframing the houses, this embodied perception, in effect, rejuvenates the object as a space of intensity. As performative force and affect, ekphrasis pro-duces and per-forms an object into presence only in an embodied perception in

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the process of becoming. The foregrounding of perception as a performative and mediating process shifts the focus of Matta-Clark’s performances toward becoming: how differences between absence and presence are created by enargeia. In the constantly changing and rearranged “politics of space”,55 the ekphrastic event points to the act of setting new borders by making the absent present.

Ekphrastic Performances of Space Taking The rhetoric of ekphrasis is enhanced when Conical Intersect is perceived, not as a single live performance, but as a series directed towards political space taking. Although the art-historical discourse tends to marginalize two of the live performances because they are not visually “documented” and seem to have no direct link to the artistic architectural act of the “sculpting”, together these two performances realize the empowering effect of ekphrasis in different modes of performances “in reality itself”.56 In all the events, the rhetoric of ekphrasis is engaged with presencing the multilayered, fluid and relational nature of time and space. Only one of the two marginalized performances is titled: Cuisse de Bœuf. The untitled performance takes place after the invisible curtain denoting the architectural live performance has been taken down and police have barricaded the entrance to the buildings. Reappearing “onstage” after the “main” performance of cutting holes in the buildings has been concluded, Matta-Clark trespasses the temporal boundaries of the official performance and the spatial boundary between public and private. Repeating the central gesture of the “main” performance, Matta-Clark tears a new hole and new agential cuts appear to disregard visible and invisible borderlines, effectively transforming reality: the hole creates the possibility for him and others to access the buildings in embodied participation. The subversive act of trespassing – of violating property rights – presences a temporal instantiation of privatization, reminding the audience that architecture is, by law, private: public only so long as it is permitted to perform within its environment. The architect Markus Miessen calls this performed architectural activism “crossbenching”: “a first-person-singular mode of acting independently, with a conscience . . . [which] aims to open up a fresh debate, not as a theory, but a way of acting politically”.57 This critical, space-claiming ekphrasis encourages future activism while presencing an alternative architecture.58 In the light of the postmodern mediation of artistic discourse, this art no longer provides an immersion in an aesthetic fiction that is outlined in the separated space of an art gallery or accessed via durable media products. Rather, it is performed in the social and political space of everyday life. Its ekphrastic power aims at an embodied engagement as it forms the potentialities of reality. With a similar attitude, Cuisse de Bœuf takes place in front of the emerging Centre Pompidou in the neighborhood of Les Halles, a space that had

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merely been a trou (a big hole) for the four years since 1971, when the traditional central market space, Victor Baltard’s famous glass and iron construction – known as the Belly of Paris, after Emile Zola’s novel with the same title – was demolished. Extending the discourse of cutting and absenting the “dead” architectural matter of stone and wood, this performance recalls the agential cuts performed by the butchers: 750 pounds of beef were cut, roasted, and served to the engaged audience. Cuisse de Bœuf corresponds with Julia Kristeva’s understanding of art as a block of sensations functioning as incarnation.59 While dead material is cut and transformed into the “life blood” of a communal feast, the living material of a ritualistic, memorializing act is performed in a space that brings its absented past into presence. The nonhuman aspect, the meat that is shared and ingested, has an agency of its own, blending embodied memories linked to the ritual actions performed in this space with the actual experience. Temporality becomes entangled in the public square, where, in front of the Pompidou Centre, an emerging future center of Paris, the everyday life of the past, the absent Les Halles, is re-embodied in the here and now of the feast. Partaking in the performance and connecting and sharing the experience with the others, the embodied participants intra-act with the force of enargeia, which passes from one participant to another, unifying the audience and the actors while presencing the abstract qualities of space within the public space – not outside of it, in an intellectual or artistic space of representation. Thus, Cuisse de Bœuf pro-duces an affective and embodied “zone of intensity” that is animated by affect and memory. This performance poses theoretical problems, as the meaning-giving signifiers do not pre-exist as given minimal units which may be related back to vocabulary or syntax. Rather, they are pro-duced “as a symptom of the world itself”.60 Ekphrasis, in a successful communication process, becomes alive as an enactment in a relational sense, imbricating multiple actants. The rhetoric of ekphrasis presences the imperceptible, conventional boundaries between spatial-temporal categories. The body’s mediating role as an intersection of lived experience in past, present and future has a blurring effect to the extent that eyewitnesses do not merely see but experience an unexpected variety of sensations within their bodies. In the situatedness of these experiences, categories of observer and observed, subject and object, body and mind, experience and memory and dead and living are dissolved. The ekphrastic mode of these performances is determined by the degree of affect produced by the force of enargeia as “a potential of associations that overflows all its determinations of its ‘production’ and ‘reception’”.61

Dissolving Dichotomies Through Diffraction Light is a basic tool for creating space in art and architecture. While light makes things visible in the darkness, it also creates a zone of ambivalence. When light passes through a prism, it diffracts (breaking apart), and thus

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it reveals its own complex, heterogeneous constitution as well as that of matter. “Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. . . . the first invites the illusion of essential, fixed position, while the second trains us to more supple vision”.62 Donna Haraway’s metaphor is useful for understanding Conical Intersect as ekphrasis. When light passes through the holes in the buildings, opened by Matta-Clark and the workers, it moves in different directions within the darkness inside the houses, and makes visible the otherwise absent and invisible. The holes per-form like a prism, diffracting visibility. The force of enargeia performs according to its ancient roots of flooding something with light to give “a clear view”. This bright light draws attention to an event and the rhetorical effect of ekphrasis when deconstructing a pre-existing object (the buildings), in that it “highlights” the effects of difference. Ekphrasis is used here in its potentiality to induce a difference-attentive mode of thinking:63 the matter of to whom and how the invisible or the darkness, when made clearly visible, makes a difference in the world. Matta-Clark’s joint performances in Paris affect the motivational salience and affective valence that connect a body’s experience of spatiotemporality with a new system of possibilities, or openings. If one is affected by enargeia, one can imagine and see that the new holes and openings make differences and can even participate in performing new agential cuts that produce meaning in an alternative world-making act. The main element of Conical Intersect is light as a mediator of hitherto invisible traces. Intra-acting with the apparatus, light guides the spectators’ attention and presents embodied absent structures as effects of the enacted agential cuts. The credits of Matta-Clark’s film explicitly point to this light effect. They refer to a spectacular French night show, Son et lumière, that projects light onto historical buildings. These light performances “illuminate” urban structures with agencies of their own as they engage affective, site-specific relationships and nonverbal narratives.64 The aestheticized buildings function both as the technological interface of a screen and as the subject (content) of the light show – as objects and as artifacts. They become visible in the ephemeral process of becoming. The effect of light animates and resurrects the remains of “dead” objects by situating them in a state of in-betweenness. This ambivalent effect can be seen in Matta-Clark’s architectural and film rhetoric, wherein light appears likewise to lend an identity and a life to the two decrepit Beaubourg buildings. In the film, too, a hole in the dark façade slowly takes the form of a dark eye that, framed by a white circle, seems to gaze directly at the eyewitnesses. It becomes impossible to unsee the rhetorical effect of the ekphrasis in the architectural intervention of Conical Intersect in terms of the life of the buildings: they are no longer dead objects. Rather, in Haraway’s words: “the object/event [. . .] is ‘enacted,’ it is both a physical thing and the power that infuses it”.65 Instead of

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encoding a message in the structure of a sign system, narratives unfold here non-deterministically, although they are guided through discourse, social practices, memories and affects. All of the phenomena transform the materiality of the buildings and light-play into rhetorical agencies that pro-duce realities. They draw affective force from the dynamics of the site, the social interrelationship with architecture as an artistic matter and medium, and the mediating relevance of light for the appearance of invisible spaces and memories. These aspects emerge thanks to the viewers’ activated and intensified dynamics of visuality, which acknowledges a limited time-space of performance in which the participants are invited to immerse themselves and create a narrative by connecting the visible with the invisible and thus making the absent present. The intra-acting series of collaborative performances of Conical Intersect illuminates ekphrasis in different material discourses and conventionalized media formats. Seen as belonging together but never adding up to a complete whole, this series destabilizes the common model of a self-sufficient ergon, classifiable either as a “source” or a “target” media product. According to Matta-Clark, the aim is not to create a “totally new supportive field of vision, of cognition”; instead, he wants “to reuse the old one, the existing framework of thought and sight. [He is] altering the existing units of perception normally employed to discern the wholeness of a thing. What might have been a richly layered underground is being excavated for deeper new building foundations”.66 In so doing, a hidden structure of “reality” disrupts the traditional boundaries, never adding up to a unity but remaining a-part. Making the creative pro-duction of performance the main component of a rhetorical model of ekphrasis, we transgress the common dichotomies (such as art/craft, representation/presentation, subject/object) and foreground the illuminating potentiality of ekphrasis as an aesthetic play of in/determinacy, intended to generate sociopolitical debates. Intra-acting with their own apparatus and the environment, Matta-Clark’s architectural performances exemplify ekphrasis when revealing the abstract function of architectural matter and its capacity to “frame” inclusion and exclusion when shaping “reality”. They challenge the conventional inside/outside divide with a life movement from inside out and outside in, while situating themselves in being, in matter with agency, within the lifeworld: they are aligned in their in-between status and they demand the co-presence of participants to “see through” a conventionalized habit of perception. In the ambivalence of the performance, the otherwise absent potentiality of the presence becomes presenced as a virtual alternative.

Conclusion Regarding ekphrasis in the frame of agential realism and rhetoric, our chapter reconsiders and broadens the established model of ekphrasis

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as re-presentation, remediation, adaptation, or even transmediation of pre-given objects, such as traditional artworks. The established model of ekphrasis was developed in the twentieth century favoring a scientifictheoretical terminology, a clear distinction between subject and object and a deep structure in language, understood as a representation. In contrast to the scholarly interest in canonized aesthetic media objects, ancient rhetoric develops ekphrasis as a process of pro-ducing something in a way that brings it into light. Our model reinvigorates this ancient understanding of ekphrasis and enargeia using the posthumanist concept of agential rhetoric. It disrupts the privileged position of subjectivity and embraces – in response to the environments – both human and nonhuman actants. Drawing from this theoretical background, the rhetoric of MattaClark’s architectural performances illuminate the capacities of ekphrasis and enargeia to show and presence something absent (repressed) for the eyewitnesses: Matta-Clark’s cuts into the houses make the objects come to life in the form of their materiality and social impact. Blurring the conventional oppositions between subject and object, Matta-Clark’s collaborative performances pro-duce a rhetoric that foregrounds the sociopolitical differences of absence and presence. In an intra-active process of becoming, they illuminate – for an open-ended and indeterminate moment in time – the potentiality of the in-between (time, space, site, place, social classes, ideologies). All of his performances discard architecture as static matter in which to dwell. Instead, they explore the complexity or “fluidity” of space and time in a social and artistic framework that invests heavily in the aesthetic of ephemerality, as it emphasizes the relation between the long-term architecture and the short-term artistic performances. Whether it is cutting holes in the architectural matter or in the barriers protecting private property, the work illustrates instability, a circumstance in life comprised of space that is charged with a direct encounter with affects. Crucial for the destabilizing of conventional perceptions is Matta-Clark’s playing with the opposing significance of light and darkness, which creates, on the one hand, an affect-image, and on the other, the flow and diffraction of light. This playing highlights the “materialities of communication” involved in the “pro-duction of presence” as an active force in the performative process of presencing.67 Performative agential cuts disrupt the optics and politics of closed spaces: light that enters through unexpected holes creates new boundaries, causing aesthetic confusion. As it touches a past that remains present, it reveals a decentralized stream of intersecting and contradictory events and narratives. Thus, instead of being presented with a specific narrative representation, the viewer participates in the performative process of producing sense-making agential cuts. Matta-Clark’s ekphrastic rhetoric allows a reconfiguration of the embodied experience of a broadened visuality that sheds light on divergent historical narratives, opening up a space for possible reimaginings. It points toward the inseparability of ethics, ontology

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and epistemology: Conical Intersect is engaged both in the discursive practices of modern architecture and in its intra-actions with the world and its inhabitants.

Notes 1. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis: Theory”, 35–49. 2. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion; Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions. 3. Cf. Posner, “Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Semiotics?” 4. Spitzer, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Hagstrum, The Sister Arts; Krieger, “Ekphrastic Principle”; Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation”, Museum of Words; alternatively, Webb, “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern” and Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion. 5. Hollander, “Poetics of Ekphrasis”, 209–19; Bram, “Ekphrasis as a Shield”, 327; Squire, “Ekphrasis at the Forge”; Elsner, “Ekphrasis as Art History”, 10–27. 6. Cf. Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis. 7. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 136; Kennedy, Ekphrastic Encounter, 26; for criticism of these preconditions of the ekphrasis discourse, see Clüver, “New Look”, 32, 37, 39. 8. Cf. Bachmann-Medick, “Culture as Text”; Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance”; Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, 203–4. 9. For an overview of the historical discourse, cf. Nigel, “Mental Imagery”; for ancient sources for enargeia, cf. Zanker, “Enargeia”; for the interartistic tradition, cf. Plett, Enargeia. For the multiple modes of the gaze, cf. Yacobi, “Fictive Beholders”. 10. For repetition of the description/narration and the time/space dichotomy, understood as “different logics” (Kress, “Gains and Losses”, 13), cf. Prince, Dictionary of Narratology, 19; Krieger, “Ekphrastic Principle” and Ekphrasis; Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation”, 301–2. According to Mitchell, Iconology, 75, this acknowledged separation of word and image reaches back to Plato. 11. Cf. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 5–6. 12. Posner, “Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Semiotics?” 13. 13. Ryan, “Media and Narrative”, 290. 14. Cf. Wagner, Reading Iconotexts; Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 5; Dhue, “Text to Screen Adaptation”, 1–33; Goehr, “How to Do More”; Lindhé, “Visual Sense”; Führer, “Thinking Ekphrasis”. 15. Cf. Auslander, “Flow”, 125. 16. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?”, 504. 17. At the crossroads of philosophy and the technoscientific realm, quantum physicist Karen Barad developed the theory of “agential realism”, which assumes that fluid agencies rather than fixed and pre-existent things can be outlined on a stable and objective scientific ground. Distinguishable entities appear only in the performativity of “agential cuts”, entangling the subject/ object cut; cf. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”. 18. For ekphrasis as performance, see Führer, “Take the Beuys Off”, 157–88. 19. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion. 20. Cf. Barnett, Rhetorical Realism; Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”. 21. Cf. Ingold, “Perception of the Environment”, 56; Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, XIII; Agamben, “Poiesis and Praxis”, 72; Whitehead, “Poesis and Art-Making”, 2; Sterne, “Communication as Techné”, 91–8. For historically shifting contexts of mimesis, cf. Potolsky, Mimesis, 1. For the contrasting

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

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views on mimesis and representation with respect to science and art, see Frigg and Hunter, Beyond Mimesis and Convention, xviii. Cf. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 43. Regarding rhetoric inherent in any form of communication, prior to human language and identified with energy, see Kennedy, “Hoot”, 22. For thing-power as a form of rhetoric beyond human intentionality, see Gries, Still Life, 12. Cf. Keeling, Posthumanist Rhetoric, 81. Cf. Barnett, Rhetorical Realism, 37–65. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”, 822 (italics in the original). Barad’s intra-action replaces the common idea of ”interaction”, which presumes preestablished entities in action with each other: agency is a dynamics of forces rather than an inherent property of an individual to be exercised. Barad, Meeting the Universe, 90, 141. Barad, Meeting the Universe, 150. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 12. Fischer-Lichte, “Performativity and Space”, 31. Bennet, Vibrant Matter. Gries, Still Life, 5. The force of enargeia is synonymous with ekphrasis; see Zanker, “Enargeia”. Prior to linguistic expression, enargeia and affect are understood as passages of intensity and thus nonrepresentative on a semantic and semiotic level; cf. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect”, 220. Massumi foregrounds the openness of affect and its potential for novelty and disruption. Affect is not a pristine autonomous state; it intra-acts with the process of life; cf. Stenner, Liminality and Affect, 203. Affect illustrates “a dynamism of matter that had been hidden in oppositions held in place by the body-as-organism, between the living and the nonliving, the physical and the biological, the natural and the cultural”. Clough and Halley, Affective Turn, 211. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion, 87ff. Cf. Haskins, “Mimesis”, 7–33; Barnett, Rhetorical Realism. Ursprung, “Moment to Moment”, 269; Barría Chateau, “The Cut, the Hole”, 95. Regarding “strolling” in the modern city, presuming a changed individuality, balancing between control and being controlled, “objectivity” and “subjectivity”, being fascinated by the contingent, and the transitory and the spectacle of the city, cf. Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist”, 18–36; Silverman, Facing Postmodernity, 69, 86. Patridge, Origins, 710; Metcalf, “Elemental Sallis”, 208; Silverman, Facing Postmodernity, 66. Halberstam, “Unbuilding Gender”. Barría Chateau, “The Cut, the Hole”, 100. Klee, in Ingold, “Textility of making”, 91. Cf. Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1241. Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, 65. Jameson, “Is Space Political?” 242; cf. Latour and Hermant, Paris. Murdoch, Post-Structuralist Geography, 13. As a member of the so-called anarchitecture group, Matta-Clark performed counter-architectural projects in downtown Manhattan in 1973 and 1974. Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark, 19, 152. Rather than rejecting the differences between the capacities of a human eye and an optical device, we foreground the parallel formats of performances that all belong to the same cultural economy and “mediatic system” – Auslander, Liveness, 5. As artistic performances, they produce complex manufactured performative knowledge by transforming agential cuts and by

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50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Heidrun Führer and Anna Kraus blurring the borderline between subject and object “in a physical practice of engagement” – Barad, Meeting the Universe, 342. Kim, Rhetoric of Visual Aesthetics, 4. Cf. Stenner, Liminality and Experience. “A minor architect is a minor destructive character, a tinkerer and hacker, journalist and editor, alter ego and subaltern. But tinkerers may sabotage as well as fix, and willfully take apart rather than assemble. Hackers may scramble code as often as decipher it, and editors (to save us from our wordiness) ruthlessly slice the excess away”. Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, 91. Lefebvre, “Politics of Space”. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”. Thanks to Kittler’s conceptual link between the invisible urban infrastructures and information technologies, no “outside” to the network space, no stable structural order and no limiting frame are possible. The “content” of any network is another network, just like the content of any medium is another medium: Barad, 720. “The coming-into being of the city is a complex ecology, assemblage or being-with of humans, architecture/infrastructure and networks”. Hoelzl and Marie, Softimage, 121. Lefebvre, “Politics of Space”, 30–7; Power, Presence in Play, 14. Opałka, “Blurring the Borders”, 251; Ouroussoff, “Timely Lessons”; Lee, “Holes of History”, 73; Graham, “Gordon Matta-Clark”, 203. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 69–70. Lefebvre, “Politics of Space”; Fischer-Lichte and Wihstutz, Performances and Politics of Spaces. Groys, “On Art Activism”. Miessen, Toward Participation, 9. Kovar, Architecture in Abjection, 243. O’Sullivan, “Aesthetics of Affect”, 130. Didi-Huberman, “Art of Not Describing”, 163. Lyotard, “Critical Reflections”, 93. Haraway, “Promises of Monsters”, 300 (emphasis added). Barad, “Diffracting: Cutting Together-Apart”. Cf. Kwon, One Place after Another. Haraway in: Barad, “Diffracting”, 174. Matta-Clark in McTighe, Framed Spaces, 43. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 17.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “Poiesis and Praxis”. In The Man Without Content, 42–56. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Auslander, Philip. “Going With the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture”. TDR 33, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 119–36. ———. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. Oxon: Routledge, 2008. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. “Culture as Text: Reading and Interpreting Cultures”. In Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, edited by Birgit Neumann, Mirjam Horn, and Ansgar Nünning, 99–118. Berlin and Boston: Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, 2012. Barad, Karen. “Diffracting: Cutting Together-Apart”. Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623.

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———. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. ———. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”. Signs 28, no. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring 2003): 801–31. http://doi.org/10.1086/345321. Barbetti, Claire. Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Ekphrasis and Interarts Theory. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Barnett, Scott. Rhetorical Realism: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Ontology of Things. New York: Routledge, 2017. Barría Chateau, Harnán. “The Cut, the Hole and the Eclipse: Matta-Clark’s Sections. O corte, o furo e a eclipse: secções de Matta-Clark”. Arquiteturarevista 7, no. 2 (2011): 95–100. https://doi.org/10.4013/arq.2011.72.01. Bauman, Zygmunt. “From Pilgrim to Tourist – Or a Short History of Identity”. In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, 18–36. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996. Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bram, Shahar. “Ekphrasis as a Shield: Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Tradition”. Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 22, no. 4 (2006): 372–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2006.10435765. Clough, Patricia T., and Jean Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Clüver, Claus. “A New Look on an Old Topic: Ekphrasis Revisited”. Todas as Letras 19, no. 1 (2017): 30–44. https://doi.org/10.5935/1980-6914/letras.v19n1. Dhue, Hannah. “Text to Screen Adaptation: Examining Reverse Ekphrasis in Joe Wright’s Films Adapting for”. CrissCross 3, no. 1 (2015): 1–33. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer – The Detail and the Patch”. History of the Human Sciences 2, no. 2 (1989): 135–69. Drexler, Arthur. Transformations in Modern Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1979. Elsner, Jaś. “Ekphrasis as Art History”. Art History 33, no. 1 (2010): 10–27. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Culture as Performance: Theatre History as Cultural History”. Actas/Proceedings. História do Teatro e Novas Tecnologias. Centro de Estudos de Teatro. Portugal, 1–4. Accessed December 12, 2018. ww3.fl.ul.pt/ centros_invst/teatro/pagina/Publicacoes/Actas/erika_def.pdf. ———. “Performativity and Space”. In Performative Urbanism: Generating and Designing Urban Space, edited by Sofie Wolfrum and Nikolai Frhr. v. Brandis, 31–9. Berlin: Jovis, 2015. ———. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge Classics, 2004. First published 1969. Frigg, Roman, and Matthew C. Hunter. “Introduction”. In Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, xv–xxix. London: Springer, 2010.

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Führer, Heidrun. “Take the Beuys Off: Reconsidering the Current Concept of Ekphrasis in the Performative Poetry of Thomas Kling”. Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura 27, no. 2 (2017): 157–88. ———. “Thinking Ekphrasis Through the Digital”. In Thinking Through the Digital in Literature – Representations + Poetics + Sites + Publications, December 2017. http://conference.reprecdigit.se/#/contributions/heidrun-fuhrer. Führer, Heidrun, and Bernadette Banaszkiewicz. “The Trajectory of Ancient Ekphrasis”. In On Description, edited by Alice Jedlickova, 45–75. Prague: Akropolis, 2014. Goehr, Lydia. “How to Do More With Words: Two Views of Musical Ekphrasis”. The British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 389–410. https:// doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayq036. Goldhill, Simon. “What Is Ekphrasis for?” Classical Philology 102, no. 1 (2007): 1–19. Graham, Dan. “Gordon Matta-Clark”. Reprinted in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990, edited by Brian Wallis, 194–205. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Gries, Laurie E. Still Life With Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. Groys, Boris. “On Art Activism”. e-flux Journal 56 (June 2014). www.e-flux.com/ journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry From Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Halberstam, Jack. “Unbuilding Gender”. Places Journal, October 2018. Accessed February 4, 2019. https://doi.org/10.22269/181003. Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———. Aristotle’s Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hantelmann, Dorothea. How to Do Things With Art: The Meaning of Art’s Performativity. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Michael Turnbull Hantelmann. Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2010. Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters. A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others”. In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge, 1992. Harth, Philip. “The New Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Poetry”. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 3 (1981): 521–37. www.jstor.org/stable/1343116. Haskins, Ekaterina V. “Mimesis Between Poetics and Rhetoric: Performance Culture and Civic Education in Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2000): 7–33. www.jstor.org/stable/3886052. Heffernan, James A. W. “Ekphrasis and Representation”. New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 297–316. https://doi.org/10.2307/469040. ———. “Ekphrasis: Theory”. In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, 35–49. Chicago: De Gryter, 2015. ———. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis From Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hollander, John. “The Poetics of Ekphrasis”. Word and Image 4 (1988): 209–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.1988.10436238.

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Ingold, Tim. “The Textility of Making”. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042. Jameson, Frederic. “Is Space Political?” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 224–55. New York: Routledge, 1997. Reprint Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Keeling, Diane Marie. “Posthumanist Rhetoric: Theory and Criticism for the More-than-Human Communication”. PhD diss. 19, University of Colorado, 2012. https://scholar.colorado.edu/comm_gradetds/19. Kennedy, David. The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Kennedy, George A. “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric”. Philosophy & Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992): 1–21. Kim, Daniel Hyunjae. “The Rhetoric of Visual Aesthetics: Image, Convention, and Form in New Media”. PhD diss. 64, University of Colorado, 2016. https:// scholar.colorado.edu/comm_gradetds/64. Kovar, Zuzana. Architecture in Abjection: Bodies, Spaces and Their Relations. New York: Truis, 2018. Kress, Günther. “Gains and Losses: New Forms of Texts, Knowledge, and Learning”. Computers and Composition 22, no. 1 (December 2005): 5–22. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004. Krieger, Murray. “The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry: Or Laokoön Revisited”. In The Play and Place of Criticism, 105–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Latour, Bruno, and Emilie Hermant. “Paris: Invisible City”. 1998. www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/viii_paris-city-gb.pdf. Lee, Pamela M. “On the Holes of History: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris”. October 85, no. 85 (Summer 1998): 65–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/779183. Lefebvre, Henri. “Reflections on the Politics of Space”. Translated by Michael J. Enders, Antipode 8, no. 2 (May 2006): 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14678330.1976.tb00636.x. First published May 1976. Lindhé, Cecilia. “‘A Visual Sense Is Born in the Fingertips’: Towards a Digital Ekphrasis”. DHQ 7, no. 1 (2013). Accessed January 15, 2019. www.digitalhumanities. org/dhq/vol/7/1/000161/000161.html. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Critical Reflections”. Artforum International 29, no. 8 (1991): 92–3. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect”. In Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited by Paul Patton, 217–39. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Matta-Clark, Gordon, and Bruno de Wit. “Étant d’art: pour locataire: Conical inter-sect”. 1975. Accessed December 5, 2018. https://vimeo.com/10617205. McTighe, Monica E. Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art. Hannover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01973762.2014.908103. Metcalf, Robert. “The Elemental Sallis: On Wonder and Philosophy’s ‘Beginning’”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 27, no. 2 (2013): 208–15.

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Miessen, Markus. Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice. New York: Sternberg Press, 2016. Mitchell, William John Thomas. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ———. “What Is an Image?” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 503–37. Murdoch, Jonathan. Post-Structuralist Geography. London: Sage Publications, 2006. Nigel, Thomas J. T. “Mental Imagery”. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2018 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. First published 1997. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/mental-imagery/. Opałka, Piotr. “Blurring the Borders Between Architecture and the Visual Arts”. Technical Transactions. Architecture 9–A, no. 15 (2015): 249–54. O’Sullivan, Simon.“The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation”. Angelaki 6, no. 3 (2001): 125–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987. Ouroussoff, Nicolai. “Timely Lessons From a Rebel, Who Often Created by Destroying”. New York Times, March 3, 2007. https://curatorialstudioseminar. files.wordpress.com/2014/07/ouroussoff_matta-clark.pdf. Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge, 1958. www.bulgari-istoria-2010.com/Rechnici/An_Etymological_Dictionary_of_Modern_English.pdf. Plett, Heinrich F. Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 4. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Posner, Roland.“Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Semiotics? Sign Theory at the fin de siècle”. Semiotica 183, no. 1/4 (2011): 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1515/ semi.2011.002. Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis. New York: Routledge, 2006. Power, Cormac. “Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence in the Theatre”. PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2006. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3428/. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum, 2006. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Media and Narrative”. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 288–93. London: Routledge, 2005. Silverman, Max. Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Society and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Reprinted 2002. Spitzer, Leo. “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar”. Comparative Literature 7, no. 3 (1955): 203–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1768227. Squire, Michael. “Ekphrasis at the Forge and the Forging of Ekphrasis: The ‘Shield of Achilles’ in Graeco-Roman Word and Image”. Word and Image 29, no. 2 (2013): 157–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2012.663612. Stenner, Paul. Liminality and Experience: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Psychosocial. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Sterne, Gregory Jonathan. “Communication as Techné”. In Communication as . . . Perspectives on Theory, edited by Gregory J. Shepard, Jeffry St. John, and Ted Striphas, 91–8. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006. Stoner, Jill. Toward a Minor Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

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Ursprung, Philipp. “‘Moment to Moment: Space’: The Architecture Performances of Gordon Matta-Clark”. Translated by Steven Lindberg. In Performance and the Politics of Space, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz, 264–77. London: Routledge, 2013. Wagner, Peter. Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books, 1995. Walker, Stephen. Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Webb, Ruth. “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre”. Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 15, no. 1 (1999): 7–18. ———. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Whitehead, Derek H. “Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-Be”. Contemporary Aesthetics 1 (2003). Accessed February 5, 2017. https://contempaesthetics. org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=216. Yacobi, Tamar. “Fictive Beholders: How Ekphrasis Dramatizes Visual Perception”. In Iconotropism: Turning Toward Pictures, edited by Ellen Spolsky, 69–88. Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Zanker, Graham. “Enargeia in the Ancient Criticism of Poetry”. RhM 124 (1981): 297–311.

7

Architectural Ekphraseis Unveiling a Brazilian Wall-Less House in Contemporary Fiction1 Miriam Vieira

The astonishing capacity for interaction between architectural environments and human beings may challenge some communication and media models. Architecture is here (re)introduced as a qualified medium2 due to its historical discourse in the system of arts and its potential to perform within human communication and culture. By challenging the dominant idea of discussing media products in their final state, in the case a modernist house in Brazil, I claim that, due to its inherent potential to store discourse, architecture as a medium demands to be considered in terms of its procedural quality. The architectural process involves several instances of transmediation, both verbal and non-verbal, in technical, or nonfiction, literature. By architectural process I mean both material and virtual instances of it from its inception. While the latter involves collaborations among the involved parties – client, architect, engineer, builder, among other professionals – the former encompasses all the design stages, from sketches to the actual use of the edificated building. Nevertheless, such architectural process(es) may be transmediated in several ways through different literary devices. One of these is ekphrasis. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to discuss how ekphrasis is able to foreground the subject of architecture by unveiling such processes in fiction. The awardwinning3 modernist house known as “Samambaia”,4 home of Lota de Macedo Soares, Brazilian life partner of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, plays a key role in two contemporary novels: Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, written5 by Brazilian author Carmen Oliveira (1995); and The More I Owe You, by American author Michael Sledge (2010). In both narratives, the protagonists’ home is brought into light by means of architectural ekphrasis. But before delving into these cases, I shall (a) briefly introduce Samambaia and (b) present how architecture fits into the ekphrasis discourse.

About Samambaia The historical figures Lota de Macedo Soares and Elizabeth Bishop6 had a few addresses in Brazil: an apartment in Rio de Janeiro, a house in

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Mariana,7 and, of course, Samambaia, located on the outskirts of the historic city of Petrópolis. Lota de Macedo Soares was an irreverent entrepreneur and self-taught architect. Despite being passionate about the art of construction and attending some architecture courses, including one taught by the prestigious French architect Le Corbusier8 during his stay in Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s, she never obtained a university degree simply because women of her generation were not supposed to. As a result, Lota de Macedo Soares hired architect Sérgio Bernardes9 to design her ultra-modern dream house inserted into the Atlantic Forest. A combination of industrialized and organic materials can be used in architecture to “resensitise people to their surroundings, leading ultimately to a realignment with nature”.10 Doing so positions the notion of space as conceived from the beholder’s point of view. The curiosity aroused by Samambaia promotes what Le Corbusier named “architectural promenade”.11 In addition, the harmonic integration of the construction with the accidental topography and into the wild vegetation evokes the “organic architecture”12 advocated by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In short, by resignifying the cosmopolitan influences of Lota de Macedo Soares and Sérgio Bernandes’s precursors, Samambaia reveals the potential of Brazilian innovative modernist architecture.

Ekphrasis and Architecture “The presence of architecture in literature would appear to be doubly confined and circumscribed by the epideictic genres, [more specifically] linked to the practice of ekphrasis”,13 proposed Philippe Hamon in his studies on 19th-century French fiction. However, the two words architecture and ekphrasis do not often appear together, probably due to the fact that architecture is not acknowledged as a medium capable of representing a narrative of its own, at least in the fashion of James Heffernan’s common-sense definition “verbal representation of visual representation”.14 Nevertheless, in order to include nonnarrative media products such as abstract paintings, architecture and cultural media products in the discussion of ekphrasis, Claus Clüver has broadened Heffernan’s definition to “the verbal representation of a real or fictitious text or texts composed in a non-verbal medium or sign system”.15 Elleström, in turn, argues that “no conflict exists between a target medium both representing and transmediating a source medium.” For him, “ekphrasis is not to be exclusively understood as media representation. Theoretical discussions of ekphrasis and, first and foremost, analytical practice tend to include not only media representation but also transmediation”.16 This discussion has led me to a reexamination and revision of the understanding around representation as the act of one medium (literature) presenting another medium (architecture), again in favor of the process involved in the act of transformation, by unfolding its ancient roots. Ruth Webb

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explains how the rhetorical notion of ekphrasis “does not seek to represent, but to have an effect in the audience’s mind that mimics the act of seeing”.17 According to ancient rhetorical handbooks, “places made by men, harbours, colonnades and the like”18 were common subjects of ekphrasis. Thus, among various subjects – such as paintings, sculptures, festivals, and battles – architecture has actually always been a source of inspiration for ekphrasis. Moreover, regardless of its subject, ekphrasis conveys and activates images stored in the recipient’s memory, a sort of mental scheme due to its force, which is called enargeia. Briefly, enargeia is the power carried by a text to create visual images, while ekphrasis evokes an absent image in the mind of the reader, or spectator, and therefore provokes an emotional response. The image thus created is likely to be culturally dependent on the eyes of the audience. This means that in order to enhance the effect being pursued, the artefact being described needs to be part of the collective imaginary of the target audience. According to Heidrun Führer, ekphrastic passages are able to reach the eyes of the audience by eliciting their “performative capacity to imagine, and [by provoking] emotional effects linked to . . . culturally influenced mental images”.19 To ancient rhetoric, the conception of ekphrasis was always thought of in terms of bodily performance and linguistic performativity. The differentiation between arts and crafts was not the same in ancient times as in the 18th century. By further developing the idea of bodily performance and linguistic performativity, I aim to discuss how ekphrasis is able to illuminate architecture as an embodied process of production and perception. But first, with reference to the work of Werner Wolf and Lars Elleström, I shall demonstrate that by undoing the fixation of the final product as a distinct medium,20 architecture should be considered as a medium in its broadest sense.21 On the one hand, as a medial procedure, ekphrasis is supposed to foreground the architectural process that culminated in Samambaia. On the other hand, its mere verbal reference or description,22 without enargeia, is not enough to be taken as architectural ekphrasis. Enargeia, in its turn, is likely to be achieved by the appeal to architecture’s medial features. Elleström’s proposed model23 for studying the transfer of media characteristics among dissimilar media has set the course for determining the intrinsic features of architecture that literature is able to reveal. This proposed model combines semiotic characteristics – which include iconic, indexical and symbolic aspects – with nonsemiotic ones, that is, the material, sensorial and spatiotemporal modes, which speak to the fundaments of mediation. However, besides an understanding of the four modalities for the transfer of architecture’s medial characteristics to literature, or its medialities,24 as in the words of Jørgen Bruhn, the inclusion of the qualifying, contextual aspects of an architectural work is of extreme relevance, since they will speak of its origins, delimitations, and usage within specific

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historical, cultural, and social circumstances. That is, they will provide background on both the production and the reception of architectural works. Furthermore, the observation of qualifying operational aspects is necessary when dealing with the building’s aesthetic and communicative characteristics. Therefore, in order to enable a deeper interpretation of architectural ekphrasis, one should take into account the medial traits involved in the transmediation of architectural processes: the discourses in different sign systems (i.e., verbal negotiations, sketches, computeraided models); the framing of passages; the textual markers; the evidences revealed by allusions and symbols; and the readers’ imagination. In other words, the transmediation of an architectural environment in the literary objects investigated in this chapter plays a hermeneutical role. Regarding the modality modes of Samambaia, it should be acknowledged that they trigger many senses at the same time. The combination of the use of multiple materials with different weather elements and human activities is likely to cause an impact beyond the visual by, for instance, bringing about different smells, producing sounds and affecting room temperature. In addition, when physically experiencing a building, many actions must be taken in relation to the construction’s affordances, such as opening doors or pushing the buttons of an elevator. Therefore, I suggest that another “sense” should be considered: the kinesthetic sense, which is related to sensorimotor activity, the movements and use of one’s own body. According to Paul Crowther, “the building’s articulation of form, shape, and mass in enduring materials, on the basis of symmetry, proportion, and the like, offers a kind of rectification or idealization of the body’s vectors of sensorimotor activity.”25 Hence, the idea of embodiment should be also considered when scrutinizing how the house’s features are likely to be transferred to the two novels I investigate. The notion of embodiment (corporéité) was proposed by MerleauPonty (1945) and aimed to include, in addition to the mind, the body in the acts of perception and representation of the world. Since this consciousness does not originate just from the mind, the notion of embodiment is supposed to guarantee the body’s central role in the way we experience the world. It is common knowledge that body and mind have an inextricable connection that cannot be dissociated. Differently from the duality proposed by Cartesian thought, subject and object compose only one unit to be treated as two facets of the same embodied entity.26 Such a notion supports the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s premise that it “is not enough to see architecture; we must experience it . . . . You must dwell in the rooms, feel how they close about you, observe how you are naturally led from one to the other”.27 Architecture is supposed to be physically explored by the senses, since its effects promote awareness by unveiling its textures. For instance, Rasmussen suggests that one must “discover why just those colors [and not another palette] were used” and how to “experience the great difference acoustics make in [one’s]

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conception of space”.28 So it is not enough for an edifice to be contemplated, it must be physically experienced. In addition, the point of view in modernist architecture should not be fixed but rather subjected to an individual embodied experience,29 as suggested by Le Corbusier’s notion of “architectural promenade.” This embodied tour within and around Samambaia enables the perception of new perspectives from different points of view. The notion of perspective presents distinct connotations within distinct disciplines. James Elkins states that “perspective directs our eyes and orders our thoughts . . . it seems to control not only what I see, but how I see and how I describe what I see.”30 The argument in favor of this unique and individualized point of view in the visual arts dialogues is compatible with the notion of focalization developed by narratology studies. According to Monika Fludernik,31 the focalization of single passages will fill functional gaps within novels’ plots. The emphasis on intense embodied visual experiences set within a personal frame and the indissoluble relationship between presence and absence is at the core of ekphrasis. Since one tends to notice only what is already known, when receivers “see” something according to the producer’s viewpoint, they are likely to perceive things that they did not know or had never seen (or heard) before. Meanwhile, when readers (or viewers) “see” something they are used to but that is presented according to the persona’s point of view (narrator, character or writer), a new perspective is added to their previous understanding. As already mentioned, an ekphrasis of an architectural environment demands an active mental movement of the recipient in an imagined space that includes the process of time. Ancient rhetoric called this imaginative exploration of traveling virtually through various levels of spatiotemporality periegesis. Ekphraseis of spaces and buildings would sometimes be intensified by the use of this rhetorical device. By exploring space, shores, landscapes and interiors of buildings, periegesis was used as an epistemological tool in order to tell people about things and places they perhaps had not seen before. According to Webb, periegesis is an “elaborate form of telling” that “casts the speaker as a guide showing the listener around the sight” or “through space”,32 and also prompts the architectural experience of going in, out, around and about even more vividly to the spectators. Aimed at providing the audience with a sort of mental performative power, periegesis is a tool that helps them achieve enargeia in ekphraseis. Thereby, space, time and the embodied experience of a created environment render a significant and evocative referential frame that is verbally performed to fulfill an emotional and epistemological purpose and to elucidate not only familiar edifices, but also those the spectator has not seen before. With reference to the notion of architectural ekphrasis as a (trans)medial procedure, I will now address the following questions: (a) How can the medial traits and aesthetic qualities of Samambaia be experienced in the two narratives? (b) Since the house is in Brazil and one of

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the investigated novels is written by a non-Brazilian author, what role do cross-cultural aspects play within this crossing of borders between literature and architecture? and (c) What is the role of the transmediation of Samambaia within the two narratives?

A Glass Jewel Box Built in Paradise The More I Owe You tells the story that starts with Elizabeth’s journey to Brazil on a ship and ends with Lota’s death. The book is divided into three parts, all named after poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Besides these direct citations, the narrative clearly reveals a contamination of the poet’s style, especially in the passages that introduce the reader to the Brazilian tropical landscape. The plot elaborates further on the nuances of the protagonists’ personalities by presenting the vigor of the (apparently) fragile poet and the instability of her partner’s strength. Even if the poet’s point of view is mostly favored in their rather competitive relationship, the narrator manages to reveal both the frailty and the toughness of each protagonist by giving them both equal attention. A critical, sometimes aggressive Lota, whose professional insecurities are revealed in recurrent nightmares, suffers intensely, especially at the end of her life. Elizabeth, in her turn, never lets herself become totally immersed in the relationship, constantly recalling that Brazil was not her final destination. Her eminent loneliness is recurrently foreshadowed. Despite the poet’s acknowledged alcoholism and introspection, her initial bitterness gradually turns into prudence, mainly during the critical stage of Lota’s depression. By withstanding adversities, Elizabeth reveals a powerful inner glow. However, the focus of my reading is on how architectural medial traits are revealed by means of well-crafted ekphraseis. In The More I Owe You, a long ekphrastic excerpt not only introduces Samambaia, but also gives a detailed account of the landscape in which the complex relationship between Elizabeth and Lota will unfold. The reader is conducted from the postcard-like skyline of Rio de Janeiro upwards and into the Atlantic Forest biome. The ekphrastic passage starts when Lota picks Elizabeth up in Rio de Janeiro to drive her to Samambaia, which is still under construction. The narrator leads the reader’s eyes as the car zigged and zagged up the hillside behind Copacabana, Lota accelerating into the cobblestone curves until the tires cried out. . . . Only as they crested the mountain did the car pause, balanced momentarily upon the ridge like an eagle surveying its realm. The convolutions of Rio lay before them, the rise and fall of hills populated by slums and apartment buildings, the modern high-rises at the center, Christ above, the harbor, the far ring of mountains. Then, launching into air, down they swooped in a rush. . . . Near the bottom

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The rhetorical tool of periegesis is used here to intensify the rollercoaster effect that is reinforced by the implied irregular gear shift made on the tortuous path along the rugged topography, a metaphorical account of Elizabeth’s state of mind. Concurrently, the intermingled brief dialogues between the two protagonists enable them to learn about each other’s personalities. The reader, through the contemplative lens of Elizabeth, is driven into an environment encircled by “tendrils of mist” and covered by “dense fog”. From the inside of “the car’s cocoon”, the character notices the “surroundings beyond the latticework of branches over their heads and the screen of thick foliage on either side of the road”34 that reminds her how “she’d have to write a note to Miss Breen”35 to tell her about her arrival at “the Green Mansions”,36 since the view is “just as [they had] pictured” during the sea voyage from the United States to Brazil. In the meantime, Lota gives her guest a “lecture on the subject of Brazil’s modernist architecture”.37 But her lecture is brought to an abrupt halt: “‘Do you read much poetry?’ Elizabeth interrupted.” This shift in the conversation not only enables the poet to better connect with the inner sensations that have been triggered by the steep road, but also foreshadows the Yin-Yang roles the protagonists will play in their relationship. Although Elizabeth experiences discomfort in her ears because of the increasing altitude, [the] mist, dissipating, transformed into a bright, luminous haze. The sun began to warm her skin. Then she saw that the fog had not simply evaporated but that they [Lota and Elizabeth] had risen above it [by car] and were now at such a great height they looked down upon the clouds. Jungled mountain peaks lay all around, the valleys below turned to rivers of pillowy white. A surfeit of feeling bloomed in Elizabeth’s chest, a moment of breathless pleasure.38 The sensorial account of the exotic landscape shows that Elizabeth feels welcomed in the tropical environment; the landscape itself would serve as inspiration for the Pulitzer-winning poem “Song for a Rainy Season” (1960), yet to be written39 within the novel’s diegetic time. It is worth mentioning that the first two strophes of “Song for a Rainy Season” are quoted in the form of an epigraph to the second part of the book. At their destination, the narrator continues: So here was the famous house. Introduced by a concrete plane that nearly bruised your nose. Lota entered a hole in the wall, and Elizabeth followed her host through a number of long concrete rooms, one communicating with the next. When they stopped, they’d made a

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loop back to where they’d begun. As promised, the boundary between inside and outside was blurred beyond recognition. There appeared to be no inside at all. The house was open to the sky, at present it had no external walls, just great gaping holes to the out-of-doors. Thin steel trusses, almost delicate, were being fitted over their heads and would soon, Lota said, support a roof made of aluminum sheets; the trusses called to mind the latticework of tree branches Elizabeth had just seen on the mountain road. Here and there labored dark little men in beaten-up straw hats. One carried stones in a wheelbarrow, a second chipped them with a chisel and mortared them into a wall fifteen feet high. Several more lifted the trusses onto fittings set into the concrete.40 Periegesis is activated in the first half of the excerpt: the actions (underlined expressions, emphasis mine) of the two characters enhance an “architectural promenade” throughout the construction site, while the edifice’s features (expression in bold, emphasis mine) promote one of the goals of modernist architecture, the integration of the house into nature. Note that, the word “inside” is visually emphasized in italics in the original book, while the other emphases have been added by me, including the box added to reinforce the relevance of the word “inside” to my analysis. Embodiment is highlighted by the frame in which Elizabeth is physically inserted – she almost breaks her nose in a collision with one of the walls – whereas the kinesthetic sense is expressed by the way in which Lota enters the house through “a hole in the wall”. While Elizabeth is guided by Lota through the construction site, the narrator guides the readers according to the poet’s point of view. By doing so, the author plays with the notion of perspective, be it technical, be it literary. Embodied in the framed scene, the character Elizabeth who guides the reader, realizes the construction’s blurring of the inside and the outside boundaries. In the second half of the passage, the narrator highlights how the elements holding up the aluminum roof recall a shape found in nature. Elizabeth, now positioned outside the construction, becomes distracted by the forms of the roof structure and starts to pay attention to how the work is being executed (expressions in italics, emphasis mine) by the laborers, as if she were watching a theatrical performance. Nonetheless, the contemplative passage is interrupted by Lota’s explanation of how her house was “the first in Brazil to incorporate this style of roof,” Lota said. “The workers think I’m mad. They’ve never seen anything like it before. Of course they haven’t – it’s revolutionary. If I’m not watching them every minute, they build their own way, as many times as I tell them otherwise. Then they become furious when I have to yell at them to tear down what they’ve done and start over. We spend the whole day screaming at each other.”

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Since Elizabeth is also confused by the architectural novelty and sympathizes with the workers’ frustration, she prefers to avoid the discussion between Lota, the foreman and the puzzled construction workers. The narrator then tells how the poet backed away from the argument and stepped outside through one of the enormous holes in the wall. The house was odd, it took some getting used to. . . . At once solid and light, serious and cheerful, like Lota herself. She squinted her eyes and imagined what Lota had described – a house sheathed in glass, a glass jewel box on the mountainside, inviting nature in from every side – and she glimpsed just how immensely beautiful it would be. From the concrete slab where Elizabeth stood, the view was only the most recent in a series of breathtaking sights. A lush green valley spread before her, forested mountains rising on the other side. Behind the house, a sheer face of black granite shot vertically upward for at least a thousand feet, like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. You half expected a pterodactyl to glide across the face of the cliff. Long streaks ran down the black rock, like the tracks of gigantic snails, while clouds cascaded over the lip, creating a waterfall of mist that was constantly evaporating and regenerating. The sun was hot on her skin and head, but before she began to feel she’d had too much, a cloudlet passed over and cooled the air to ease any discomfort. Lota was building a house in paradise.42 After leaving the framed scene physically “through one of the enormous holes in the wall”, Elizabeth remembers how Lota “had described a house sheathed in glass, a glass jewel box on the mountainside, inviting nature in from every side”. By putting into words what Lota had imagined would eventually become a house, enargeia is triggered concomitantly in the character’s and in the reader’s mind. That is, instead of interacting directly with the construction site in front of her eyes, Elizabeth imagines the future as she “glimpsed just how immensely beautiful it would be”. In a dynamic cognitive scheme necessary for constructing ekphrasis, the poet prefers to revive what is in her memory, which will later be materialized in the poem “Song for a Rainy Season”. In other words, the ekphrasis that takes place in the mind of the readers merges with the ekphrasis inside the character’s mind.

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Elizabeth observes Samambaia and its surroundings “from the concrete slab”. By using expressions such as “clouds cascaded”, “waterfall of mist that was constantly evaporating” and “cloudlet passed over and cooled the air”, the persona’s viewpoint in “Song for a Rainy Season” is used as a reference to supplement the (lack of) background knowledge of readers unfamiliar with the Atlantic Forest biome. Besides relying on the imagery from the poem, Sledge also evokes Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan of the Apes, and a specific type of dinosaur. Although these references are somewhat awkward for Brazilian readers, they are resources that are used to trigger enargeia in audiences who may never have experienced this kind of tropical environment. In sum, by means of periegesis, the characters interact with the construction site that has been inserted into a tropical environment, while ekphrasis encompasses the visualizing of an edifice that is open to the landscape reinforced by the blurred inside-outside borderline. Besides the enargeia triggered by the ekphrastic passage, the appeal to the senses is also enhanced by references to familiar literary pieces – Bishop’s poem and Burroughs’s novella – in order to create the desired aesthetics as well as to better engage the novel’s potential readers. As part of the larger concept of rhetorical ekphrasis, the passage unfolds an embodied experience of seeing anew. In an embodied and mental experience, ekphrasis is used as a (trans)medial procedure to make the absent (known or unknown) architectural environment, Samambaia, present to both the (intradiegetic) viewer and the (extradiegetic) reader.

A Wall-Less House in the Middle of the Clouds Samambaia plays a key role with the impact of a third character in the approximation of the two protagonists in the narrative of Rare and Commonplace Flowers. The novel’s plot takes place from 1951, when the two protagonists meet in Boston, until 1967, the year of Lota’s death in New York. Most of the chapters take the form of anecdotes, some of them told through Bishop’s poetic introspective accounts of Brazilian costumes, landscape and Brazilian architecture of the 1950s; others through Lota’s pragmatic political positioning on the period that preceded the 1964 military coup in Brazil.43 Rare and Commonplace Flowers takes advantage of different types of medial references: some Brazilian and North American popular songs are listed as “sources” at the end of the book and many poems by Elizabeth Bishop are cited or evoked. For instance, “Song for a Rainy Season” is even partially reproduced in the novel.44 At first glance, this poem is dedicated to the peculiar and great changes that take place during the rainy season in the mountain region. According to the novel, by emphasizing the natural landscape in which Samambaia is inserted, the poem refers to details that praise it “not as an architectural monument, but as a house

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permanently open to nature”.45 Therefore, while this kind of reference to the poet’s oeuvre pays homage to her writing style, observations made by the character Bishop on Brazilian customs reinforce the plot’s historical, social and cultural contextualization. Besides the textual references, the multimodal book features three sections in which photographs, newspaper cutouts, letters, sketches and caricatures are reproduced. Most of them operate as a frame for or supplement to the many architectural ekphraseis that are not “detachable set pieces”46 but truly indispensable to the novel’s narrative construction. In other words, Rare and Commonplace Flowers disturbs the simplifying emphasis of sign system opposition (verbal vs visual), as suggested by Heffernan’s common-sense definition of ekphrasis. In this novel, the ekphrasis of Samambaia appears in the passage in which Bishop is invited by Lota to visit the house’s construction site. The trajectory “in the midst of dazzling scenery” on their route to Petrópolis, “an enchanting little town” with “solemn mansions, with well-kept gardens adorned with hydrangeas”, is constructed as a periegesis from Bishop’s viewpoint as they “deftly maneuvered around rocks and holes”.47 In order to emphasize the immediateness of the poet’s bodily-visual experience along the exotic route, the narrator recurrently uses the adverbial expression “suddenly”. Once they arrive, still inside the car, Bishop raises her head to admire “[i]n the distance, the bluish mountains. All around, the forest. In front, powerful, an enormous slab of granite”.48 The uncanniness of being led into a construction site hidden in such a wild landscape and the sensory overload of the foreigner arriving on a new continent are intertwined with the host’s (too) attentive manners. All of the details noticed “here and there” turn the periegesis into a vivid experience. At the construction site, Bishop sees that two half-naked men were perched on top of a wall. Guided by Lota, Bishop traversed the site from top to bottom, stepping on cement that had been abundantly decorated by dog prints. This will be here, that will be there, Lota pointed out enthusiastically. A gentle touch on the arm indicated that it was time for Bishop to keep moving. Lota explained how she had planned the house, with someone whose name Bishop did not grasp. In a daze, the American woman dimly understood that a house without walls was to be erected there; or else it was a corridor, around which there was to be a house.49 A close reading of this excerpt in the light of its semiotic modality, as defined by Elleström,50 might elicit the complexity of a semiosis process of architectural discourse. Due to the procedural status of the construction site, the ekphrastic passage unfolds the medial complexity of architectural communication, including both visual and verbal signs. It

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demonstrates the relativity of the communicational act among its characters: the architect Sérgio, Lota, the workers and Bishop. Moreover, some technical aspects in respect to the process of the house design – conception, elaboration, and construction – are revealed. Even though the building is being erected by construction workers, it was Lota who conceived the house in the first place. The fact that the authorship of the design is by “someone whose name Bishop did not grasp”51 highlights the loss of origin within the architectural process. This erasure foregrounds something specific to the “medium” architecture, namely the mutual understanding. The communicational gap between the guide and her guest, due to the foreign language all around them or to Bishop’s bewilderment, might be related to how, as a writer, she is so dependent on words and verbal understanding. However, architecture also embraces other medialities that lie beyond words. The intertwinement of traditional and innovative construction technologies used in Samambaia reinforces the aesthetics of Brazilian modernist architecture. In short, the passage reveals what the construction site would eventually become: a wall-less house. While Lota guides Bishop in a pragmatic tour inside the construction site, the poet concentrates all her attention on the outside of it. The unfamiliar multicolored landscape will later inspire her to (intradiegetically) write “Song for a Rainy Season”. The humidity caused by the actions of elements of nature and the vegetation growing over the construction are alluded to in another passage when the narrator mentions that “the mustiness of the prized house continued to afflict the bronchial tubes of the fragile American [who] had prolonged asthma attacks.”52 In this novel, the ekphrasis is not reduced to being about a man-made artefact, but rather insists on its integration into nature and opens up a new way of thinking about architecture as neither a natural process nor a static artwork. The narrator explains that, since women were not supposed to attend university in Brazil at that time, Lota hired one of her male architect friends, Sérgio Bernardes, to design her dream house. Samambaia should be built as a shapely object in straight lines among the ornate and sinuous forms of nature. The rigidity of iron, the fragility of glass, the luster of the artifact, and the roughness of rocks from the river would all coexist. Different textures, shapes, and levels would always put the observer in front of unforeseen angles, pushing him, because it was so beautiful, to accept what transgressed the norms. The house would express Lota’s passionate ideas about modern architecture. It happened that Sérgio had his own passionate ideas about modern architecture. The result: fireworks when the two of them sat down to discuss the project. He held the degree in architecture, but she was Lota de Macedo Soares.53

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By means of a more technical, rather than poetic, discourse, this excerpt illustrates how Samambaia is composed of innovative materials, such as steel and glass. It also explores the virtual potentiality of architecture by presenting the confrontation between the client’s imagination and the architect’s passionate ideas. I understand architecture as a process that departs from the thoughts and ideas that have materialized in the minds of those involved, hence, the (heated) discussions between Lota and Sérgio materialize alternative solutions by means of words. When approaching architecture from its procedural quality, it needs to be thought of as having several stages, from the moment someone decides to have something built to the moment it is ready to be used. The initial ideas are transmediated into words, the words are expressed by drawings (done by hand in the past and nowadays aided by computer software), the set of drawings that comprises the project is reproduced in blueprints, and these blueprints are used as diagrammatical references at the construction site. The complete architectural process culminates in the edifice per se. Thus, the interactive discourse created by the negotiation to reach the common goal of the producer(s) and client(s) needs to be taken into account. In brief, the communication about the future building is only successful when visions and perceptions vividly convey a common mental image, which happens to be the rhetorical principle of ekphrasis. The narrator foregrounds Bishop’s personal viewpoint that structures the following ekphrasis, which is framed with variations of the verb “to watch” (emphasis mine): That morning, Bishop watched Lota moving from one side to another, directing the placement of trellises on the roof. To the despair of the two masons, this roof didn’t have slats or clay tiles, like any usual roof. It was a mad contraption made of aluminum plates supported by steel girders. Because the work was very expensive, Lota had decided to build the most audacious architectural elements last, after finishing a basic nucleus with a bedroom, living room, bath room, and kitchen. The walls were already standing. Now they had to be covered, which she would accomplish as soon as she could convert her two unwilling helpers. Bishop didn’t tire of watching her. It was good for a person to dream, and then build her own house.54 The simple lexis used – nouns related to the materials used and the rooms of the house (roof, slats, clay tiles, aluminum plates, steel girders, bedroom, living room, bath room, kitchen, walls) and verbs related to the act of building (directing, supported, build, standing, covered) – reinforces the physical materiality of architecture. Virtual materiality is also present, since Lota, who is supposedly the client, is literally putting up the

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shelter. The tridimensional volume defined by the roof, which is about to be placed on the top of the walls, will give what is now just a “corridor” the status of a residence. In the meantime, in a contemplative way, Bishop observes the scene from the outside, as if she is in a gallery admiring a bidimensional piece of artwork or in a theater watching a performance by Lota and the two masons scenographically inserted within the architectural space. In other words, differently from the other ekphraseis in the novel, which are promoted by periegesis, in this passage, the narrator constructs the emphasis in a contemplative manner that evidences both Bishop’s outsider position and the aesthetic value of the house under construction. One can see physically present artefacts as signs, just as one can see even further than what is present when such artefacts are unfolded in an infinite process of semiosis. Ekphrasis is used as a (trans)medial procedure to intensify the process of seeing, both in the phenomenological and in the cognitive sense, for the intradiegetic characters and the reader. When integrated into an architectural ekphrasis, the material presence of the diegetic world is unfolded in its virtual time and space. This process is transferred from the embodied viewer onto an architectural space that therefore becomes animated. During the construction site tour, by means of architectural ekphrasis, the narrator guides the reader while Lota makes her idea of the ultramodern house present in the poet’s mind, so that, in the narrative, Bishop will transmediate her own material construct in the form of a poem. At the end of the last ekphrastic passage displayed above, the narrator acknowledges that Bishop is no longer an outsider since she has settled down not only in the house but also in Lota’s life. By sharing “a healthy happiness”, the once in-between state of love is dissolved during the (relatively short) time the two protagonists spend together in the wall-less house that is endlessly “under construction in the middle of the clouds”.55 In short, the narrative of the novel Rare and Commonplace Flowers, by means of architectural ekphrasis, unveils how Samambaia harmonizes Lota’s dream of building an ultramodern house and Bishop’s wish to have a place she can call home.

Final Thoughts In Rare and Commonplace Flowers, the novel written by the Brazilian author Carmen Oliveira, architectural ekphrasis takes place in a fragmented way. However, Samambaia is so present in the narrative that it may be taken as a character that brings the two protagonists together when Lota invites Bishop to visit the house under construction, even if the medialities of another architectural environment later sets them apart (when Lota focuses all her energy on the construction of Flamengo’s Park and Bishop feels left out of her partner’s life, but this is a topic for

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another essay). In The More I Owe You, the novel written by the American author Michael Sledge, however, the sources of architectural ekphrasis are extrapolated by including places beyond the ones where the two protagonists lived, probably to help readers build the imaginary of where the plot action takes place. In both novels, the characteristics of the architectural aesthetic movement that are in vogue within the diegetic time are transmediated by means of architectural ekphraseis inspired by the house known as Samambaia. In such passages, the reader is invited to physically experience the organic quality of a house inserted into the Atlantic Forest biome through the blur of inside-outside borderlines. Besides situating the house Samambaia aesthetically, historically and geographically, the architectural ekphraseis, enhanced by periegesis, manage to promote sensorial, mental and embodied experiences to the characters as well as to the readers. By means of enargeia, vividness is activated by way of culturally dependent mental schemes. The mutual understanding triggered by the engagement of the mind of the receiver and of the producer is analogous to successful interaction between client and architect in the architectural process. The discussion of these tactics broadens the ekphrasis discourse by foregrounding not only the subject of architecture, but also its impact as a cognitive exercise to stimulate the recipient’s imagination and participation through the unveiling of the architectural process of a wall-less house.

Acknowledgments The present work was supported by the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Developement, CNPq—Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (process number: 168942/2017-8). I would like to thank Heidrun Führer, Associate Professor, Lunds Universitet, Sweden, who was my supervisor during my Doctoral Academic Mobility sponsored by Erasmus Mundus Action 2 Programme that took place in 2015/2016, for all her support and collaboration since then.

Notes 1. This chapter is an update on the partial results of my doctoral dissertation titled “Dimensões da écfrase: a presença da pintura e da arquitetura em romances de artista” (2016), UFMG, Brazil. The investigated cases have also been presented in Portuguese at “Samambaia: uma casa (trans) formada por poesia e romance,” a chapter of a Brazilian publication edited by Arbex, Diniz and Vieira entitled Escrita, som, imagem: perpectivas contemporâneas, 83–102. 2. Media “may be understood as communicative tools, in the widest sense of the word, constituted by related features.” Elleström, Media Transformation, 2. 3. The architectural design of Samambaia won a prize at the celebrated 2nd International Architecture Exhibition of São Paulo in 1954; it was chosen by a selected jury headed by Walter Gropius.

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4. The word samambaia means fern, a typical plant from the mountainous tropical region of Petrópolis in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 5. Translated into English by Neil K. Besner in 2003. 6. Whenever I use the full names Lota de Macedo Soares and Elizabeth Bishop, I am referring to them as historical figures. Whenever I simply use Lota and Bishop/Elizabeth, I am referring to them as characters of the novels. 7. A historical town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. 8. Pseudonym used by the French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887–1965). 9. For more about Sérgio Bernardes and his design of Samambaia, including photographs of the plans and the house, see www.bernardesarq.com.br/memoria/ lota-macedo-soares/ and http://institutolotta.org.br/casa-de-samambaia. 10. Samuel, Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade, 9. 11. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complète, Vol. 1, 60. 12. While Le Corbusier proposed the concept of machine-à-habiter, Wright disseminated the notion of “organic architecture”. The latter believed “that the ideal of an organic architecture forms the origin and source, the strength and, fundamentally, the significance of everything ever worthy the name of architecture”. By organic, he meant “an architecture that develops from within outward in harmony with the conditions of its being as distinguished from one that is applied from without”. Wright, “In the Cause of Architecture,” 406. 13. Hamon, Expositions, 24. 14. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3. In a recent essay, Heffernan argues that the narrative of a source medium may be turned into its target medium, He also states that “ekphrasis is a kind of writing that turns pictures into storytelling words”. Heffernan, “Ekphrasis: Theory,” 48. 15. Clüver, “Ekphrasis Reconsidered,” 26. In order to avoid the discussion of filmic ekphrasis, Clüver redefined ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of real or fictive configurations composed in a non-kinetic visual medium” in “Ekphrasis and Adaptation,” 462. 16. Elleström, Media Transformation, 33. 17. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion, 38. 18. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion, 80. 19. Führer and Banaszkiewicz, “The Trajectory of Ancient Ekphrasis,” 59. 20. For Werner Wolf, the discussion on the notion of medium should be broadened to its process, as suggested in Wolf, “Literature and Music: A Theory,” 459–74. 21. Lars Elleström discusses both the restricted and the broadest senses of media in Elleström, Media Transformation, 11–35. 22. It is important to note that ekphrasis goes beyond description, since, as an ancient rhetorical device, it involved both description and narration in order to, by means of enargeia, induce vivid thoughts and sensations, making the listener become a spectator. 23. Elleström, Media Transformation, 47–61. 24. For Jørgen Bruhn, medialities “are specified clusters of communicative forms” (17) that “may be briefly defined as tools of communicative action inside or outside the arts” (1). Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature, 1–40. 25. Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, 181 (author’s emphasis). 26. Auslander, Theory for Performance Studies, 136–9. 27. Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture, 33 (author’s emphasis). 28. Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture, 33. 29. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 33–48. 30. Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, 212.

134 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Miriam Vieira Fludernik, “Description and Perspective,” 461–78. Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion, 54. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 30. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 33–4. A character from the poem “Arrival at Santos.” In Sledge’s novel, the protagonist Elizabeth meets Miss Breen in the ship and in “daydreams” the two of them “imagined the same Brazil, the same tapestries of green forest, the colors of birds and flowers”. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 6. Reference to W. H. Hudson’s exotic novel Green Mansions (1904), about a traveler exploring the Guyana forest and his romantic encounter with the jungle girl Rima. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 34. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 35. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 85. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 36. (the word “inside” (here also in a box) is in italics in the original; the other emphases have been added by me). Sledge, The More I Owe You, 36. Sledge, The More I Owe You, 37. By raising relevant historical issues within the diegetic time, Oliveira’s Rare and Commonplace Flowers has been used as a historical source in several academic works. It is even acknowledged as one of the sources of Sledge’s The More I Owe You, 7. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 56–7. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 56. Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” 84–9. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 7. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 8. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 8. Elleström, Media Transformation, 37–9. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 8. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 50. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 11. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 12 (emphasis added). Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers, 39.

Bibliography Auslander, Philip. Theory for Performance Studies. New York: Routledge, 2008. Barthes, Roland. “L’effet de réel.” Communications 11, 1968. Recherches sémiologiques: le vraisemblable: 84–89. Bishop, Elizabeth. “Song for a Rainy Season.” The New Yorker, October 8, 1960: 40. Bruhn, Jørgen. Intermediality and Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Clüver, Claus. “Ekphrasis and Adaptation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 459–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. “Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts.” In Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations Between the Arts and Media, edited by Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, 19–33. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997. Crowther, Paul. Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

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Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Fludernik, Monika. “Description and Perspective: The Representation of Interiors.” Style 48, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 461–78. Führer, Heidrun, and Bernadette Banaszkiewicz. “The Trajectory of Ancient Ekphrasis.” In On Description, edited by Alice Jedlickova, 45–75. Prague: Akropolis, 2014. Hamon, Philippe. Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Heffernan, James A. “Ekphrasis: ‘Theory’.” In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature-Image-Sound-Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, 35–49. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. ———. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis From Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Le Corbusier, Jeanneret Pierre. Oeuvre Complète, Vol. 1, 1910–1929, 4th ed., edited by Willy Boesiger. Zurich: Les Éditions D’Architecture Erlenbach, 1946. ———. Vers une architecture. Zurich: Lars Müller, 2007. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Oliveira, Carmen. Flores raras e banalíssimas: A história de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1995. ———. Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. Translated by Neil K. Besner. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Rasmussen, Steen Eiler. Experiencing Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962. Samuel, Flora. Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010. Sledge, Michael. The More I Owe You. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010. Vieira, Miriam. “Dimensões da écfrase: A presença da pintura e da arquitetura em romances de artista.” Doctoral diss., Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2016. www.bibliotecadigital.ufmg.br/dspace/handle/ 1843/ECAP-A7UFYL. ———. “Samambaia: uma casa (trans) formada por poesia e romance.” In Escrita, som, imagem: perspectivas contemporâneas, edited by Márcia Arbex, Miriam Vieira, and Thaïs Diniz, 83–102. Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2019. Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Wolf, Werner. “Literature and Music: Theory.” In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature-Image-Sound-Music, edited by Gabriele Rippl, 459–74. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Wright, Frank Lloyd. “In the Cause of Architecture.” The Architectural Record XXIII, no. 2 (May 1914): 405–13. www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/ news/2016/01-Jan/InTheCause/Cause-PDFs/In-the-Cause-of-Architecture1914-05.pdf.

Part III

Transmediation A Broad Media Perspective

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The Logic of Cutting Yourself From Senseless Chaos to Signifying Order Hans T. Sternudd

Introduction Why do people intentionally cut themselves? How does a cutter think? Answers can be found in Inside a Cutter’s Mind (2007),1 at least according to the authors Clark and Henslin. They say that Inside a Cutter’s Mind aims to explain the phenomenon of self-injury for relatives of those who are engaged in the practice and to give some hope of recovery.2 The cover designer, Brock, has visualized the title on the cover of Clark and Henslin’s book (see Figure 8.1). To capture the viewers’ and the potential readers’ attention, he uses an effective strategy, the representation of a direct stare that becomes an indexical sign that addresses the onlooker.3 It is a gaze that is part of a black-and-white photo of a person who, through features like hairstyle and make-up, is coded as a young woman. Only half of her face is shown on the front cover of the book (the rest of the photo continues on the spine and back cover). She is depicted at an angle slightly from below, which gives her a kind of superiority and cockiness. A layer of red is smeared over the photo. With its scrape marks and irregular structure, the layer resembles paint that has been applied with a squeegee. The eye is nearly completely hidden behind the semi-transparent layer of red. It is a manipulation of the original photo that obstructs the representation of the young woman’s stare and also the gaze of the beholder. By hiding her eye, Brock has presumably tried to visualize the problem in this way to represent what goes on in a cutter’s mind. In context, the layer could be interpreted as a veil of blood that obstructs attempts to understand how a cutter’s mind works. Brock unbalances the composition of the cover of Inside a Cutter’s Mind by putting the photo of the young woman far to the left, opening up an analogy between the formal qualities of the image and the state of the young woman’s mind. The original photo is attributed to Duplass, an artist who distributed the photo through the stock photo service Shutterstock (see Figure 8.2). It is representative of a type of generic image that often illustrates texts about young females in distress. On the service’s site it is described as a

Figure 8.1 Clark and Henslin, Inside a Cutter’s Mind (2007), cover art by Brock © NavPress.

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Figure 8.2 Duplass, Teen girl with troubled or scared expression © PhotoEuphoria – Can Stock Photo Inc.

photo of a “[t]een girl with troubled or scared expression”,4 a description that accentuates the stereotypical character of the cover. Using a young woman with an indifferent facial expression and an empty look to exemplify a cutter is a typical way of gendering the act. Self-cutting becomes, through these types of representations, the property of young women with problems. The distanced gaze in the original image and the additional red veil emphasize the concept of the uncommunicative cutter. Just as the authors, graphic designer and photographer mentioned above have tried to do, this chapter will try to capture how inner experiences of turmoil and chaos can be represented and communicated. With the help of a semiotic analytic method, three steps for making meaning of chaos through mediation and transmediation will be sketched out. The analysis is based on two prerequisites: first, that the way mental distress is manifested and communicated relies on discourses that have evolved in sociocultural contexts, which implies that the available semiotic resources are limited.5 Second, according to the writings of scholars and the testimonies of people who have had self-cutting experiences, it is quite common to relate mental distress to a chaotic state.6 The study presented in this chapter is part of a series of analyses of self-injury that I have done and which are grounded in different theoretical approaches;7 in this chapter, Elleström’s work on signs, mediation and transmediation

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is used,8 in combination with a sociocultural understanding of mediation as an act that creates meaning.9 On a metalevel, this analysis itself is a transmediation of self-cutting. Through a systematic semiotic analysis of self-cutting as a mediation of inner experience and the following transmediations of the act, new meaning will emerge. My aim is to contribute to the understanding of why people cut themselves and why they continue to do so. The purpose of adopting a semiotic approach is to sketch out the signifying and communicative potential of self-cutting. Formulating a logic of why individuals cut themselves is an overarching goal in my studies. The research question is as follows: In what way is the meaning of self-cutting generated through mediations and transmediations of the act?

Previous Research Research on self-cutting has often been integrated into studies about selfinjury, which is defined as hurting yourself without having a suicidal intent.10 The American psychiatrist Favazza’s Bodies Under Siege (1987) set the stage for most of the later studies in the field. Over the years, a wide range of research articles and other texts about self-injury have been produced; for overviews, see Shaw (2002) and Mayrhofer (2011).11 Using a medicalized perspective has been a dominant approach, although some ethnographical, sociological and cultural studies can be found; see, for instance, Brumberg (2006), Johannisson (2006), Johansson (2010) and Adler and Adler (2011).12 Self-injury is typically understood as a way of coping with mental distress, expressing bad feelings of various kinds or as a culturally coded activity. Several writers, such as Strong (1998) and Bandalli (2011),13 adopt a communicative approach to self-injury, and I do so in this chapter. Research on how visual media are used to communicate self-injury experiences has been carried out by Edmondson (2013) and Seko (2013),14 and I have contributed to the field with my own studies on this subject. Studies that use a semiotic approach to self-injury and self-cutting, such as my previous studies, are to my knowledge hard to find. This makes this semiotic analysis unique.

Theoretical Points of Departure In line with Clark and Henslin’s book, this investigation starts from an imagined position inside a cutter’s mind. I suggest that what characterizes this mind is chaos. This point of departure is empirically grounded on recurrent verbal and written textual accounts of people who cut themselves. It is also verified by professionals who work as care providers and can be illustrated by these words from a psychologist: “The skin becomes a battlefield as a demonstration of internal chaos.”15 Testimonies about self-cutters’ experiences immediately before the act typically include descriptions such as the following: “My anger melted

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Figure 8.3 Chaos here represented by black and white visual noise, often called TV snow. Source: Figure by author.

into an agonizing desire to cry. But no tears came. Instead, emptiness and numb resignation overtook me.”16 With this and similar statements as points of departure, this study automatically excludes people who cut themselves for other reasons (for instance as part of a culturally sanctioned activity).17 Chaos is a state of being without order (see Figure 8.3), and therefore, when chaos is perceived as a mental state, it is impossible to grasp it or to make sense of it. As an inner experience, it is connected to notions such as dissociation, ecstasy and being in a trance. Chaos is indescribable; it does not mean anything. Naming it is an inconsistency, and the word chaos is used here as a way of addressing an experience that cannot be named. Chaos is an unsemiotic situation, something that language and other semiotic systems fail to grasp. Hence, it would arguably be inconsistent to talk about chaos as a state of mind because “state” connotes something that has some kind of order. “The things that make me cut are feelings like you’re going out of your head and like you’re a time-bomb waiting to go off.”18 This quote is an example of how an experience of something that could be called an un-state of mind is a system-threatening and possibly lethal condition that needs to be taken care of.19 Chaos, defined like this, is close to Tomkins’s notion of affect as an inner sensation that cannot be comprehended using language. Affect should, according to Tomkins, be understood as an intense sensation that he describes as an “amplification of urgency”,20 or as Shouse puts it, an abstract pre-personal intensity.21 Tomkins has explained affect and how it is handled by a newborn who experiences an intense sensation, for instance hunger, and reacts with a scream that has a similar intensity. The response to an intense inner sensation is an unarticulated reaction. The idea of the unarticulated and

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unspeakable affect is important for the logic of this paper, and I shall return to it later.22 “Feelings, on the other hand, are affects that have been understood through language and have received a label.”23 After previous experiences of an affective situation, an easier process of “feeling making” follows. Affect theory defines feelings as labels for inner subjective experiences which, at least theoretically, can be separated from emotions; feelings are “social qualities that we communicate with in social situations”.24 Examples of emotions are sorrow, love, shame and wrath. Emotions are feelings that are contextualised and shaped into a socially understandable discourse. Even if it is possible to experience chaos, it is a problematic semiotic state. Something is experienced, and urgently needs to be dealt with, but there is no representamen and no object, and hence no interpretant. There is no “mental effect of the Representamen and the Object”.25 In other words, the semiotic process that produces an interpretant does not take place – the experience of chaos triggers no semiosis and no sign or meaning is produced. This means that the individual who experiences chaos is left in a dreadful situation, which needs to be taken care of. In the example I will analyze here, s/he stretches out to reach a razor blade. In previous work I have used discourse theory (DT) as a theoretical and methodological device. According to DT, signs achieve meaning through their position in a network of signs. This means that signs or elements, in DT terminology, get their meaning through their relations to other signs. This is called a chain of equivalence.26 Outside the network, the elements have no meaning and any element could therefore achieve any meaning; it all comes down to where in the network the element is positioned. To me this is a counterintuitive standpoint, and even if DT makes sense and is a productive tool in analysis, it has to be developed to take into account each medium’s different capacities to create meaning. These capacities are based on each medium’s unique mix of modalities.27 A mode should be understood as “a way to do things”;28 for instance, a mode could be a text, image or sound. In a lecture, Kress exemplified modes’ different capacities for meaning-making by considering the difference between the written word “family” and a drawing of a “family”.29 As a written word, “family” is relatively vague; it can suggest numerous types of family formations (based on the interpreter’s experience and values). The drawing of a “family”, though, will depict a specific family (for instance a nuclear one). Relying solely on the concept that meaning is created through relations between signs in a network, as in DT, simplifies the process and the possibility of having different grounds for different sign types is lost. My point of departure comes from an urge to understand how the precision in theoretical works of semioticians like Elleström can be a fruitful contribution to the development of sociocultural theories such as those developed by Vygotsky, Kress, van Leeuwen and Laclau and Mouffe. This is important, as the complexity of meaning-making and communication

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cannot be fully understood without a contextualization of the processes involved. On the other hand, even though they are very consistent when it comes to media and arts, Elleström’s theories could be improved by being related to semiotic processes and communications that take place in social situations. Säljö’s take on sociocultural theory, developed by Vygotsky and Wertsch, has been of great importance to this study. According to Säljö, one of the fundamental premises of sociocultural theory is that the world is pre-interpreted through semiotic resources. These resources are used in and provided by social context.30 This corresponds to DT, which states that the world is understood through articulations that rule what can be said and understood about the world.31 In sociocultural theory, this process is called mediation, which could be described as a halftone screen that sits between ourselves and the world. This screen can be shaped by intellectual resources, such as language, or physical resources, for instance different devices such as an oil painting, engraving or computer screen. The development of different mediating tools of an intellectual or physical nature is central to learning processes.32 If self-cutting is understood as a communicative tool, a semiotic analysis could show how the act is integrated into meaning-making systems through mediation and transmediation. In light of the theoretical exposition above, the purpose of this chapter can be developed and research questions can be formulated. The purpose of this analysis is to investigate how means provided by semiotic and sociocultural theories and their way of understanding media, mediation and transformation make it possible to understand how self-cutting as a semiotic resource can make meaning out of chaos. This perspective will give the practice a didactic potential; that is, through the act of cutting and transformations of the outcome of the act, something is learned. Throughout the analysis, examples will be given of how different modes and media, with their particular capacities, can make various kinds of knowledge possible for individuals experiencing inner intense sensations. In light of the theoretical perspectives that guide this study – mediation according to Vygotsky and Tomkins’s affect theory – two questions are added to the overall question of how the meaning of self-cutting is generated through mediations and transmediations of the act: What knowledge is acquired during the processes involved in the different stages of mediation and transformation? Where in the semiotic process is affect turned into a meaningful representamen? The focus lies on what is gained through the transmediation processes – not on what is lost. The chapter follows an imagined signifying process, from affect to meaning by means of mediation and transmediation.

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It should be stressed that the aim is not to generalize my findings here to comprise a general view on self-cutting that is applicable to all people who cut.

Method and Material The analysis of the outcomes of mediating and transmediating processes will apply a terminology initially elaborated by Elleström. Terms and concepts will be explained as they appear in the analysis. To clarify the analysis, some empirical examples will be presented that should be understood as exemplifications of the reasoning and are chosen as examples of the phenomenon of self-cutting. It should be pointed out that self-cutting is a highly personal activity. Because of this, the examples in this text are not relevant for everyone who cuts themselves. Despite this, I have strived to ensure that the text reflects the experiences of the executors of cutting. The testimonies of people who state that they have first-hand experience of self-cutting that are included in the analysis reveal an ambition that the analysis would reflect a situated knowledge.33 In line with this are statements made by and opinions of those who execute the act of cutting themselves, and these are taken at face value. For the sake of reasoning, it is necessary to give the imagined self-cutter a contextualizing feature. This person is portrayed as initially being unfamiliar with the concept of self-injury and self-cutting. Even if it is hard today to find people who are unaware of these concepts, at least in Western societies, many self-injurers still claim that their original act was self-generated.34 This is reflected in this statement by Alice, referring to an episode in 1992: “And I don’t really know why I started to do it. For some reason it was something that I think I just did almost accidentally for the very first time I did it.”35

The Cut, a Mediation Let us return to the cutter’s mind. As discussed above, it turned out to be in a chaotic and unbearable situation. Something needed to be done. The situation required a structure, a form, and therefore the person cut her/himself. In the example in this chapter, I stipulate that the reason for choosing this act was unclear for the protagonist and that it was an impulse rather than a choice that was made to act in this way. Self-cutting is a powerful reaction to an inner intense experience, which means that the protagonist in this “story” has experienced a similar situation to the infant in Tomkins’s example and has reacted by carrying out an intense action. This situation is not unknown in the literature. Molly explains: I guess frustration and hurting from stuff from when I was little all the way up to now and not knowing how to cope with anything. I get scared; I cut. I start hurting, and I can’t cry; I cut.36

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Figure 8.4 In this model the chaotic state is marked with an exclamation mark and a question mark, indicating its destructive force and how confusing the state is. m = mediation and M1 = the first medium (the cutting) of the analysis. Source: Figure by author.

This statement, from a 20-year-old woman, is an example of how cutting becomes a way of handling frustrating and hurtful experiences that are impossible to express (e.g., through tears). The cutting that will become medium one in the transmediating process discussed later is marked as M1 in Figure 8.4. At the moment when the cut is made, there is no signifying process involved. None of the modes involved, including the action and the gesture, represent anything initially. They are elements that lack the qualities of signs for the executor. But the self-cutter perceives several things – bodily sensations that emanate from being in a particular position and movements that are registered through haptic, proprioceptive and kinaesthetic senses. In this self-induced act, the executor’s own body is used, and her/his body combines the material and sensory aspects of the act. How could the cut be understood in the semiotic framework developed by Elleström? According to this framework, a medium is “a channel”,37 something that is perceived with the senses and has four aspects of modality: a material, a sensory, a spatiotemporal and a semiotic aspect.38 A medium has both signifying and communicational potential. In Elleström’s model, the four modalities are related in a chain, starting with the material and leading to the semiotic, where meaning is created by the perceiver. The material modality is the condition that makes perception possible via sensory receptors; sense data must have some kind of form in space and time to be graspable. In my examples, three out of the four criteria that qualify a medium are met. But the semiotic modality is not (yet) established. Without this final stage, self-cutting cannot be a medium. I suggest, therefore, that self-cutting is a mediation, defined by Elleström as a pre-semiotic phenomenon, a pure “physical realisation of

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entities”.39 This realization has semiotic potential when the realization occurs “within a communicative context”, which, as we will see later, will fit well with my example. I suggest that self-cutting triggers the start of a signifying process in which the self-cutting will become a representamen in the end. It is also possible to connect the impulse to cut to the chaotic state of mind through a relation that exists in a space-time continuum. Even if the act was impulsive and not thought through, it is probably connected to the experience of chaos, for instance as a perceived trigger. This relation is essential for the reasoning in this analysis. At the moment, we can assume that the cut, with its dramatic qualities, is a potential representamen that calls for an object, a relation that makes it meaningful.

The Cut, Medium 1 We have seen how “the concept of mediation highlights the material realisation of the medium”.40 The self-cutting act is the result of the mediation and is also the first media product (M1 in Figure 8.4) in a signifying process that in the end becomes a sign. M1 represents the cutting body. This body constitutes, in the examples here, a technical medium, which is “any object, physical or body that mediates, in the sense that it ‘realizes’ and ‘displays’ . . . media”.41 Technical mediums have different capacities of mediating media, “that is which modal variants of the four modalities it can mediate”.42 Defining the cutting act as a medium involves recognizing a semiotic modality. If the performer reflects on the act of cutting and can find it meaningful as a conventional sign, the active body signifies a perpetrator, whereas the passive body that is cut signifies a victim. This dichotomy is one of the aspects of self-cutting that complicates the understanding of the act, both for the self-cutters themselves and for the persons who witness the act (or learns about it in other ways).43

The Aftermath, Medium 2 Immediately after the cut is made, an indexical sign appears. The aftermath, consisting of a wound and blood, is of course an indexical sign and is based on contiguity. This aftermath is a new medium, M2 in the model (see Figure 8.5). For analytical reasons, the mediation, the act M1, and its aftermath, M2, are separated, a division that is probably hard to make in real life. M2 is an unavoidable result of the act but it also endures over time. The wounds and scars are visual indices that show that something has happened, even if the self-induced element is not observable. M2 can also fit into Elleström’s category media product, defined as a communicative tool “in the widest sense of communication”.44 Theoretically, the process up to now can be described as follows: 1) “a technical medium [that] 2) mediates sensory configurations that form what is 3) viewed as a media

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Figure 8.5 The aftermath, medium 2. Source: Figure by author.

product”.45 This corresponds with 1) the body,46 2) the action, self-cutting itself and 3) the aftermath – a wound and blood (and later a scar). M2 is a media product that has a corporeal, embodied materiality and a spatiotemporal mode (even if the time frame of the media is significantly longer than the mediating act, e.g., the difference between cutting and scars that slowly fade away, which means that the media disappear). The material modality is a human body, and one of its fluids – the blood – plays an important role in the signifying process. The sensorial modality that involves the nerves transmitting nociceptive experiences could be perceived, for instance, when the sharp tool slices through the skin and/ or when there is a slight tickling sensation when the blood is running out of the wound. For the self-cutter, all senses can be, but are not necessarily, activated. Self-cutters’ perception of the sensorial modality can certainly differ for each person. But due to the dramatic visual impact of their own skin cut open and their blood flowing out of the wound and the way the cutting hurts, many self-cutters would probably emphasize the importance of sensory inputs as seeing and feeling. The spatiotemporal modality relates to the fact that the cuts are often produced in straight lines that are wider in the middle and narrower at the ends. Red, fluid forms muddle the shape of the lines and create accumulation, drop forms and streams on the curved surface. Just like all physical modes, M2 is stretched out in time. It is a dynamic medium and as such M2 will go through changes that are quite fast at the beginning and then slow down. First the blood will disappear and then the scar will be covered by a scab, and when that is gone a reddish purple scar will take its place. Finally, it will turn into a mark that is slightly lighter or darker than the original skin tone. This final stage can remain for as long as the body is alive or it can fade away and disappear. The aftermath has a semiotic modality that creates meaning in the spatiotemporal “medium by way of different sorts of thinking and sign interpretation”.47 M2 can certainly produce an infinite number of possible meanings, for instance in different semiotic modes (iconic, indexical

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or conventional/symbolic). In some examples taken from a collection of personal stories about self-destructive behaviour that has been published on the internet,48 we can see how the semiotic conventional modality produces understandings such as the following: “blood represented the life, and feelings that I couldn’t feel”;49 the temporal capacity has the possibility of narrating a story about recovery and healing; the blood’s fluid quality resembles “a red flood”;50 and regarding continuity, M2 is of course the indices of the cut that has taken place, but it is also (symbolic indexical) proof that “suffering is real”.51 With M2 the cutter is entering a more complex semiotic condition, a state with more signification possibilities than M1. As M2 is a medium with a higher degree of consistency than M1, it provides an opportunity for contemplation and hence more complex media products, which I return to later. For the moment, looking at the learning outcome of the mediation in question could be in line with the notion that the inner condition is comparable to being hurt and wounded, etc. This is exemplified by these quotes: “I wanted to cut so I could see the pain that was within me”52 and “I used to think my scars were beautiful, battle wounds of depression, isolation and mania.”53

Transmediation In this section, four examples of transmediations of self-cutting are discussed. As we will see later, all of these transmediations to a lesser or greater degree refer to the original mediation. Elleström states that “transmediation means that the representamen of the target medium (its outward appearance) conjures up in the mind of the perceiver approximately the same object as the representamen of the source medium conjures up”.54 This means that the target medium has “equivalent sensory configurations (sensory configurations with the capacity to trigger representations that correspond to those of a source medium)”.55 I would like to add to this the new aspects of the representamen that are made possible through the capacities of the target medium. In Elleström’s model (see Figure 8.6), the source medium is represented by Mα and the target medium by Mβ; C stands for the represented media characteristics.

Figure 8.6 “M = Medium; C = represented media Characteristics; T = Transfer”. Model from Elleström, Media Transformation, 16.

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Figure 8.7 Transmediation from medium 2 to spoken verbal text. Source: Figure by author.

Transmediation should not be confused with media representation: “Media representation is at hand whenever a medium represents another medium”.56 In relation to the cases we are considering, a fake wound created by a special-effects make-up artist would be an example of a media representation. The source medium M2 appears in all examples of transmediation in this section. M3a, the target medium in the first example, is based on the technical medium of vibrating air mediating verbal text (see Figure 8.7). In these examples, the uttered texts consist of simple identification, naming what caused M2, the aftermath of the act, e.g., scars and blood. One of the texts is uttered by the person who executed the cutting: “I have cut myself”, and the other by a beholder: “You are hurt”. What kinds of meaning do these utterances contain for the self-cutter? It is possible to presume that for the self-cutter the object in the sign relation, the utterance, contains a remembrance of sensory inputs that occurred during the act. For the outside perceiver, more general concepts of cutting probably become activated in the signifying process. How meaning is constituted depends on the interpretant’s experiences of cutting in social, cultural and/or individual contexts. M3a in this example is based on naming and identifying what has happened. Consequently, there are no media characteristics (C) from M2 that are represented in M3a – all meaning processes go on in the mind of the perceiver. Following Elleström’s model, this is marked with a thin arrow that represents the transformation (T), which indicates that there are few (if any) “successfully transferred media characteristics”57 that transfer from M2 to M3a. In line with the concept, reflected in the research question, that mediations and transmediations produce knowledge, we could ask the following question: What is the learning outcome from this part of the process? Arguably, the identification that takes place through this transmediation produces a poor learning outcome. But, as noted at the end of the previous section, M2 can give rise to a more complex semiosis. For this to happen, more elaborate analogies and metaphors are required, as we will see in the next transmediation.

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Figure 8.8 Transmediation from medium 2 to visual verbal text. Source: Figure by author, text: Annette in Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 78.

In the second example of a transmediation, the target medium is a visual verbal text, a story, describing M2 (see Figure 8.8): Watching it spill out, red on my pale skin. The rows of lines, symmetric, organized, such a contradiction to my mixed up thoughts and emotions.58 This example is taken from the same collection that has previously been mentioned.59 Publishing these kinds of personal accounts of mental illness can be seen as part of a confession culture, as described by Frank Füredi.60 Because of M3b’s more dense description of visual traits in the “story” than appears in the pure naming that takes place in M3a, the arrow is thicker than in the previous example, which means that several characteristics from M2 are transmediated in M3b. The target medium describes the visual impact of the aftermath of cutting, the blood that is spilled out in lines from the cuts on the skin, and gives it a symbolic meaning through a formal contradiction between the concrete lines on the skin, which are “symmetric, organized”, and inner “mixed up thoughts and emotions”. In this way, the text is referring to a conceptualization of self-cutting as a way of gaining control. This is one example among many in which self-cutters describe their experience of cutting in visual verbal texts. It seems that these representations have the capacity to grasp central aspects of the experience. One of the learning outcomes of this transmediation is the way in which the story constructs structural similarities between the shape of the scars and the inner experience.61 Through these entities in the material, the sensorial and the spatiotemporal levels are joined together on a semiotic level. They become connected through a perceived iconicity, and thus visual order is similar to mental stability. This means that cutting calms the mind because it seems to be something that fixes the inner turmoil. In the third example, the target medium, M3c, is a digital photograph of M2 that is taken close in time to M1 (see Figure 8.9). Because of the capacity of this technical media to convey depictive qualities,

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Figure 8.9 Transmediation from medium 2 to digital photo. Source: Figure by author, photo printed with permission from the photographer © 2019 Sternudd.

more characteristics of the source medium are transmediated – hence there is a thicker arrow. The target medium shares many of the technical and sensory modalities of M2b. In the same way as the visual text medium is displayed, the photo is formally distributed over a flat, two-dimensional surface. The spatiotemporal qualities are possibly the same, even if the formal traits are totally different when it comes to the semiotic modalities. As a visual image it adds indices and similarity modes, as compared to the text, which is dominated by a conventional mode. With its representation of bleeding wounds caused by cuts, M3c is an example of a typical photo of self-cutting that is often found on the internet. These photos often have some features in common: they are close-ups of an injured body part, usually an arm with scars that is often, but not always, bleeding from cuts, and they lack contextualised features.62 These photographs can also be seen as part of a contemporary culture in which every moment in life is documented and published online. The material modality of a digital photo is not stable; M3c could be materialized (and communicated) through different interfaces and technical mediums (e.g., be printed out on paper), and during these processes it reproduces, more or less, its central, visual spatial manifestations. In its original form it is materialized on “the latent corporeal interface”63 of the screen of a phone. For the self-cutter, the transformation has lost the direct sensory mode – the nociceptive feeling connected to M1. But the photo is different from M2 because it can capture one moment in time. In the photograph, parts of the visual traits of the source medium are captured. Because of the consistency of the technical medium, the digital photo can be compared to the body and can therefore preserve central aspects of M2 for a longer time. On the other hand, M3c lacks the dynamic and progression qualities of M1/2. M3b has the potential to reproduce several of the visual traits (C1) of M2, but because of the image’s two-dimensionality, the body’s roundness is a characteristic that is left out in the transition. In addition, it cannot capture the

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difference between a living body and a lifeless, flat and glossy surface. Because of M3c’s material modality, M2 can be watched at a distance from the body. A similar conventional and resemblance-related semiosis can appear in M2 and M3b. But the photo adds another meaning based on continuity: it captures the mediation as proof or a memory when the scar has faded. One of the learning outcomes of the second transmediation could include knowledge that arises from the possibility of seeing the body from a distance, and this knowledge could provide new perspectives that trigger self-reflection about what the person has done to her/himself. As photographs are often understood as things that produce proof of what is in front of the camera, M3c could become evidence (produced by the contiguity between M1/2 that is transmediated to M3c); it could capture a person’s capacity to execute the act.

Transmediation, Second Level – The Qualified Media Self-cutters often use the internet as a resource that allows them to share, communicate and discuss their experiences. Assuming that the protagonist in this analysis uploads M3b/c to a website is therefore not farfetched. As a technical medium, a website has the capacity to represent the media characteristics of the source medium in almost all the detail provided (disregarding minor differences, such as colour saturation and contrast, though these will also depend to some degree on the resolution of the screen being used). As M4 reproduces the source medium, there is no reason to repeat the analysis of M3b/c provided above (see Figure 8.10). The reason for discussing this transmediation is to show how the context in which the target medium appears has an impact on the interpretation. When M4 is published on sites on which similar media are present, it is contextualized in a new setting. This makes it possible for the individual to compare her/his own transmediations of the act with other similar media. In this location, M3b and M3c are given new meaning as they are related to similar and different transmediations of the act.

Figure 8.10 Transmediation from M3 b/c to a website. Source: Figure by author. Photo printed with permission from the photographer © 2019 Sternudd.

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On these sites, the self-cutting receives new names and definitions, such as self-harm, and descriptions that explain the act are given: When the level of emotional pressure becomes too high it acts as a safety valve – a way of relieving the tension. Cutting makes the blood take away the bad feelings. Pain can make you feel more alive when feeling numb or dead inside.64 In this way, knowledge is obtained through a textual medium that makes a more complex knowledge possible than the naming in M3a, the description in M3b and the depiction in M3c. The transmediation to M4 makes it possible for the individual to learn through considering similarities by comparing images and textual media products with her/his own, and in this way it is possible to find new meaning in the original mediation. While the first three transmediations had basic media, such as auditory and visual texts and still images, as targets, the transmediation to a qualified medium, a medium that is “historically and communicatively situated, meaning that [its properties] differ depending on time, culture and aesthetic preference”,65 gave the act a more complex meaning. As a consequence of transmediating self-cutting into a sociocultural context – a discourse, that is – new meanings that are reached through applying new perspectives are made possible.66 An example of this is how the act is often inscribed in a mental health discourse, in which it is understood as a way of releasing tension caused by mental distress. One effect of the transmediation to web forums used by people who discuss experiences of self-injuring practices is that the act can become the foundation for an identity – as a cutter or a self-injurer, as we can see in this statement from Erica in which she describes the impact of an internet forum: Just the fact that there were other people doing it. Maybe like it really is, there’s a group of people. I am part of this group, obviously. That helped me connect my identity to a self-abuser. Whereas before I was just, like, one of two people doing it so it wasn’t really an identity, it was more of a problem. I didn’t really think it was a problem, just a habit. Whereas on the Internet it’s a lifestyle almost, the way you are, instead of just a habit. They were connected to it in a more long-term way. It was a more central focus of people’s lives. It was the central focus of mine for quite a while.67 We can recollect how the analysis here began with an affective experience (in Figure 8.4 symbolised with “!?”) and how it triggered a cut that seemed like a quite unarticulated medium. Now that the analysis has come to an end, the act of cutting oneself has become constitutive of a person’s identity and the central aspect of a whole community. Selfcutting has evolved from being a problematic habit to a “lifestyle”.

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Through Transmediation and Back The overarching theme in this analysis is how order is created from chaos. In Figure 8.11, the different stages of mediation and transformations are brought together. The mediation that took place at the first stage, when the cut was made, functioned as a materialization of the inner affect that was experienced. Even if the act was an intuitive reaction to an overwhelming experience, it gave form and shape to the inner experience. With this act, the unspeakable began to take form; it was materialized and took on a visual shape that could start a signifying process. Through the mediation, a potential media product was created, but it did not include any significant semiotic modes in the perceiver’s view. In the Peircean sign model, this could be a representamen that is in the process of being created. Through a series of different transmediations, the qualities of basic media give self-cutting a meaning on a rudimentary level. But meaning on

Figure 8.11 From Senseless Chaos to Signifying Order. Figure by author. Source: Photo printed with permission from the photographer © 2019 Sternudd.

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a more complex level is needed for a transmediation to a qualified media, which gives the transmediated self-cutting a context. To make sense of the act, a transmediation to a medium that appears in a sociocultural setting is probably necessary. In the example presented in this chapter, this medium was an internet-based forum. On this interactive site, selfcutting is connected to signs that give meaning to it. An equivalence chain consisting of elements such as “emotional pressure”, “tension” and “bad feelings” connect the act to a general notion (a moment) of mental ill health. This is something that from an affect theory perspective shows how the unspeakable has transformed into a socially communicable emotion. What is inside a cutter’s mind could then be given names, like sorrow or wrath. But the result of this process depends, as pointed out above, on how the associative chains in the discourse are constructed. Returning to the example mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it could be said that through the transmediating processes the red veil has been lifted from the eyes of the “cutter”. We can, figuratively speaking, “see” inside the cutter a suffering or desperate soul that communicates its distress through the sign of self-cutting. In this way, the original media product M1, the cut, becomes a representamen in a sign relation, i.e., it makes sense of the act. It has become a sign, a semiotic resource for expressing overwhelming feelings. The book cover, with its generic image of a young woman in distress, can be seen as an example of how the cutter has been integrated into a discursive understanding of gender and mental health – a stereotype that arguably does more harm than good. For the protagonist in this analysis, the process becomes an example of how the world comes to individuals already interpreted. Once the transmediation process has happened, an order is established and the pressure of the affect can be replaced by relief. Through the signifying process, the inner turmoil is given a “name”, which makes it understandable. Self-cutting has become a way to handle the experience of affect, through transmediating it to communicative emotions, and the act receives a fundamental role in a socioculturally coded identity. The protagonist has become a cutter who has gained a social network through using social media platforms. This position has advantages that provide motives to continue to execute the act. One example of such a motive is a sense of belonging to a special and exclusive group of peers.

Conclusion The key theme in this chapter is the semiotic capacity to create meaning out of nothing. In the analysis, a chaotic, un-semiotic situation was transmediated into a sociocultural system – a transformation that made it possible to manage the experience. Transmediation was crucial in this process, from the first steps into basic media and then to a more complex qualified medium. Even if it was only during the last step of the

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process that a more adequate meaning was reached, the simple transmediation (naming, describing and depicting) was necessary to achieve the learning outcome. So, how can the overall question on how mediation and transmediation of self-cutting generate meaning be answered? The analysis shows that when cuts on the body were transmediated in text and photographs, it provided the opportunity for distanced reflections. In the example it was shown how the injury could be understood as an answer to the inner experience of turmoil (“rows of lines” vs. “mixed up thought”). This could be seen as important knowledge for the person who has cut her/himself. The second of the initial questions focused on what kind of knowledge different stages of the mediation and transformation could give rise to. Here the analysis showed that by transmediating self-cutting into semiotic systems, such as spoken and written language and iconic visual depictions, it became possible to communicate the mediation of the inner chaos, something that was crucial for getting involved in an online forum. The interaction with peers in the internet community made it possible to make sense of the act. As a result, the act of self-cutting was transformed from being an unexplainable reaction to an inner sensation to a significant moment in a sociocultural setting. Selfcutting became a significant marker that gave access to the community and also to something that it was possible to be – a cutter. It is probably impossible to give an exact answer to the third question, Where in the semiotic process is affect turned into a meaningful representamen? But it is possible to say that in the final stage of this analysis self-cutting became a significant cultural sign which gave legitimacy and access to a community. It became the “central focus of people’s lives”, as Erica said. Probably even more important is that in this process, affect was labelled as a socially and discursively recognizable emotion, such as sorrow, wrath or shame, emotions that could be managed and communicated through a person cutting her/himself. This reasoning could explain the logic of selfcutting and why self-cutters continue to execute the act. In this analysis I have focused on what is gained rather than what is lost through transmediation. By using the sociocultural concept that mediation equals a learning outcome, the analysis has sketched out how such a process can be understood. Further semiotic analysis of self-cutting could take a closer look at the body of the self-cutter that merges the active, cutting body with the passive body. This body becomes the physical medium for and the perceiver of the act. An act and its aftermath become independent signs that are liberated from the executor.

Notes 1. Clark and Henslin, Inside a Cutter’s Mind. The word “cutter” is often used in a pejorative way that confuses the practice with the person who executes it, and therefore the word is often rejected by many who cut themselves. Therefore I use the word cutter here only in reference to Clark and Henslin’s book.

The Logic of Cutting Yourself 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Clark and Henslin, Inside a Cutter’s Mind, 16–18. Messaris, The Role of Images, 21–24. CanStockPhoto, “Troubled Teen Stock Photo.” For semiotic resources, see Kress, Multimodality, 5–8. In the literature, self-cutting is often (but not always) seen as a coping strategy to handle different kinds of mental distress that are comprised here in the term chaos. Self-cutting is seen as a way to manage “anxiety” for example, in Babiker and Arnold, Comprehending Self-Mutilation, 74–75; “dissociation” in Alderman, Understanding and Ending Self-Inflicted Violence, 37–39; and “trauma” in Kilby, “Bearing Witness to Self-Harm,” 124–42 and Strong, SelfMutilation, 99–102. Strong, 17–28 also uses “void” as a concept to describe what self-cutters experience. Sternudd, “Visuality and Self-Cutting,” 14–29; “Reflections on the SelfInjury Experience,” 151–169; “Words Cut into the Skin,” 183–99. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 11–48; “Peirce Adapted,” 83–138; and Media Transformation. Säljö, Lärande i praktiken [Practice of teaching]. Over the years, research has resulted in different terms for this or similar kinds of behaviour. For instance, “self-mutilation” in Menninger, Man against Himself and Favazza, Self-Mutilation and Body Modification. The differences in the definitions of “self-injury” and “self-harm”, or “deliberate self-harm”, are discussed in Mayrhofer, Non-Suicidal Self-Injury, 27–9. “Non-suicidal self-injury” is a term that has become more and more frequently used; see American Psychiatric Association, Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., 803–6. Shaw, “Girls’ and Women’s Self-Injury,” 191–219 and Mayrhofer, NonSuicidal Self-Injury, 25–56. Brumberg, “Epidemic of Self-Injury?”; Johannisson, “Sjukdomsestetik och kultur [Aesthetics of illness and culture], 29–55; Johansson, Självskada: En etnologisk studie [Self-injury: An ethnological study]; Adler and Adler, Hidden World of Self-Injury. Strong, Bright Red Scream and Bandalli, Phenomenological Analysis. Edmondson, Using Pictures and Words to Explore Self-Harm and Seko, “Self-Injury Photographs.” Psychologist Scott Lines quoted in Strong, Bright Red Scream, 29. Clark and Henslin, Inside a Cutter’s Mind, 14. On other reasons for self-cutting see, for example, Favazza, Bodies under Siege; Babiker and Arnold, Language of Injury, 57–85; or Mayrhofer, NonSuicidal Self-Injury. Babiker and Arnold, Language of Injury, 74. For a discussion, see Sternudd, “Modes of Pain,” 150–1. Tomkins, Selected Writings, 54. Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” The clinical literature has used alexithymia as a term for this kind of inadequacy to express inner feelings in an adequate and appropriate way; see, for example, Bandalli, Phenomenological Analysis, 27–9 or Mayrhofer, NonSuicidal Injury, 49. Sternudd, “Words Cut into the Skin,” 186, with reference to Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” Öhman, Jönsson, and Svensson, “Inledning” [Introduction], 11 (Translation by the author). See also Tomkins, Selected Writings. Elleström, “Pierce Adapted,” 128. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 110. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 29.

160 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Hans T. Sternudd Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 14. Kress, “Reading Images.” Säljö, Lärande i praktiken [Practice of teaching], 66–67. See, for example, Winther Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis, 1. Säljö, Lärande i praktiken [Practice of teaching], 100–1. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 81–101. Clark and Henslin, Inside a Cutter’s Mind, 34–7; see also Alderman, Scarred Soul, 13, or Adler and Adler, Hidden World of Self-Injury, 56–7. Adler and Adler, Hidden World of Self-Injury, 56. Adler and Adler, 67. See also, for example, Bandalli, Phenomenological Analysis, 26–32; Babiker and Arnold, Language of Injury, 73–7; Mayrhofer, Non-Suicidal Injury, 48–9. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 14. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 17–24. Elleström, Media Transformation, 12. Elleström, Media Transformation, 12. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 30. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 30. In the example of self-cutting here, one condition is that the act is performed in solitude. But if the cuts were made with people who are also self-cutting or just in front of others, the requisite for a mediation “within a communicative context” (see Elleström, Media Transformation, 12) is at hand and it can have conventional meanings, for instance how the act is interpreted in alternative cultures such as black metal, where musicians sometimes cut themselves on stage. Elleström, “Material and Mental Representation,” 86. Elleström, Media Transformation, 13. A knife is not a technical medium because it cannot mediate the cuts; it is just part of an execution of them (compare the pen in Elleström’s example in Media Transformation, 30). Elleström, “The Modalities of Media,” 36. Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 78. Amber in Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 53. Alex in Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 29. Amy in Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 59. Babiker and Arnold, Language of Injury, 79; Nicole in Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 588. Elleström, “The Modalities of Media,” 16–17. Elleström, Media Transformation, 20. Elleström, Media Transformation, 15. Elleström, Media Transformation, 59. Annette in Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories, 78. Wulff, Collection of Personal Stories. Füredi, Cultivating Vulnerability, 40–3. On semiotic/multimodal principles, see Kress and Leeuwen, Grammar of Visual Design, 3. Sternudd, “Discourse of Cutting,” 81. Elleström, “Material and Mental,” 17. Pearlman, “Why Do People Self-Harm?” Elleström, “Transfer of Media Characteristics,” 672. An example of another type of second-level transmediation/transmediation to a qualified media could be a therapeutic conversation. Adler and Adler, “Cyber Worlds of Self-Injurers,” 41.

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Bibliography Adler, Patricia A., and Peter Adler. “The Cyber Worlds of Self-Injurers: Deviant Communities, Relationships, and Selves.” Symbolic Interaction 31, no. 1 (2008): 33–56. ———. The Tender Cut: Inside the Hidden World of Self-Injury. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Alderman, Tracy. The Scarred Soul: Understanding and Ending Self-Inflicted Violence. Oakland: New Harbinger, 1997. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. Arlington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Babiker, Gloria, and Lois Arnold. The Language of Injury: Comprehending SelfMutilation. Leicester: British Psychological Society, 1997. Bandalli, Peter K. A Phenomenological Analysis of the Expressive and Communicative Functions of Deliberate Self-harm. Bath: University of Bath Department of Psychology, 2011. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. “Are We Facing an Epidemic of Self-Injury?” Chronical of Higher Education 53, no. 16 (2006): B6–B8. CanStockPhoto. “Troubled Teen Stock Photo.” Accessed April 25, 2018. www. canstockphoto.co.uk/troubled-teen-0109946.html. Clark, Jerusha, and Earl R. Henslin. Inside a Cutter’s Mind: Understanding and Helping Those Who Self-Injure. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2007. Edmondson, Amanda Jane. Listening With Your Eyes: Using Pictures and Words to Explore Self-Harm. Leeds: The University of Leeds, Academic Unit of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, School of Medicine, 2013. Elleström, Lars. “Material and Mental Representation: Peirce Adapted to the Study of Media and Arts.” American Journal of Semiotics 30 (2014): 83–138. ———. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 11–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. “Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Dissimilar Media.” Palabra Clave 20, no. 3 (2017): 663–85. Favazza, Armando R. Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. First published 1987. Füredi, Frank. Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. London: Routledge, 2004. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, edited by Sandra Harding, 81−101. London: Routledge, 2004. Johannisson, Karin. “Sjukdomsestetik och kultur: Exemplen hysteri, anorexi och apati” [The Aesthetics of Illness and Culture: The Examples of Hysteria, Anorexia and Apathy]. In Att se det osedda: Vänbok till Ann-Sofie Ohlander [To See the Unseen: Memorial Volume for Ann-Sofie Ohlander], edited by Louise Berglund, 29–55. Stockholm: Hjalmarsson & Högberg Bokförlag, 2006.

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Johansson, Anna. Självskada: En etnologisk studie av mening och identitet i berättelser om skärande [Self-injury: An Ethnological Study of Meaning and Identity in Narratives About Cutting]. Umeå: h:ström – Text & Kultur, 2010. Jørgensen, Marianne Winther, and Louise Jane Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: Sage Publications, 2002. First published in Danish by Samfundslitteratur, 1999. Kilby, Jane. “Carved in Skin: Bearing Witness to Self-Harm.” In Thinking Through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 124–42. London: Routledge, 2001. Kress, Gunther R. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge, 2010. First published 1996. ———. “Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media.” Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation, 2004. Accessed August 8, 2011. www.knowledgepresentation.org/BuildingTheFuture/Kress2/Kress2.html. Kress, Gunther R., and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. First published 1996. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 2001. First published 1985. Mayrhofer, Andrea. The Practice of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: A Sociological Enquiry. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011. Menninger, Karl A. Man Against Himself. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Messaris, Paul. Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Öhman, Anneli Brännström, Maria Jönsson, and Ingeborg Svensson. “Inledning.” In Att känna sig fram: Känslor i humanistisk genusforskning [“Introduction.” In to Feel One’s Way: Feelings in Humanistic Gender Studies], edited by Anneli Brännström Öhman, Maria Jönsson, and Ingeborg Svensson, 7−19. Umeå: Bokförlaget H:ström, 2011. Pearlman, Julia. “Why Do People Self-Harm?” The Mix: Essential Support for Under 25s. Accessed October 13, 2016. www.themix.org.uk/mental-health/ self-harm/why-do-people-self-harm-5680.html. Säljö, Roger. Lärande i praktiken: Ett sociokulturellt perspektiv [The Practice of Teaching: A Sociocultural Perspective]. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2000. Seko, Yukari. “Picturesque Wounds: A Multimodal Analysis of Self-Injury Photographs on Flickr.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 14, no. 2 (2013). Accessed September 26, 2013. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1302229. Shaw, Sarah Naomi. “Shifting Conversations on Girls’ and Women’s Self-Injury: An Analysis of the Clinical Literature in Historical Context.” Feminism Psychology 12, no. 2 (2002): 191–219. Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005). Accessed March 3, 2015. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Sternudd, Hans T. “Digitalisation and the Production of Feeling and Emotion: The Case of Words Cut Into the Skin.” Film and Media Studies 10 (2015): 183–99. ———. “The Discourse of Cutting: Regaining Control and Meaning Making.” In How Does It Feel?: Making Sense of Pain, edited by Hans T. Sternudd and Angela Tumini, 75–98. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011. ———. “‘I Like to See Blood’: Visuality and Self-Cutting.” Visual Studies 29, no. 1 (2014): 14–29.

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———. “Modes of Pain: Reflections on the Self-Injury Experience.” In Painful Conversations: Making Pain Sens(e)ible, edited by Hans T. Sternudd, 151–69. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014. Strong, Marilee. A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain. London: Virgo Press, 2005. First published 1998 by Viking Penguin. Tomkins, Silvan S. Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wulff, Morten, ed. A Collection of Personal Stories. Greve: Psyke.org Press, 2004. Accessed October 9, 2006. www.psyke.org/download/personal.

9

Three Ways of Transmediating a Theme Park Spatializing Storyworlds in Epic Mickey, the Monkey Island Series and Theme Park Management Simulators Péter Kristóf Makai

Was a new medium born with the opening of the first theme park? It is not without a certain hesitation that one can call theme parks a medium. Holiday destinations, sure. Entertainment venues, yeah. But media? Whether we consider Knott’s Berry Farm (1940 or 1968),1 Santa Claus Land (1946) or Disneyland (1955) to be the first of their kind, it is not immediately obvious that theme parks mediate. Yet, like world fairs that are inspired by mottoes such as Chicago’s “A Century of Progress” exhibition (1933–34) or “Peace through Understanding” at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, theme parks can and do convey ideas and experiences through semiotic means that are widely accessible to their many visitors coming from different cultures. As patrons partake in the enjoyment of theme park features, they decode and enact cultural meanings associated with themes, which are aesthetic, political or ideological in nature. In this chapter, I argue that the spatial narratives and themed experiences created within the theme park translate remarkably well from the physical to the virtual world. Video games are privileged sites in which we can see how essential characteristics of the spatial organization of storyworlds are transmediated and reinvented for a different mode of interaction between the built environment and the visitor. I shall examine how different games or game genres have taken the principles and iconology of the Disney theme park design and woven them into the fabric of their virtual storyworlds. In doing so, I highlight how the functions and dynamics of the theme park experience are shaped by the process of transmediation. Theme parks engage and excite the senses to give an altered sense of time, place and state of mind and use various art forms to bring these physical virtual worlds to life. By featuring scenes and milieux from across the globe and constructing rides and areas from the building blocks of history and modern commercial intellectual property, they build microcosmic worlds the patrons can experience and inhabit for a short time. Themes are therefore transmedial ab ovo, and the study of

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theming in its various forms must thus be transmedial scholarship by definition. Therefore, I treat the theme park as a unique cultural form, following the suggestion of Margaret J. King, who called the Disney park “a new technological and sociological art form”2 which takes the shape of a “qualified medium”.3 Qualified media are the intersubjectively shared cognitive constructs built from the sense data of basic media and expressed in technical media. As a medium, the theme park organizes spatial relations, material objects and emotional labour4 into semiotically encoded themes for consumption in one’s leisure time. Specifically, theme parks make microcosms of entertainment, “self-contained worlds which are geographically, visually, and ritually separated from the rest of the world” and that are “multisensory and highly immersive environments”.5 Theme parks are also media in Bolter and Grusin’s sense of “that which remediates”,6 as they fuse and redesign various forms of spatial, architectural and aesthetic media, including the landscape garden, the world fair (explicitly so at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center, with its carnival grounds, films and film sets, dioramas and theatrical performance in all its various guises, including the puppet theatre, which includes AudioAnimatronic figures), musical theatre, and many more. This immediately raises the question of whether theme parks fulfil this criterion of media from the other direction: can the theme park itself be transmediated, and if so, how? Transmedial relationships between two art forms are characterized by a process of transferring certain aspects of form or content across media borders. For example, the case studies below do not recreate theme parks as faithful digital models – instead they transform elements that are recognizable for media consumers in new configurations, providing a new experience that is tailored to medial and genre conventions. I investigate how key media modalities, from the materiality of ride buildings to the spatiotemporal experience of ride sequences to the semiotic modality of themed landscapes, are presented to the player in order to enhance the “theme-park-ness” of the simulated worlds they interact with. As I hope to demonstrate with several case studies, video games specifically “appropriate the techniques, forms, and social significance”7 of theme parks and transmediate them. Games can transmediate individual theme parks and rides (as Epic Mickey8 transmediates Disneyland and Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom), the cultural logic of immersion in theme parks (as in the Monkey Island (MI) series, which also transmediates certain iconic Disney rides), and finally, the economic logic of ludic capitalism in the Rollercoaster Tycoon9 and Theme Park10 series. By enumerating and analyzing the variety of ways in which certain functions and representations of theme parks are made playable, I seek to highlight the structures of space-making as world-making and the transmedial changes that result from digitization and the adaptation of these spaces to specific video game genres.

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I Never Click Where I Want to Go in Disneyland: Interfacing Media and Matter in the Parks and on the Screen Whether we frame the theme park as a separate, qualified medium (as Carlà and Freitag11 and Lukas12 do) or treat it as a postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total world”13 or a meta-medium which not only “generated novel forms of mass entertainment and spectacle but also swiftly incorporated those recently developed elsewhere”, as world fairs did,14 is secondary to the way we receive them. Yet I find it particularly enlightening to think of it as a form of “narrative architecture”.15 The term is used by Jenkins to discuss the spatiotemporal affordances of video games, but they apply to the world-making practices of theme parks as well. They are spread out over vast territories (most notably Walt Disney World’s area, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which enjoys special, citystate-like privileges; see Foglesong),16 and constrain access not just at the gates, but throughout the parks for maximum effect. These constraints suggest a preferred way of experiencing spatial narratives. The architectural sequencing of themed lands and progression through the scenes of the parks convey an implicit story of before and after.17 In dark rides, people are railroaded through dioramas in a fixed order to show set pieces that together form the journey narratives that make up the fictional microcosm of the ride.18 History may be etched into the polystyrene, mimicking cracks of the ages, and architectural clues suggest a weather-beaten lived-in-ness of buildings that may have been erected only a few short decades ago. Architectural context creates “environmental storytelling”.19 In themed entertainment, themes are understood as sensory, semiotic, multimodal assemblages that synergize to create the experience of being in another time, place or social setting.20 Because they are meant to “read” easily, themes employ dominant popular cultural genres for reference,21 shaping guest expectations by priming particular modes of reception, such as using a medieval castle and a torture chamber to signal majesty and bring the “Dark Ages” to a guest’s mind, who now expects a royal joust to occur in the courtyard any minute now, and looks for a nearby “banqueting hall” to satisfy their hunger and quench their thirst. Themes are distillations, derived from settings of fictional texts in various media, and therefore are always already intermedial. Themes build worlds. Reminiscent of Nelson Goodman’s six Ways of Worldmaking22 (composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, deletion and supplementation and reformation), Carlà and Freitag23 note that cultural mediation at theme parks follows four essential strategies. First, by the selection of certain themes over others (i.e., there is no Darfurland or Comptonland in Walt Disney World); then by the abstraction of a chaotic storyworld via reducing a complex totality “to iconic and

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evocative signs or symbols”;24 third, by the immersion of the patron’s senses into the themed storyworld, so that they experience the spatiotemporally distant as the here and now. But most notable is the fact that transmediality itself is the fourth strategy: appealing to the media literacy of consumers, themed spaces extend the storyworlds of popular culture into the actual world of the media consumers. However, there are notable differences in how the narrative architecture of storyworlds is designed in analogue themed spaces and the digital realm. Obviously, the physical construction of a themed space is more labour-intensive than creating a digital world. One downside of this material constraint is that the built environment cannot defy the laws of physics. In contrast, virtual environments can represent any configuration of space and simulate any physics model, whether realistic or wholly imaginary. The materiality of the entertainment site and the embodied presence of the patron allow a more multimodal engagement of the senses, providing intense kinaesthetic, olfactory and even gastronomical experiences besides the audiovisual and haptic experiences of video games. On the flip side, agency is rather constrained in most theme park venues for the physical safety and emotional well-being of the guests, whereas video games thrive on conflict and provide ample room for deviant behaviour, as antisocial behaviour does not result in physical harm and users have more control over the experience. Staying in themed entertainment spaces is expensive, in terms of both time and money. Users spend less time in theme parks compared to the time they spend playing video games, due to the demands of biological and social life, but also because of fiscal considerations. The time spent with individual micronarratives is also rather short: a ride might last a quarter of an hour, but not much more. Although significantly cheaper, computer and video games still require a healthy dose of cash to buy both hardware and software to display their inhabitable worlds. Play sessions can easily last several hours, and dedicated gamers often sink hundreds of hours into titles favouring immersive content and long quest narratives. At the higher end, MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) invite players to return and play several hours daily or weekly over the course of years and even decades. Whether the costs are financial or temporal, though, there is something about themed spaces that makes us keep coming back for more. Perhaps it’s the ease of interaction and the choices we can make. Selfabandon and agency produce a state of flow in which we are optimally aroused and feel empowered, whether as post-tourists or digital flâneurs.25 Even so, interacting with the environment is much more seamless in theme parks than in games because of a shared set of conventions that facilitate cross-cultural enjoyment of the theme park.26 Meanwhile, the human-computer interface introduces an extra element of mediation, the

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controller, whose inputs seldom relate to action simulated on the screen in an intuitive manner. Furthermore, there is always a possibility that player performance will mismatch player intent, as misclicks and clunky controls are interpreted as purposeful commands by the computer, resulting in frustrated players trying desperately to avoid unintentionally alarmed enemies and reloading saved games after a missed jump or an evitable character death. I, for one, never need to click where I want to go in the real world, and seldom end up casually hurting others due to typos (editors notwithstanding). A lack of space prohibits me from delving deeper into the general comparison of intermedial constraints and the affordances of digital games and theme parks, but I hope that by analyzing three case studies, I can showcase how space and agency are configured across themed entertainment media. Games transmediate spatial relations, interactions, themes and storylines from theme parks for different artistic and commercial purposes.

The Theme Park That Guests Forgot: The Blasted Landscapes of Epic Mickey Epic Mickey (and its sequel, Epic Mickey: The Power of Two) is Disney’s reimagination of the company’s history in a video game. It chronicles the story of Mickey Mouse, controlled by the player, who ventures from his comfortable life in Cartoon World27 (the primary storyworld of the game) into Wasteland, a sort of metaphysical retirement community for forgotten cartoon characters (such as Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, Walt’s prototype for Mickey). In a scene modelled on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment from Fantasia, Mickey sneaks into powerful wizard Yen Sid’s study, where the Wasteland exists as an architectural model on a map, wrought by the wizard’s Magic Brush that breathes life into ink. Unfortunately, Mickey’s curiosity and clumsiness do not mix well, and he spills magic Paint and Thinner all over the model. The ink comes to life, taking the shape of a demon not unlike Czernobog in Fantasia, and sucks Mickey into the model of Wasteland in a distressing moment of ontological metalepsis, and our hero will have to clean up the mess he made there. This ontological metalepsis is a rhetorical figure for the immersive potential of themed entertainment, and of video games in particular, which I would like to call transmediation by proxy. Here, immersion is portrayed via the circuitous route of having a protagonist literally enter into the (hypo)diegetic storyworld of another medium rather than the one in which the main story is represented. Therefore, they are allegories of transmediation. The “realistic” simulation of 3D space in Epic Mickey is represented by Mickey Mouse, a 2D cartoon character, being sucked into the map of a theme park, a 3D medium, while what the designers are really trying to explain is why Mickey would end up in the actual medium of Epic Mickey, the video game, and a 3D platformer at that.

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Platformers are the proverbial granddaddy of all video game genres: they consist of a player-controlled avatar and a series of levels in 2D (or later, 3D) space littered with impassable chasms, short platforms and enemies which block the player’s passage. Falling into a chasm, colliding with an enemy or being hit by a projectile results in the player’s death, while successfully traversing the play space and reaching some finish line results in victory and the transportation of the player to a different level with a new configuration of obstacles and visual themes. In Epic Mickey, the purpose of the game is to travel through all the major lands of Wasteland and restore the structures of each area using either Paint or Thinner, which the player shoots from Mickey’s Magic Brush by pressing the appropriate button. The use of Paint or Thinner creates and removes the platforms, and also feeds into the game’s moral choice system, since using Thinner is the quicker and easier route to defeating enemies and accessing secret areas. Now, the spatial logic and, indeed, the buildings themselves closely follow the organizational principles of Disney parks: each area corresponds to one themed area in Disneyland, with individual structures modelling particular rides or shops. So, for example, Mean Street is a dystopic rendering of Main Street, USA, Bog Easy is based on New Orleans Square, and OsTown is the Wasteland version of Mickey’s ToonTown, but rethemed for Oswald, the de facto ruler of Wasteland. The different lands also inherit the colour schemes and visual vocabulary of their real-world counterparts; iconic ride buildings are transformed into lived-in homes for the in-game characters and themed decorations become functional, climbable objects, required to beat the game. A particularly illustrative case is audio. In the parks, BGM (background music) is intended to enhance the atmosphere, with each land having its signature tune, played on a loop. Individual rides also have an audio soundtrack with several songs, atmospheric sound effects and dialogue addressing the visitors. In Epic Mickey, composer Jim Dooley made sure that the musical themes of the rides are extensively quoted. The music also reflects the actions of the player; Dooley spoke of his task in intermedial terms: In Epic Mickey, I had to do very difficult gameplay tracks that were dynamic. Essentially, think of it [as] panning back and forth. There were three music tracks playing at the same time. In the center there is a track that is playing all the time. The central is neutral and to your left is dark and to the right is light. . . . Neutral always plays. If you start creating in the world, it starts playing the light element, and if you start destroying the world, it will go to neutral. If you are mischievous it will start adding this dark element. . . . And they adapt and mix on the fly as you play the game.28 Another curiosity of the first Epic Mickey is that, unlike theme park rides, characters don’t speak in any intelligible language, but converse instead

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in gibberish and non-semantic vocalizations. Therefore, the semantic content of descriptions is relegated to speech balloons. However, Epic Mickey 2 is fully voice-acted, and even features the sort of musical theatre songs Disney’s animated features are known for, bringing the sequel closer to the conventions of theme parks’ soundscapes. Even though the sound design hits all the right notes, it is hard to overemphasize how improbable and un-Disney-like the concept of Wasteland is. Long noted for its meticulous attention to detail and spic-and-span cleanliness, Disneyland is a place where nothing is ever out of repair. Walt did not even let the Haunted Mansion be designed to look decrepit and run-down, reportedly saying: “We’ll take care of the outside, and let the ghosts take care of the inside.”29 Wasteland, on the other hand, is anything but immaculate. Epic Mickey acknowledges the technological nature of Disney parks by adopting a steampunk aesthetic, with oily cogwheels and machines visible throughout the game. Furthermore, Thinner has spilt all over the world, so certain parts of structures appear hollow, pale and ghostly. Wasteland is meant to look and feel like a park after a natural disaster, a “blasted landscape”.30 Because Epic Mickey focuses so much on “the doppelgänger image of the theme park”, as Scott A. Lukas puts it,31 it is a rare case of a Disney product actually emphasizing “dark theming”. Even though renovating buildings with Paint is the central goal of the game, if the player uses Thinner in the wrong place, structures may collapse and characters comment upon the further havoc Mickey wreaks on Wasteland. Ordinary patrons in real-life parks would never have this much power in the first place. Gameplay is constituted by progression through areas designed to evoke the themed lands of Disney parks. Wasteland is organized spatially to resemble the parks, following a structure called the “Magic Wand” layout.32 Also called the hub-and-wheel structure, it consists of the long promenade of Main Street, USA leading into a central plaza from which guests can enter Adventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland and Tomorrowland. Visual magnets in the form of tall, iconic buildings, called “weenies”,33 stand at strategic positions. In the parks, they would draw guests further into the lands, while in the games, they remind the player of inaccessible areas. Mickey starts off in his own house in Cartoon World (modelled on Mickey’s Country House in Disneyland), but the vast majority of gameplay takes place within Wasteland. Unlike those who freely walk in the parks, Mickey must earn access to themed areas by fixing ride machinery, as themed lands are physically separated from each other. In an inventive intermedial metalepsis, Mickey travels to other lands by activating projection screens showing thematically appropriate Disney cartoons and jumping into the projection. Therein, players play a short 2D platform level that features enemies and scenery from the titular animated short,

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then leave via another projection screen. To get from Mean Street to Bog Easy, for example, Mickey enters the pictorial world of “Lonesome Ghosts”.34 If the Disney short in question was originally in black and white, the projection screen level will also be in greyscale. Before Mickey jumps into the Lonesome Ghosts projection, the title screen of the original short is seen on the canvas. After entering, a loading screen appears, which shows the still image of a postcard of a steamboat sunk into the marshes of Bog Easy (Steamboat Willie, in fact). Then gameplay commences, with Mickey ascending a crooked staircase with several planks missing and the titular ghosts hindering Mickey’s progress. Floating furniture that recalls the animated short’s ghostly haunting form platforms on which Mickey must jump to reach the end of the level. The borders of the side-scrolling level are animated to look like celluloid reels. When Mickey reaches his goal, he jumps out of the platforming level onto Bog Easy. This is similar to the “transmediation by proxy” case above, but with a twist. Rather than representing what the source medium does to achieve an effect within that medium (a miniature train physically taking people in a theme park to a new land, in which case the train is part of the theme park medium) in a target medium (a video game) in order to talk about the effects of media (i.e., transportation into another world), the game uses intermedial relations to mask the mechanisms by which the source medium achieves an effect (you still travel to another land, but through other means). In transmediation by proxy, an additional medial layer is supplied to make a transmedial statement possible: to avoid making Mickey aware that he is in a video game, he is put in a virtual theme park instead. But in this case, jumping in and out of 2D video game levels disguised as Mickey shorts, the internal logic of the theme park is shattered to transmediate intellectual property. So, following the logic of the earlier coinage, I would christen this transmediation by bootstrapping: the ontological and intermedial metalepsis occurs arbitrarily, without any diegetic necessity or rhetorical effect. Yet transmediation occurs because it makes for a better tale. Themed hubs such as Bog Easy allow a much greater freedom of movement than side-scrolling travel levels. Players can jump onto the rooftops of buildings, something that would not be medially possible in a real theme park because the architectural illusion of scale only works at the eye level of pedestrians.35 Bog Easy Square mimics the French Quarter-style architecture of New Orleans Square, but the colour scheme is even more vibrant than in the parks, and the lighting scheme is more dramatic because it is perpetually nightfall. The main attraction here is Lonesome Manor, but the player can also access a shop to buy parts and eventually assemble an Audio-Animatronic Donald (who looks much less “lifelike” than real Animatronics). Other hubs feature more shops and rides: for example, Ventureland has a Tiki Shop and a Hat Shop, as well as a Treehouse (inspired

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by the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouses in the parks) and the Pirates of the Wasteland attraction. One notable way the game environment’s hub worlds differ from those of the parks is that each individual land has many fewer shop interiors and rides, because a) designers need to streamline the experience to 10-15 hours of gameplay, b) the game tells a linear story with a suitably epic conclusion and the design has to funnel the player towards story beats and c) the few lands the player can explore are more convoluted on the inside, featuring hidden backstage areas. Nowhere is this dialectic between linear progression and open-ended exploration more visible than in areas based on individual rides, such as Pirates of the Wasteland. Here, the video game offers a wish-fulfilment fantasy of stepping out of a dark ride and interacting with the setting the theme park only vicariously teases us with. The area is based on the Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC) ride. In the original attraction, riders go from New Orleans Square through an old fort, embark and plunge down a waterfall into the 17th-century Spanish Main, meet pirates, witness the sack of Tortuga and ship-to-ship combat between rival captains and see hoards of pirate treasure, then end the ride by going up the waterfall to emerge safely in New Orleans Square. Using the waterfall as the main gateway between the present and the past, the ride literally immerses guests into the world of pirates. In the game, the ride is found in Tortooga, a Caribbean colonial town with missionary architecture like Disney World’s version of the attraction, except that a quest to find Beluga Bill’s treasure replaces the queueing experience. To pursue this quest, Mickey must converse with the captive pirates in the jail area, who are begging for a key, very much like the jailed pirates in the original ride. The pirates then open the skull gate to Pirate Voyage, the area that most closely resembles the actual PotC ride. Entering the ride requires passing through an animated platforming section modelled after the Disney short “The Castaway.” Pirate Voyage opens onto a river, but instead of merrily cruising down the ride in a boat, Mickey has to avoid the flowing Thinner by jumping on rotating platforms. Skill challenges of this kind are always an integral part of video game storytelling in a way theme parks can only hope to imitate with interactive dark rides, such as Duel: The Haunted House Strikes Back! at Alton Towers or Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin at the Magic Kingdom, where players shoot virtual enemies with ridemounted guns. Next, Mickey enters the burning town scene inspired by the sack of Tortuga, and this time, he can jump into a bateau, but he is mostly required to fix some machinery spread across the ride buildings while dodging enemies. Once done, we arrive at Skull Island, where Mickey needs to solve mechanical puzzles to raise Smee’s sunken boat and go on to fight Captain Hook. The climactic boss battle takes place in a separate area, Hook’s Ship, which the opening cutscene shows in a shot that evokes the ships’ battle

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diorama in PotC. Hook is defeated by a mix of logic puzzles that takes place across the whole of the ship, culminating in saving a Tinkerbell-like sprite, which gives Hook’s arch-nemesis, Pete Pan (since he is modelled on the character Black Pete), the ability to fly and defeat Hook. Thus, Epic Mickey recapitulates the drama of the theme park ride by using the video game lexicon of gameplay without being a derivative simulation of the actual land or ride. The rising action of discovery, quests, killing enemies and defeating the final boss constrains the player to a set narrative which adheres to a tried and tested schema of progression.

Lost in the Funhouse: The Allegory of Immersion in the Monkey Island Series You are Guybrush Threepwood, self-styled mighty pirate who defeated the evil ghost captain LeChuck twice, after two games’ worth of pirating in the 17th-century Caribbean. Searching for the fabled treasure Big Whoop, you fight the demonic LeChuck underneath Monkey Island (MI), where you enter strange, modern corridors. LeChuck, in his death throes, asks you to take off his mask. Pulling the mask off, you find your little brother Chuckie underneath. Soon, you leave the dark corridors to emerge in an amusement park, where your parents are waiting for you and Chuckie. Were LeChuck and the lost treasure fantasy? Or was the theme park real? This is the question the ending of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (MI2) poses to the player, who is suddenly jolted out of the diegetic world to be faced with the disheartening ending involving the little child in the theme park. It is one of the most puzzling endings in video game history. Upon closer inspection, however, the seemingly consistent world of the MI series turns out to be thoroughly anachronistic. While it is supposed to be set “deep in the Caribbean” during the golden age of piracy, the games feature vending machines selling grog, microbreweries, Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereals, electric lights, lifts, sushi restaurants, engraved Elvis plates, robots and other modern contraptions. Certain scenes are spitting images of Disneyland rides, most importantly the Pirates of the Caribbean. It should not be at all surprising that LucasArts, the game design company producing the first four Monkey Island games, drew on the players’ knowledge of Disney entertainment when creating the MI series. George Lucas’s companies have collaborated with Walt Disney before to design themed rides based on Indiana Jones and Star Wars. This collaboration is all the more interesting given that Monkey Island lead designer Ron Gilbert wrote much of Monkey Island 1 and 2’s story arcs based on a then little-known book by science fiction author Tim Powers, called On Stranger Tides.36 The novel details the adventures of one Jack Shandy, who is captured by pirates seeking the Fountain of Youth and teams up

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with Blackbeard, whom he must defeat to save the love interest, feisty Elizabeth Hurwood. The novel features copious amounts of voodoo magic, ghost pirates and zombies, just like the Monkey Island games. The fourth instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, On Stranger Tides, is also explicitly based on Powers’ novel, while still existing in the cinematic universe of the PotC franchise. In another twist, the original Disney park rides were refurbished after the release of the movies to incorporate Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbossa.37 The complex web of transmedial adaptation is as much due to the synergistic nature of Disney’s entertainment empire (which bought LucasFilm in 2012) as to the rich source material: the immersive dioramas of the original ride. Point-and-click adventure games like the Monkey Island series adopt a set of theatrical conventions to portray their settings.38 The storyworld is segmented into discrete screens, presented as proscenium theatrical sets, with exits towards the left- and right-hand sides of the screen, as well as occasionally towards the back. The player character’s job is to interact with objects and non-player characters to bring a story to life. The player picks up and collects objects and engages in conversation by selecting one from a handful of pre-written lines of dialogue. The player’s progress is hindered, and accessing new screens requires the solving of puzzles, usually by combining previously collected items or creatively repurposing those tools when interacting with the scenery. One metamedial puzzle involves the protagonist having to find buried treasure in a theatre in The Curse of Monkey Island: to do so, he must follow directions on a treasure map by manipulating stage lights as if the buttons represented the directions of the compass. Despite the strong theatrical tradition of representation, adventure games are also heavily inspired by the riddle tradition of literature. In the Monkey Island games, gameplay is segmented into discrete “acts”, continuing the theatrical metaphor. Because it is set in the Caribbean, the archipelago of the islands imposes an architecture on the narrative whereby the player starts out each episode stuck on an island, and after exploring it and solving the puzzles there, she can move on to another but cannot go back and explore the scenes belonging to a different “act”. Even so, there is still considerable freedom to be had: in MI2, after getting off Scabb Island, the second “act” of the game lets the player loose on a triad of islands, Phatt, Booty and Scabb, where she has to gather the four pieces which comprise the map of Big Whoop, and the puzzles require the player to visit every single island once to collect each piece of the map. Thus, the game tries to develop the plot by easing up on the strict sequentiality of the narrative through introducing a series of heavily concatenated puzzles which require the player to explore all available content. The anachronisms and spatial structure of progress in the MI games share several similarities with Disney’s worlds, to the point that their

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sources are often identical. For example, Fantasyland’s buildings are inspired by Tudor timber-framed architecture and Sleeping Beauty Castle is based on Schloss Neuschwanstein.39 The fairy-tale Europeanness of Fantasyland owes much to Swedish Disney illustrator Gustaf Tenggren, who has drawn abundantly from the architectural tradition of medieval German towns like Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber.40 The area surrounding the old clock tower of Rothenburg, with the Koboldzellersteig and the Spitalgasse, is lifted practically whole into the Monkey Island games, serving as the central part of the old town on Męlée Island. Similarly, both Booty Island in MI2 and New Orleans Square in Disney’s theme parks are architectural and cultural citations of the famous Louisiana city. In Monkey Island 1–4, the architecture is transmediated in order to produce a narrative tension between the immersive environment of the theme park and a critical reflection on commercial practices of the experience economy. In The Curse of Monkey Island (MI3), the Pirates of the Caribbean dark ride – as it existed in the parks at the time – becomes a master trope, organizing the plot, art direction and settings of the game. Entire sequences are transmediated: even before the introductory cinematic starts, the player must choose a difficulty level. The dialogue box looks like an old wooden sign hanging in a dark swampland at night, and faint banjo music plays. This is based on the Blue Bayou Lagoon of the Disney ride: the riders board their bateaux in the area dubbed “LaFitte’s Landing”, the name indicated on a battered wooden sign. The scene is set at night, and the Louisiana origins of the scene are anchored by a banjo playing either “Camptown Races” or “Oh, Susanna!”. The game’s introductory sequence has our hero, Guybrush, floating in a bumper car. As he is writing in his logbook, he inadvertently sails into the naval siege of Puerto Pollo, with LeChuck at the helm of the flagship. This scene is taken from the ride as well, where the riders drop into a naval siege of a similar colonial fort. These intermedial references are none-too-subtly underscored by the bumper car Guybrush is manning. The intro of MI3 takes the player along just as the dark ride would, metareferencing the ride to immerse the player in the world of the game while the intro “performs” the ride. The parallels with Disney’s ride and park escalate as MI3 draws to a close. The two final chapters of the game are set in LeChuck’s Carnival of the Damned. At the start of Act V, Guybrush is held fast in a ski-lift car that will bring certain death, as it plunges the riders into the lava in its regular course of operation. The ski lift, with two lines and the mountain looming in the distance, is a riff on the Matterhorn and the now defunct Skyway ride in Disneyland. After Guybrush escapes, he is left to his own devices and wanders around the carnival amusements. The most popular attraction that every guest at the carnival will ride is Great Monkey Mountain, a dark ride with several dioramas. Here, the final act unfolds

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when Guybrush enters the ride by jumping out of the ride vehicles into the dioramas to assemble an explosive device. Theming itself is thoroughly metamedial in the Monkey Island games. In Escape from Monkey Island (MI4), the exploitative nature of theming is the driving force of the plot: the old world of unruly pirates has given way to the new world of entertainment and commercialization of the Caribbean’s history of piracy. Land developer Ozzie Mandrill is in the business of transforming islands into tourist destinations. Jambalaya Island, for example, has been turned into a pirate-themed tourist trap. The three main chains in operation are a Micro-Groggery, a Starbuccaneers and a Planet Threepwood, the last themed around the exploits of Guybrush. Events and characters from previous games are referenced in the menu, decorations evoke places from the series and staff dress as Guybrush and other characters, giving the player a chance to reflect upon the medium of the park and the principles of theming. These venues play on the well-known fact that Disney uses corporate synergy to capitalize on its cartoon franchises, but Guybrush must obtain items from each restaurant in order to create a device that will defeat Ozzie Mandrill, thus subverting the mindless consumerism of themed venues. Theme parks have been the objects of critical intervention because their intended function is to entertain by immersion, lulling the consumers into a rapt enchantment, which also inspires them to spend more money. As Florian Freitag observes, “[T]heme parks have been careful not only to select themes that are immediately recognizable, but also to avoid controversial themes . . . that might offend or alienate potential customers.”41 The passive acceptance of inoffensive, catch-all themes, of simply riding and spending, is seen as detrimental, exploitative and complicit in the ideological reinforcement of capitalist values.42 That “passivity” is precisely what is upended in the Monkey Island games, as the player is an active co-creator and re-enactor of the game’s narrative. Figuratively, the player is not just immersed in the games’ theme park, but subverts the logic of immersion to critically comment on theming and commercialization. Guybrush literally blows up the theme park at the end of MI3 and exploits his own potential for theming to defeat his nemesis and stop the theming of the Caribbean in MI4. By making the players ride a rollercoaster in an in-game theme park that thematizes the previous games, the designers of MI3 defamiliarize the video game narrative by exposing it as an improved allegory of the corporate theme park’s regime of spatial narratives. The main argument of the Monkey Island games is that the theme park rides’ spatial narratives limit the interactors’ agency by “railroading” the guests through the scenes of the ride and the themed lands without allowing them to exercise any creative powers. The adventure game series thus vanquishes what is the greatest drawback of theme park rides: the passivity of the patron.

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Here You Build Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: Constructing Theme Parks in Rollercoaster Tycoon Both Epic Mickey and the Monkey Island games have transmediated theme parks as storyworlds, telling their own tales of destruction, immersion and restoration. In ludological terms, they are games of progression, “the historically newer structure” of games where “the player has to perform a predestined set of actions in order to complete the game . . .; most games with storytelling ambitions” are therefore games of progression.43 Furthermore, games of progression can be finished, as once the story is told, it will always unfold in the same manner. Platformers and adventure games are examples of this tradition of playful storytelling. In contrast, games of emergence44 are more traditional, since the rules only specify possible moves, and players can experiment with different strategies. Games of emergence unfold differently from game to game. This distinction is complemented by another ludological dichotomy: some forms of play are very rule driven, where direct confrontation is replaced by a civilizing set of formalized instructions to allow a fair contest, which Roger Caillois calls ludus,45 whereas others are “spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct”,46 which exhibit paideia. Paideia can be understood as acts of spontaneous make-believe. They are freeform play activities with little structure to them, where the imagination can run wild. Ludus games are partly like contemporary board and card games because they are defined by clear rules, and partly like story-based video games because the narrative imposes a clear dramatic structure on the events of the storyworld. Paideia games are more open-ended and creative, like children’s toys, whereby the play objects are mere props – building blocks for the imagination. The Rollercoaster Tycoon series is an example of just such a game. As a building-and-management simulator, the focus here is not on adapting a specific theme park or on enacting one particular story in a themed space, but on how a theme park operates. In the Rollercoaster Tycoon games, players are tasked with running the theme park as a business. They simulate guests with different preferences and budgets who want to spend some time and money in the player’s parks. They are games of emergence governed by paideia, as there is no predetermined story, only a set of financial goals to achieve, and players are free to run their parks however they see fit, building rides and overpricing them to their hearts’ content. Theme park management games chronicle how an empty plot of land becomes a successful commercial enterprise. They feature an isometric bird’s-eye view of the lot the player is trusted with and an interface which allows them to place or combine buildings and their elements into a functioning ride. These are all material transpositions of media objects: from rollercoasters to candy floss stalls and from Ferris wheels to haunted houses, all the traditional fairground rides are there. Sensory

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transmediations include the background music, which typically features a whimsical soundtrack, with individual ride buildings capable of playing music tracks appropriate to that ride: calliope music for merry-gorounds, dance music for dodgems. Sound effects such as the ratcheting of the rollercoaster lift or the excited screams of guests further enhance the ambience, with crowd effects providing a true-to-life experience of walking around a theme park. Amusement park management has a pedigreed history of 25 years in the video game industry. The first game to feature the running of a park was Bullfrog’s Theme Park, a surprisingly deep business simulation given its age: players can construct rides, hire employees, adjust pricing, create show buildings and set up food and drink shops, as well as place decorations to ensure guests’ happiness and reap healthy profits from a wellrun park. Ride pricing is based on a predetermined excitement rating. Players can choose different maps from across the globe, which means having different terrains to build on and around, as well as different economic conditions, such as how much capital they begin with, and what the interest rate, land tax and climate of the selected country are. To win a scenario, players must rank Number 1 against 40 simulated competitors in a variety of categories. But the fun lies more in seeing a park grow than in hitting arbitrary, quantified goals. When people start up the game, a curious intermedial moment occurs: the intro movie features a family watching an ad for the new park, when suddenly the announcer leaps out of the screen to address the family members and then whisks them away into the TV screen, further underlining the immersive potential of themed spaces by using the TV as a proxy for another medium, just as Epic Mickey does. In an unparalleled innovation within the business simulation genre, players can choose from three levels of complexity for the first time – Sandbox, Sim and Full – which affects how many game mechanics are in play. Sandbox allows the players to focus on simple building, with only the most rudimentary business elements retained: taking out loans and balancing expenses and income to avoid bankruptcy. The Sim setting introduces the research mechanic, whereby the players can allocate some of the profits to R&D in order to unlock new rides and buildings. Players are also faced with dialogue boxes informing them that their employees are demanding pay rises and are threatening to go on strike if their requests are not met. The Full setting is where Theme Park really shines: players now have to manage the stocks of shops and can buy shares in other theme parks, while AI-controlled park managers affect the ingame business climate. Although developers have tried, no other game has achieved the same level of economic depth and micromanagement as the original Theme Park. Crucially, Theme Park does not allow its players to create a theme park. Rides and show buildings never have enough thematic connections

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to form consistently themed lands. Players can build amusement parks without a problem, of course: from hook-a-ducks to haunted houses, bouncy castles and merry-go-rounds – all are standard carnival fare – but even the most advanced decorations are limited to trees, shrubbery and fountains. Despite these shortcomings, Theme Park was ground-breaking, and it laid the foundation for the genre. Rollercoaster Tycoon (RCT) is both a shameless copying of and a massive improvement upon Theme Park. Designed by Chris Sawyer, RCT was built on the engine of Sawyer’s earlier success, Transport Tycoon. It features an industry-standard, isometric, grid-based world with height mapping, which provides a clearer perspective of spatial relations than the indistinct birds’-eye view of Theme Park. This enables what sets RCT apart from its predecessor: the player can build custom rollercoasters and other rides on tracks that may be elevated above the ground but can also run beneath ground level. The engine also simulates the physics of the rides, so the game can calculate the effects of different drops, loops, corkscrews and helixes on the guests. As well as having an Excitement rating, ride buildings also have an Intensity and a Nausea score, which affect guests’ willingness to pay for a ride. A certain degree of Intensity is necessary to entice people to get on a ride, but build a ride that is too tame or too intense and no one will board it at all. Intensity and the attendant G-forces translate into a coaster’s Nausea rating: if a ride is too vomit-inducing, expect to hire more handymen to clean up the mess afterwards. Finally, the novelty of an attraction is signaled by the Excitement rating: the higher the excitement rating, the more people will want to experience it. It is the ultimate yardstick by which the pricing of the rides, and therefore the resulting profit, is calculated. Players simply cannot charge too much for a boring ride, but profits can be sky-high for a suitably exciting ride. The mechanics of Excitement are worth unpacking in greater detail, because this rating is the nexus of design innovation within RCT. For every 0.1 point of excitement, the player can charge an additional £0.10 (or other currency) for a ride. Guests will never pay more than £8 for a single ride. Excitement can be increased by directing the tracks of a ride near water (max +1) or building a section underground (max +2). Having a ride’s track in close contact with other rides or interlocking it with its own path can raise Excitement by a whopping 3 points maximum, encouraging the player to make full use of the custom-building system. Theming the ride by decorating the area near the tracks with scenery items also contributes to the Excitement rating, with a maximum additional rating of +0.51. Admittedly, theming is not the greatest determiner of a ride’s Excitement rating, but it contributes significantly to potential profit. As for actual theming, here Rollercoaster Tycoon delivers in earnest. Extending the research mechanics of Theme Park, RCT offers new

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rides and decorations that players can research to form coherent and distinctive themes. The base game delivers Egyptian, Classical/Roman, Mining, Martian and Wonderland theme packs, which include recognizably themed scenery elements, such as sphinxes, pyramids, temples and amphiteatres, as well as theme-appropriate lamps and walls. Further expansions (Added Attractions47 and Loopy Landscapes)48 reach deeper into the lucky dip of themes associated with amusement parks,49 such as Pagoda, Jungle, Jurassic, Space and others, which offer players the option to use theme-consistent ride exits and entrances and custom signs and also unlock period-associated music in ride buildings, such as fanfares, medieval pipe music, etc. The assortment of different assets further underscores the notion that theming is fundamentally transmedial and that popular cultural imagery is transferred from one medium to another, whether it is a pumpkin-shaped street lamp, an equestrian statue of a Roman emperor or a rubbish bin designed to look like a radar tower. The success of RCT lies in the vast amount of customization and building options it includes, which have resulted in a more authentic theme park design experience. The immense replayability of the game meant that it would see several sequels, including RCT 2, which added more custom building and modding features, and RCT 3, which brought the series into 3D with a realistic style, including night-time views and fireworks displays. An extreme example of the lasting impact of RCT is the case of one Sebastian Brendgen, who worked for 10 years on a fully themed park, filling the entire map of the game, a 254 × 254 tile grid, and using most of the themes available in RCT 2, featuring 255 rides and shops hosting an average of 8,000 guests, with a total attendance of over 471,000 simulated visitors. Another, perhaps more significant, legacy is the rivalry between the Rollercoaster Tycoon franchise and its competitors. Bullfrog Entertainment was the first to release a 3D theme park management game, Theme Park World, in 1999, in which all the parks were themed from the outset (Lost Kingdom, Wonder Land, Halloween World and Space Zone) and players could only build themed rides that fitted into their respective areas. A follow-up with more polished graphics, Theme Park Inc, was the last Bullfrog game; it returned to the management roots of the original Theme Park and featured a more intricate challenge system to keep players on their toes. Regrettably, the right to use the series’ name fell into the hands of rookie game developers Nvizzio Creations, who could not uphold the standards of the source material, and their 2016 creation, Rollercoaster Tycoon World, was an abject failure that was riddled with infuriating bugs and inane design decisions, and this consigned the game to the rubbish heap of failed sequels, best forgotten. Today, several games continue to use this formula: at the time of writing in 2019, Texel Raptor’s Parkitect seems to be taking a page out of the earlier RCTs’ book, with a strict grid-based system but a more polished

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building interface and stylized graphics. Planet Coaster50 (2016), meanwhile, comes from the same developers as RCT 3 and offers a greater degree of freedom to construct elaborate show buildings. Amusement park simulators have come a long way, moving towards offering a wider range of elements for the player to build their parks with, adding a variety of themes to existing games and deepening the extent to which players can recreate the theme park experience.

It’s Just a Ride: Transmediating the Theme Park World It is a great source of misery to me that I can only provide the reader with such a superficial, highly selective and painfully abbreviated account of the various ways in which video games can transmediate certain aspects of the theme park medium. Elsewhere, I have written about how MMOs remediate the promises of the theme park medium in a much more concentrated fashion51 and how the institutional histories and icons of world fairs and theme parks live on in video games.52 Yet these works are just pieces of a larger puzzle about the power of the computer to algorithmically simulate the operations of other media. Video games can transmediate and convey allegories of a visitor’s experience in a theme park. Although today’s games do not yet provide a fully immersive VR experience, games are already using audiovisual stimuli and interactive feedback loops to give a semblance of reality to the bits and bytes that bring fantasy to life. To the extent that theme parks succeed in transporting visitors to another time and place, they can be considered an immersive medium, an analogue virtual reality. They are just as procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopaedic as digital environments,53 which ensures that video games are more than capable of delivering such experiences on the computer, even if the raw physical feel of being present at a virtual place is missing. Their complex narratives and modes of representation challenge our notions of what narratives can be and how we can enact them. The procedurality and encyclopaedic nature of video games provide opportunities for simulating the financial incentives for operating the theme park machine. These properties work in tandem to create microcosms of experience that enshrine the capacity of theme parks to de-lude and delight. The Sebastian Brendgens of the world may rejoice – people will continue to design games inspired by theme parks as long as there is imagination left in the world.

Notes 1. Knott’s Berry Farm used to be a functioning berry farm before it was turned into an amusement park. Depending on how strict we are with the definition of theming, we can either date the turning point as 1940, when a Ghost Town was built on the premises, or 1968, when KBF fenced off the area and began charging for admission.

182 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Péter Kristóf Makai King, “Disneyland and Walt Disney World,” 117. Elleström, Media Transformation, 19. Bryman, Disneyisation of Society, 104–27. Freitag, “Intermedial Relations,” 706. Bolter and Grusin, Understanding New Media, 65. Bolter and Grusin, Understanding New Media, 65. Epic Mickey. Rollercoaster Tycoon. Theme Park. Carlà and Freitag, “Ancient Greek Culture,” 242–59. Lukas, Theme Park. Smith, Total Work of Art, 114–33. Geppert, Imperial Expositions. Jenkins, “Narrative Architecture.” Foglesong, Walt Disney World. Carlà and Freitag, “Ancient Greek Culture.” Surrell, Pirates of the Caribbean; Surrell, Haunted Mansion. Smith and Worch, “Environmental Storytelling.” Gottdiener, Theming of America. Philips, Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking. Carlà and Freitag, “Ancient Greek Culture,” 244–6. Carlà and Freitag, “Ancient Greek Culture,” 245. Csíkszentmihályi, Psychology of Optimal Experience; Graham, “Archaeologist and the Video Game”; Wood, “‘What Happens [in Vegas]’,” 315–33. Lipp, Disney U. In the analysis of games, I refer to game areas, mechanics and some in-game objects with capitalized letters to highlight the terminological status conferred upon them by the game, rather than myself. PerLee, “Jim Dooley.” Surrell, Haunted Mansion, 13. Kirksey, Shapiro, and Brodine, “Hope in Blasted Landscapes,” 29–63. Lukas, “Questioning ‘Immersion’,” 115–24. Mitrasinovic, Total Landscape, 127. Barrier, Life of Walt Disney, 303. Gillett, dir., Lonesome Ghosts. Marling, ed., Designing Disney’s Theme Parks; Borrie, “Disneyland and Disney World,” 75. Powers, On Stranger Tides. Surrell, Pirates of the Caribbean, 148. Laurel, Computers as Theatre. Marling, Designing Disney’s Theme Parks, 175. Allan, Walt Disney and Europe, 78–82; Conrad, “Gustaf Tenggren’s Forgotten Decades,” 20. Freitag, “Critical Theme Park,” 6. Marcus, “Criticism and the Disney Theme Parks,” 201–8. Juul, Half-Real, 5. Juul, Half-Real, 4. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 13. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 28. Rollercoaster Tycoon: Added Attractions. Rollercoaster Tycoon: Loopy Landscapes. Philips, Fairground Attractions. Planet Coaster.

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51. Makai, “From Neomedievalism to Retrofuturism,” 201–22. 52. Makai, “Befejezetlen múlt.” 53. Murray, Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, 71–89.

Bibliography Algar, James, dir. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Fantasia. Burbank, Walt Disney Productions, 1940. DVD. Disney, 2010. Allan, Robin. Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2007. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Borrie, William T. “Disneyland and Disney World: Designing and Prescribing the Recreational Experience.” Loisir et Societé / Society and Leisure 22, no. 1 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.1999.10715576. Bryman, Alan. The Disneyisation of Society. London: Sage Publications, 2004. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1961]. Carlà, Filippo, and Florian Freitag. “Ancient Greek Culture and Myth in the Terra Mítica Theme Park.” Classical Receptions Journal 7, no. 2 (2015): 242–59. https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clu013. Conrad, JoAnn. “Fantasy Imaginaries and Landscapes of Desire: Gustaf Tenggren’s Forgotten Decades.” Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research 39 (2016). https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v39i0.257. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. The Curse of Monkey Island, LucasArts, 1997; Windows/Mac OS X, LucasArts. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137474254.0001. Epic Mickey, Junction Point Studios, 2010; Wii, Disney Interactive Studios. Epic Mickey: The Power of Two, Junction Point Studios, 2012–2013; PS3/Wii/ Xbox 360/Wii U/Windows/PS Vita, Disney Interactive Studios. Foglesong, Richard E. Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Freitag, Florian. “Critical Theme Parks: Dismaland, Disney and the Politics of Theming.” Continuum 31, no. 6 (2017): 923–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/103 04312.2017.1310180. ———. “‘Like Walking Into a Movie’: Intermedial Relations Between Theme Parks and Movies.” The Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 4 (2017): 704–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12569. Geppert, Alexander C. T. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gillett, Burt. dir. Lonesome Ghosts. Los Angeles: The Walt Disney Studios, 1937. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978.

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Gottdiener, Mark. The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments, 2nd ed. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2001. Graham, Shawn. “The Archaeologist and the Videogame.” Shawn Graham’s Open Digital Humanities Notebook 2016–17, March 16, 2016. http://smgprojects. github.io/the-archaeologist-and-the-video-game/. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” http://interactive.usc. edu/blog-old/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Jenkins_Narrative_Architecture.pdf. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Videogames Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. King, Margaret J. “Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form.” The Journal of Popular Culture 15, no. 1 (1981): 116–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1981.00116.x Kirksey, Eben, Nicholas Shapiro, and Maria Brodine. “Hope in Blasted Landscapes.” In The Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey, 29–63. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Koczwara, Michael. “After a Decade of Construction, this RollerCoaster Tycoon Megapark Is Finally Finished.” PC Gamer, May 30, 2017. www.pcgamer.com/ how-one-player-spent-a-decade-creating-a-rollercoaster-tycoon-megapark/. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley, 1991. Lipp, Doug. Disney U: How Disney University Develops the World’s Most Engaged, Loyal, and Customer-Centric Employees. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2013. Lukas, Scott A. “Questioning ‘Immersion’ in Contemporary Themed and Immersive Spaces.” In A Reader in Themed and Immersive Spaces, edited by Scott A. Lukas, 115–24. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2016. ———. Theme Park. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Makai, Péter Kristóf. “Befejezetlen múlt: a fogyasztás és a szórakoztatás utópiáinak térbeli kifejeződése a Disney-élményparkok Tomorrowlandjében és azon túl.” Apertúra 10, no. 3 (2015). http://uj.apertura.hu/2015/tavasz-nyar/makaibefejezetlen-mult-a-fogyasztas-es-a-szorakoztatas-utopiainak-terbeli-kifejezodese-a-disney-elmenyparkok-tomorrowlandjeben-es-azon-tul/. ———. “From Neomedievalism to Retrofuturism: A Virtual Addition to the Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground.” In Time and Temporality in Theme Parks, edited by Filippo Carla-Uhink, Florian Freitag, Sabrina Mittermeier, and Ariane Schwarz, 201–22. Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2017. Marcus, Greil. “Forty Years of Overstatement: Criticism and the Disney Theme Parks.” In Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, edited by Karal Ann Marling, 201–8. Montréal, Paris, and New York: Flammarion, 1999. Marling, Karal Ann, ed. Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance Montréal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre of Architecture; Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1999. Marshall, Rob, dir. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures, 2011. Mitrasinovic, Miodrag. Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space. London: Ashgate, 2006. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

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Nelson, Steve. “Walt Disney’s EPCOT and the World’s Fair Performance Tradition.” The Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 106–46. Parkitect, Texel Raptor, Early Access; Windows, Steam. PerLee, Ben. “Jim Dooley: Infamous Epic Mickey Music Master.” GameZone, May 4, 2012. www.gamezone.com/originals/jim_dooley_epic_mickey_infamous_ music_master/. Philips, Deborah. Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. Planet Coaster, Frontier Developments, 2016; Windows, Frontier Developments. Powers, Tim. On Stranger Tides. New York: Ace Books, 1987. Rollercoaster Tycoon, Chris Sawyer Productions, 1999; PC, Hasbro Interactive. Rollercoaster Tycoon: Added Attractions, Chris Sawyer Productions, 1999; PC, Hasbro Interactive. Rollercoaster Tycoon: Loopy Landscapes, Chris Sawyer Productions, 2000; PC, Hasbro Interactive. Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, Chris Sawyer Productions, 2002; PC, Hasbro Interactive. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, Frontier Developments, 2004; Windows/Mac OS/iOS, Atari/Aspyr Media/Frontier Developments. Rollercoaster Tycoon World, Nvizzio Creations, 2016; Windows, Atari. Smith, Harvey and Matthias Worch. “What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling.” Presentation at Game Developers Conference 2010, San Francisco, CA, March 9–13, 2010. Slides: www.gdcvault.com/play/1012647/ What-Happened-Here-Environmental. Smith, Matthew Wilson. The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2007. Surrell, Jason. The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic. Glendale: Disney Editions, 2015. ———. Pirates of the Caribbean: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies. New York: Disney Editions, 2005. Theme Park Inc, Bullfrog Productions, 2001; Windows, Electronic Arts. Theme Park World, Bullfrog Productions, 1999; Windows/PS/Mac OS/PS2, Electronic Arts. Transport Tycoon, Chris Sawyer Productions, 1994; MS-DOS (PC), MicroProse. Wood, Andrew F. “‘What Happens [in Vegas]’: Performing the Post-Tourist Flâneur in ‘New York’ and ‘Paris’.” Text and Performance Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 1, 2005): 315–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930500362403.

10 Intersemiotic Translation as a Creative Thinking Tool From Gertrude Stein to Dance João Queiroz and Pedro Atã

1. Introduction: Artists Are Cognitive Cyborgs Our thesis here is that creative artists are cognitive cyborgs1 and one of their most decisive implants is intersemiotic translation. Intersemiotic translation is a default procedure in creative arts. Artists such as Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Morton Feldman and Augusto de Campos are among many notable examples of artists in the last century who relied on translation between different semiotic systems to scaffold the creative transformation of artistic conceptual spaces. They are cognitive cyborgs because they have regulated and augmented their creative activity by coupling themselves to various tools and material structures. This is a new approach in the domain of intermediality that brings together premises from Peircean semiotics and distributed cognition. This approach is part of intermedial studies because it is interested in modelling relations between different media and also because it shares, to some extent, a similar tradition of research – semiotics and translation studies. However, within intermedial studies, our approach follows its own set of distinctive premises. First of all, we adhere more strictly to Peirce’s semiotics, which had already offered more than a century ago a systematic model of all logical phenomenological relations of meaning, including the materiality and situatedness of meaning. In doing so we are more conservative than others in the field with regard to terminological innovation, preferring to stick with terms that are already discussed within a semiotic framework, such as intersemiotic translation and intersemiosis, than introducing new terminology, such as the notion of transmediation. Secondly, we associate the description of relations between media more closely to models of joint and distributed cognition2 than to models of communication. That is, we propose to understand intermedial relations not so much as means for transmitting some meaning or import across context, but rather as means for thinking and acting together. In this paper, we will explore the notion of intersemiotic

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translation as a creative thinking tool and exemplify it with an intersemiotic translation of Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose (especially her Portraits) to dance pieces created by João Queiroz, Daniella Aguiar and Rita Aquino. In the example, intersemiotic translation works as a thinking tool that scaffolds creativity in dance. For Clark,3 humans are natural-born cyborgs, symbionts “whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry”. This thesis is related to our ability to extend cognition through non-biological devices, merging our cognitive activities with the operation of thinking tools and creating an external and distributed cognitive system. Our “mind is just less and less in the head!”4 or our mind is “out of our heads”,5 and this is not just a metaphor. Humans couple bodies with a paraphernalia of tools in order to augment perceptual, motor and cognitive competencies. Thinking tools are a constitutive part of our cognitive lives: we are able to alter conscious states and our attention by using pharmacological drugs; we ”freeze” reasoning and communicate it through the use of alphabets and other notation systems; and we organize, compare and calculate the world through numbers, graphs and diagrams. Various tools, such as pen and paper, calculators, calendars, maps, notations, models, computers, shopping lists, traffic signals, measurement units, etc., are considered non-biological elements of a cognitive system.6 Finally, the most impactful thinking tool that shapes human cognition is language: it is a deeply ingrained scaffolding device that radically augments what our cognitive systems can achieve in terms of categorization, memory, inference, learning and attention, as well as regarding building social relations and institutions.7 These thinking tools shape cognition: when we alter the constitution of our material environments of artefacts and the practices they afford, we modify the structure and organization of our cognitive/semiotic activity. This is a cumulative process: the newly organized cognitive activity affects the environment in a different way, which further modifies the patterns of cognitive activity, and so on in a circular and continuous process of cognitive (or semiotic) niche construction.8 Humans are cognitive niche builders, extending the mind into the space to think more efficiently. If this thesis is correct, and human cognitive achievements are highly dependent on the use of thinking tools, what about artistic creativity? Distributed cognition and situated problem-solving traditions have described examples of the use of external tools in different domains, for example in numerical cognition,9 different kinds of puzzle solving,10 practising and learning science,11 and in joint creative problem-solving tasks.12 In the context of philosophy of science, Nersessian13 analyzed the role of material resources in problem solving in the emergence of scientific concepts during “scientific revolutions”. But how is artistic creativity dependent on the exploration of thinking tools and artefacts? According to the premises indicated above, artists also rely on cognitive

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extensions, and different kinds of semiotic resources are “thinking tools” that distribute cognitive activity. Furthermore, and as emphasized in the literature on intermedial relations, a number of creative artists rely on explicit cross-influence between different semiotic systems in cases variously described as adaptation, ekphrasis, transmediation or intersemiotic transposition.14 We defend here the idea that this process of intersemiotic translation (IT) is a thinking tool that scaffolds creativity in arts. We explore this idea by taking advantage of an example of IT from literature (Gertrude Stein’s prose) to dance. But first we should answer the following question.

2. What Is Intersemiotic Translation? Intersemiotic translation was first defined by Roman Jakobson15 as the “transmutation of signs” – –“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems”. After Jakobson had defined this term, it became broader and now it designates relations between systems of different natures and is not restricted to the interpretation of verbal signs.16 Consequently, this process is observed in several semiotic phenomena, including literature, cinema, comics, poetry, dance, music, theatre, sculpture, painting, video and so on. In this sense, the concept bears similarities to others such as adaptation, ekphrasis and transmediation. An important difference is that the concept of IT is necessarily tied to the notion of semiosis (action of signs): it is grounded on the same epistemological and ontological principles that ground the notion of semiosis, and it stresses a level of description in which communicational processes are treated as semiotic processes. The question “what is intersemiotic translation?” is thus related to the question “what is semiosis?”. A Peircean approach to semiosis is related to formal attempts to describe cognitive processes in general. This framework provides a pragmatic model of sign-action, a conception of mind as a sign-interpretation process,17 and a list of fundamental varieties of representations based on a theory of logical categories. Semiosis is a concept that describes the most fundamental properties involved in processes of meaning and cognition as triadic relations, as opposed to the dynamical action of reactive, brute-force processes that occur between two subjects.18 A description of semiotic processes according to the Peircean model is a formal description and deliberately avoids using psychological and cultural notions. The formal roots of Peirce’s semiotics do not require it to be grounded on human psychology. Peirce is interested in the kinds of relations that are logically antecedent to the special characteristics of any interpreter. Thus, speaking in formal terms, this model differentiates between semiotic and non-semiotic processes by describing semiotic processes as irreducibly triadic relations, while non-semiotic processes

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Figure 10.1 The triadic relation S-O-I. Notice that a triad is different from a triangle. This graphic difference is relevant since in a triad the three terms are irreducible, while in a triangle two vertices are connected regardless of the third vertex.38

can be decomposed into dyadic and monadic relations.19 According to Peirce, any description of semiosis should necessarily treat it as a relation constituted by three irreducibly connected terms – sign, object, and interpretant (S-O-I for short), which are its minimal constitutive elements20 (see Figure 10.1). Triadic irreducibility is a requirement of any process that we might regard as “interpretative”, “cognitive”, or related to “meaning”. The S in S-O-I is the entity or process that stands for something else. The O in S-O-I is something else that the sign stands for. In the cases we are interested in here, this object should be understood not as a substance, property, or thing in itself but as a ”form” or “habit”, a pattern of constraints that regulates how S is determined.21 The I in S-O-I is an effect produced in a cognitive system22 by the use of S as determined by O. Semiosis in the cases that interest us here is thus an irreducible process through which a constraining factor (O) acts on cognitive behaviour (I) because of the mediation of a certain entity (or group of entities) or process (S). It is relevant that semiosis is characterized as triadically irreducible. In an irreducible triad, what brings together all the terms of the relational complex cannot be any sum of dyadic correlations between the terms. Any relation between a sign and its object depends on an interpretant. A consequence of this characterization is that whenever we are describing a meaning relation, we have to make a reference to who this relation is meaningful for. The pronoun “who” does not necessarily refer to psychological agents here, but to any kind of cognitive, interpretative system23 (see section 3 for a brief discussion of distributed cognition). The effect of the sign on the cognitive system is the interpretant. It is only in simultaneity with an interpretant that any entity can be said to be a sign and possess an object. If you change the interpretant of an S-O-I relation, you potentially change the whole relation. The same entity occupying the functional role of a sign for two different interpretants will have two

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different objects. Semiosis is not a thing, but an event or process of interpretation; it necessarily involves time and it is always prone to change. There cannot be anything like an ahistorical or non-situated semiosis.24 Another consequence of the formal definition of semiosis as a triadic relation is that sign, object and interpretant are viewed as functional roles.25 These roles can be taken by virtually any entity or process, provided that the interpretant is an effect produced on a cognitive system. Furthermore, the same entity or process can take different roles in different meaning relations: an interpretant in a given S-O-I relation can immediately take the role of a sign in another S-O-I relation, for example. Semiotic relations are not isolated but are connected in temporally and spatially distributed chains and webs. But what kind of relation is established between S, O and I? In the Peircean model, S-O-I relations are described as determinative: “A sign is anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which [it] itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum.”26 According to Ransdell,27 the notion of “determination”, in the context of Peirce’s philosophy, carries both a logical and a causal sense. If we consider the dynamical aspect of “determination”, we can think of it as the production of an effect. In this sense, we are dealing with causal determination in the intuitive sense of “bringing about”, elaborated in the modern theory of causality in terms of efficient causation. If instead we consider the logical aspect of “determination”, we can think of it as a material implication: if p, then q. In this sense, “determination”, should be understood as a constraining (a reduction of possibilities) rather than a causally deterministic process. What about intersemiotic translation? If translation is a semiotic process, the description above also corresponds to a minimal formal description of what a translation is. In an intersemiotic translation, the semiotic relation S-O-I describes how a translation source is translated into a different semiotic system, resulting in a translation target. There are two possible ways of mapping a translation source and a translation target to the S-O-I triad:28 either the source is the sign (S) and the target is the interpretant (I) (model 1; see figure 10.2) or the source is the object (O) and the target is the sign (S) (model 2; see figure 10.3). What are the implications of modelling an intersemiotic translation through model 1 or model 2? The two models are not two different types of intersemiotic translation; they show different aspects of the same phenomenon. Model 1 puts the translation source in the functional role of a sign and includes the object of the translation source in the model. It shows how the object of the translation source is codependent on the translation target: different intersemiotic translations of the same source will stress, unveil and/or construe different objects. Also, model 1 puts the target semiotic system (e.g., dance) in the functional role of a cognitive system.

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Figure 10.2 Model 1 of intersemiotic translation. In this case, the translation source is a sign, which mediates an object so as to determine the translation target as an effect. Note that this model graphically represents the object of the source but not the effect of the target on its interpreters. Model 1 describes how, through a translation source, a certain pattern of constraints acts on a cognitive system so as to produce a translation target.

Figure 10.3 Model 2 of intersemiotic translation. In this case, the sign is the translation target, which mediates a translation source (viewed not as a substance but as a pattern of constraints) so as to determine an effect on a cognitive system. Note that this model graphically represents the effect of the target on a cognitive system but not the object of the source. Model 2 describes how, through a translation target, a translation source constrains the interpretative behaviour of a cognitive system.

Model 2 puts the translation target in the functional role of a sign and includes the interpretants of the target in the model. The object of the triad is the translation source. In this model we have the notion that a translation target stands for a translation source. This S-O connection is, of course, dependent on interpretative effects being produced in a cognitive system. An obvious example of a cognitive system is an audience. Thus, model 2 captures the notion that a work is interpreted by an audience as a translation of another work. However, the cognitive system that interprets the sign doesn’t have to be an audience. We will explore such a case in the section below.

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3. How Does Intersemiotic Translation Work? We are interested in how intersemiotic translation as a thinking tool is used to scaffold creativity in the arts.29 We will examine models 1 and 2 as semiotic processes that happen during the creation of artworks. In this case, the functional role of the interpretant is not related to audiences but to the creative process. Is the cognitive system in which interpretants are produced the mind of a creative artist? It can be, and it certainly involves what can be described as an individual mind, but the notion of a cognitive system here should be viewed more broadly and not necessarily as mappable to an individual psychological agent. Here we recover the notion of distributed cognition that was briefly introduced in the first section. Distributed cognition, situated cognition and the “4E” paradigm30 attacked cognitive internalism, claiming that the description of cognitive processes as brain-bound information processing misses the point of how cognitive processes actually happen “in the wild”.31 A conception of cognition should also acknowledge and integrate perceptual and motor systems, nonbiological material inside and outside the body, and the social, multi-agent contexts in which cognition happens. For distributed cognition, everyday objects such as shopping lists, computers, pen and paper, maps, charts and diagrams and so on, are cognitive artefacts32 that aid, support, enhance or improve cognition. Hutchins33 stresses the need to account for cultural practices, i.e., a practice that “exists in a cognitive ecology such that it is constrained by or coordinated with the practices of other persons”. Cultural practices produce cognitive artefacts and organize perception and action, as well as producing the environment itself in which cognitive agents operate. This ecological view of cognition doesn’t see the individual agent as the centre of cognitive processes but as the participant in wider cognitive systems dependent on cognitive cultural ecologies. This notion of culturally – and socially – distributed cognitive systems is a more precise way to characterize the locus of interpretants than the notion of an individual psychological mind. In this sense, the loci of interpretants in the intersemiotic translations we are interested in here are distributed cognitive systems that create new artworks. How does such a distributed cognitive system use intersemiotic translation to scaffold creative processes? Our argument in this section is that models 1 and 2 above, when applied to artistic creation, describe how intersemiotic translation functions, respectively, both as an anticipatory and as a generative tool. But what do we mean by creativity? According to Margaret Boden,34 creativity is “the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable. ‘Ideas’, here, includes concepts, poems, musical compositions, scientific theories, cooking recipes, choreography, jokes . . . and so on”. Boden relates creativity to modifications in conceptual spaces. A conceptual space is a structured style of thought and

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determines a horizon of conceivable ideas. Examples include “ways of writing prose or poetry; styles of sculpture, painting, or music; theories in chemistry or biology; fashions of couture or choreography, nouvelle cuisine and good old meat-and-two-veg”.35 How can a cognitive system break away from previously established and structured styles of thought? How is it possible to navigate a novel and yet unstructured space of creative possibilities so as to produce something recognizably valuable – as opposed to, say, gratuitous change? It is in the context of such challenges that intersemiotic translation is often used as a thinking tool. Intersemiotic translation scaffolds creativity by taking advantage of recognized differences between semiotic systems: if a source system is part of a conceptual space that is structured differently from the conceptual space of the target system, the influence of the source system on the target system can generate novelty (difference) in the latter. Furthermore, because the source system has a structure with at least some degree of internal coherence, it is easier to produce novelty that is non-gratuitous and potentially recognizable as aesthetically valuable. We characterize the action of IT in scaffolding creativity as anticipatory and generative. Intersemiotic translation as an anticipatory tool: Cognitive systems use anticipatory, predictive tools to direct action. This is a ubiquitous operation involved whenever an agent acts expecting something else to happen (using a door handle to open a door and enter your house is a trivial example of an anticipatory system in action). Examples of anticipatory tools used to organize action include schedules, planners, maps, blueprints, norms of etiquette, organizational diagrams and fluxograms and so on. All of these tools reduce (or at least attempt to reduce) the number of possible choices a cognitive system will face in the future (by consulting a map to navigate to the other side of town, I know that I should avoid making any turns until the end of a certain avenue; by consulting my schedule, I know that today I should prioritize a certain work assignment instead of another). A conceptual space can be seen as a set of constraints that simplify the costs of cognitive activity for creators: artists don’t have to start from scratch – they anticipate and simplify their creative process by reasoning in terms of already structured styles, conventions, canonical references and so on. When a conceptual space is being transformed, a cognitive system is faced with unexpected interpretative situations. Intersemiotic translation plays an anticipatory role in reducing the difficulty of making a choice in these situations. In this case, the translation source is being used as an anticipatory, a “map” that tells the creative cognitive system how to navigate through unfamiliar territory and arrive at creative solutions without getting lost or stuck in the several highly costly choices that need to be made. This corresponds to the view shown in model 1, where the translation source occupies the functional position of the sign (an anticipatory tool, in this case) in semiosis (see Figure 10.4).

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Figure 10.4 Intersemiotic translation as an anticipatory tool. The translation source occupies the functional position of the sign and works as an anticipatory tool to help artistic creation. The locus of the interpretant is not the translation target itself but the creative process that in the future will result in creation the translation target. The interpretant is a constraining factor in this creative process in the form of a reduction in the cost of choices for the distributed cognitive system responsible for the creative process. The object is what the translation source is perceived to be ”about”. Notice that S-O-I irreducibility entails that different creative processes (I) may reveal different objects of the same source.

Intersemiotic translation as a generative tool: One of the functions of IT explored by creative artists is taking advantage of the semiotic difference between source and target to generate competing and otherwise unprompted creative opportunities in the target system. During the creative process in an intersemiotic translation, a transformation in the target semiotic system leads to a cascade of further transformations in that system. The regulatory principles (the “structure” of thinking) that are used to regulate a conceptual space interact, change or are partly abandoned in favour of a different set of regulatory principles which are developed from the translation source. The translation source in this case functions as a generative seed that acts on a target semiotic system. Any translation choice that a creative cognitive system makes that establishes a transformation in a target conceptual space is a choice understood in reference to this generative seed. In this case, a transformation in a conceptual space occupies the functional role of a sign while the translation source occupies the functional role of an object. The interpretant that they determine, and in virtue of which they are brought together, is the notion (to be realized in the future) of new conceptual space (see Figure 10.5). In the next section we give an example of the anticipatory and generative functions of intersemiotic translation. We present a translation of Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose (especially her Portraits) to dance pieces, created by João Queiroz, Daniella Aguiar and Rita Aquino. Stein’s

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Figure 10.5 Intersemiotic translation as a generative tool. Because of the semiotic relation depicted, any transformation in a target conceptual space is taken to be a sign of a translation source. This intersemiotic relation between source and target is used to effect further transformations that (potentially, in the future) lead to a different conceptual space.

prose was used as a tool for anticipating choices in the creative process and as a seed for generating unpredictable effects in dance.

4. Intersemiotic Translation of Gertrude Stein to Dance Gertrude Stein’s work is an example of the most radical literary modernist experimentalism of the early 20th century. Her work was refined through her written portraits, initiated by the novel Three Lives. She was strongly influenced by William James, her teacher at Harvard Annex, who directed her literary experiments towards questions about conscious experience and perceptions of time. Her writing intersemiotically translated the compositional techniques developed by Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, creating a kind of literary cubism. Those innovations had an important impact on the representation of dynamic space-time perception. One of Stein’s main innovations is the attempt to deform the development of spacetime perception, freezing its dynamic flux. The creative procedures used to produce such effects are among the most important aspects of her work that we consider here in dance translations from Stein’s work. From around 2009 to the time of writing in 2019, Stein’s work has attracted the attention of different choreographers. The following are examples of choreography from Brazil and other countries that are translations of Stein’s work’: e [dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein] (and [ten episodes on the topovisual prose of gertrude stein]) (2008) and 5.sobre.o.mesmo (2010), by João Queiroz (Brazil); Always

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Now Slowly (2010), by Lars Dahl Pedersen (Denmark); Shutters Shut (2004), by Nederlands Dans Theater; Four Saints in Three Acts (2000), by Mark Morris Dance Company, and Liminal presents Gertrude Stein (2012), by Liminal Performance Group (United States). The Brazilian dance piece ,e [dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein] (referred to later as ,e) is a female duet irregularly divided into semi-independent episodes.36 This dance translation has more than one source text. Although the piece is related to Stein’s work in general, there is a focus on four texts: an excerpt from the play Four Saints in Three Acts, the first-phase portrait Orta or One Dancing, the second-phase portrait If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, and an excerpt from the play Listen to Me. Each episode was conceived as an intersemiotic translation of a fragment of Stein’s texts. The process of elaborating each one was based on a systematic discussion of the properties considered most relevant in the source sign according to Stein’s critical fortune and historiography and a discussion about how to creatively translate these properties into dance. In the paragraphs below, we first describe the dance piece as it is intersemiotically translated from Stein’s oeuvre (sections 4.1 to 4.7), and then relate the example to the theory presented above (sections 4.8 and 5). 4.1. Overhead Projectors Episodes There are two episodes that use overhead projectors. The first is at the beginning of the piece, in the staging of an excerpt from the play Four Saints in Three Acts. In this episode, the dancers manipulate transparent plastic sheets on the two overhead projectors that are projecting side by side onto a large onstage screen (Figure 10.6). Each projector is manipulated by one dancer. Each sheet shows a monosyllabic word taken from Stein’s text. The sequence in which the text appears is not very different from the original. However, each word occupies a whole sheet of transparent film, covering almost a whole screen when projected. One can recognize, in the manipulation of the transparent films, dance compositional properties: the scene is transformed in a dance duet by the variation of velocity and trajectories caused by the manipulation, which creates a dialogue between the projections that sit side by side. The scene consists of a composition of words on the screen, with the transparency sheets functioning as an augmentation of the dancers’ bodies. This episode focuses on the physical properties of monosyllabic words. This becomes clear when, at the end of the episode, different identical transparency sheets showing the word ‘Dez’ (Ten) are superimposed on one of the overhead projectors, while the other shows only a single, but also identical, sheet. In this simple episode, it is possible to identify a combination of Stein’s ideas: the materiality of the written word, the insistence, the idea of difference through repetition, and the accumulation of identical instances of the same word.

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Figure 10.6 The dancers manipulating transparent plastic sheets on the overhead projectors.

4.2. Walk, Sit, and Lie Down Episode The second episode is based on the insistence of only three trivial actions: walking, sitting, and lying down. The actions are executed in a space limited by the lighting – a cube is delimited by the lighting structure and by a diagram painted on the floor (see Figure 10.7). This diagram was conceived by the graphic designer Phillip Rodolfi, also by following Stein’s texts. Each dancer moves only in straight lines, forward and backward, using only the lateral edges of the cube. The actions (walking, sitting and lying down) occur alternately, between moments in which they are organized in set choreography and others that suggest an improvisational game. The pattern of movements is highly regular and uniform in its dynamics. Besides the insistence, there is another semiotic relation to Stein’s work in this episode. The repertoire of motor activities is composed of a reduced vocabulary of only three trivial actions, which are not part of any established dance technique. They are trivial movements for dancers, and can be considered transitional movements, which means that they are frequently used as a transition from one dance movement to another. In this case, there is an intersemiotic translation of transitional words

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Figure 10.7 The dancers moving in straight lines, forward and backward.

or relational terms, a resource Stein emphatically explored, to motor actions. How can one translate, in dance, this emphasis on connectives, transitional particles in general and adverbs? In dance, different traditions

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consider different movements to be the most important ones. However, in general, one could say that the dancer will normally demonstrate some kind of motor or acrobatic skill, or a high level of refinement relative to the qualities of the execution of dance movements. But in this episode, the dancers only walk, sit and lie down, although with exactitude, not permitting any movement to look like something the audience expects to see as a dance movement. There is no fluidity between one action and the next, contravening another familiar quality in dance; rather, what we see are singular independent actions. 4.3. Gaze Score Episode The third episode is a gaze score. In this scene, the dancers are outside the limits of the light cube and are closer to the audience, sitting in front of a music stand, in a situation similar to that of musicians. The work lights are on, and the viewer perceives that an action is being performed with the dancers’ gaze. They follow a score that prescribes where they should look. In this way, they look at the score, at the dance partner, and at the audience (see Figure 10.8). The audience watches the performance of the same action they execute themselves: a gaze action. The dancers, in the place of the audience, are watching the audience’s performance. Once more there is a choreography, in this case one action with three variations, where repetition, unimportant elements and the perception of the audience are the subjects explored. 4.4. Minimal and Spasmodic Episode The fourth episode is a solo performed in the delimited space of the light cube. For this scene, only one of the lines of the light structure is on, focusing where the dancer (Daniella Aguiar) is positioned. She executes minimal and spasmodic movements, creating vectors with distinct parts of her body. As in the third section, the audience here needs time to realize that something is happening in the scene. Once again, in a distinct manner, the episode works on the perception and the habits of audience reception. As with Stein’s first-phase portraits, we find here the illusion of a scene that does not develop, created by the performance of a succession of movements in low light, where it is hard to perceive the difference between them. However, as is the case with the more attentive readers of Stein, the more insistent the spectator of this choreographic piece is, the better he or she will perceive that the dancer presents a succession of different, even if minimally different, movements or body positions. This episode explores the size of motor vocables. The following excerpt from the portrait of Picasso is an example of Stein’s monosyllabic composition.

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Figure 10.8 The dancers watching the audience.

He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he. . . . As trains.

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Has trains. Has trains. As trains. As trains. The use of short words creates a peculiar reading rhythm that can be called staccato. The translation of this rhythm is obtained with the development of a sequence of almost invisible movements of body segments, for a few seconds creating an illusion of an immobile dancer. By making the movements so small, the dancer finds a correspondence to the monosyllables in verbal language and, at the same time, she reproduces the rhythm imposed by the reading of such elements. It is interesting to note that in this episode, all elements are presented in their minimal configuration: only one of the two dancers is performing; the movements are the smallest possible; the light is low; and the music presents a reduced number of sounds. 4.5. Transcription of If I Told Him Episode37 The fifth episode is another experiment with emphasis on insistence and on syntactically minor vocables, as is the first episode. However, it is a direct translation of an excerpt from If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso, using it as a score in which there is a correspondent movement for each word. Of course, the audience does not have access to the source text while the dancers perform. Again, the dancers have a music stand in front of them. The chosen movements are almost imperceptible everyday actions – straightening the blouse, scratching the nose, and adjusting the hair. Again, the dancers use movements not traditionally recognized or perceived as dance, treating them choreographically by using Stein’s text as a score. Such everyday actions, performed for self-observation, call attention here to the movement itself (see Figure 10.9). The dancers’ patterns are not identical; each executes her own selfreferential movement sequence. Sometimes they perform the movements simultaneously; at other times they each make distinct movements, creating a kind of canon, as we can see in Always Now Slowly. The combination of similar, but non-identical, movements and the alternation of unison and non-unison amplifies the sense of insistence. The use of the same words in different orders, already present in the text, also appears in the choreography and is amplified by the choreographic strategies used. 4.6. Overhead Projector Episode – Listen to Me Another experiment with the overhead projector is performed in this piece using an excerpt from the play Listen to Me. Here, the same choreographic strategies are applied to manipulate the transparencies – remarkable care

Figure 10.9 The dancers in quotidian actions.

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Figure 10.9 (Continued)

is taken in handling the sheets, in choreographically controlling the time and manner of putting them on the equipment. But now it is a solo, not a duet. Compared to the first overhead projector scene, the relation between the written text and the dance piece is more referential: it represents the nature and the dynamics of the work. The excerpt acts as a metalanguage of the dance piece. It uses this excerpt from Listen to Me: Fourth Act. And what is the air. Fourth Act. The air is there. Fourth Act. The air is there which is where it is. Kindly notice that is all one syllable and therefore useful. It makes no feeling, it has a promise, it is a delight, it needs no encouragement, it is full. Fourth Act. The air is full Fourth Act. Of course the air is full Fourth Act. Full of what Fourth Act. Full of it. Fourth Act. The air is full of it Fourth Act. Of course the air is full of it. Fourth Act. Of course

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Fourth Act. The air Fourth Act. Is full Fourth Act. Of it. The selected excerpt, shown on the transparencies, highlights Stein’s compositional tactic of insistently using monosyllables. The text also alerts the audience to this characteristic – “Kindly notice that is all one syllable and therefore useful” – and then suggests its sufficiency: “It makes no feeling, it has a promise, it is a delight, it needs no encouragement, it is full.” Stein makes her language strategies and effects noticeable. By using this text, the dance piece also allows the audience to think about the property of insistently using monosyllables as a choreographic strategy. It creates a dialogue with audience perceptions about dance status, dance movements and music for dance, and it highlights the dance itself and its conventions. This excerpt from the text, therefore, can be interpreted as a metalanguage of the dance piece itself, since even in another language system it presents indirectly to the spectator a comment about what is being watched. 4.7. Dyadic Relation Episode The last episode is a dyadic experiment (a bilateral relation between two entities), with emphasis on the dynamics of “brute” reaction. Two dancers are sitting on stools facing each other in the delimited space of the lighting cube. From there, they begin a series in which they rise and walk towards each other, and their progress is interrupted when their bodies collide. They come back to their original positions and begin a new cycle, with variations (see Figure 10.10). The beginning (the moment when they start), the development (the duration of the walking) and the end (the colliding) are different in each cycle. We can relate the structure of this episode to the portrait Orta or One Dancing. The following excerpt is an interesting example for comparison: This one is one having been doing dancing. This one is one doing dancing. This one is one. This one is one doing that thing. This one is one doing dancing. This one is one having been meaning to be doing dancing. This one is one meaning to be doing dancing. The first direct correspondence that can be found are the successive beginnings. It seems that Stein initiates the same sentence over and over again, and yet a different sentence always emerges. In the same way, the dancers always come back to the initial position, sitting on stools, facing each other. Each cycle corresponds to a sentence. Each new cycle, like each new sentence, is very similar to the previous one, but with subtle

Figure 10.10 Dyadic experiment with the dancers’ collision.

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differences. The episode, one could say, is equivalent to a paragraph whose sentence beginnings are very similar. 4.8. Conclusion (,e) In the table below, we summarize the relationship between the dance episodes, the main properties of the literary source, and the target. Table 10.1 Summary of episodes, main selected properties of Stein’s prose and the target Episode

Translation source: forms Translation target: I of S-O-I (in of Stein’s prose model 1) or S of S-O-I (in model 2)

Overhead projectors episodes

Monosyllabic words; insistence and accumulation of words; difference through repetition Use of transitional particles and adverbs, reduced vocabulary, regular patterns of word usage, insistence Repetition, unimportant elements, perception of the audience Scene that does not develop

Walk, sit, and lie down episode Gaze score episode Minimal and spasmodic episode

Transcription Insistence, syntactically of If I Told minor vocables, Him episode excerpt from If I Told Him Overhead Excerpt from the play projector – Listen to Me; insistent Listen to Me use of monosyllables; metalinguistic explication of compositional strategies Dyadic relation Successive beginnings episode of sentences in a paragraph and subtle variations in these sentences

Dialogical properties of duet action with emphasis on verbal material, in cycles or regular reiterative patterns Short vocabulary of action, uniform and regular dynamic of patterns, trivial transitional movements . . . dialogical Unimportant movements of gaze dialogue to include the audience Almost invisible actions creating vectors with distinct parts of the body (the audience here needs time to realize that something is happening in the scene); scene that does not develop – very small size of the monosyllabic vocables Quotidian movements, synchrony and asynchrony between the dancers Properties of monosyllabic words projected onto the screen, superimposition of different transparency sheets.

Dyadic bilateral relation between two entities, with emphasis on the dynamics of ”brute” reaction

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The division into independent episodes, without climaxes or hierarchical relations between parts, worked as a thinking tool to emphasize salient aspects of Stein’s experiments. This approach reveals relevant properties in Stein’s work, since each episode shows more than the familiar aspect of insistence. The choreography also focuses on audience perception and attention, and this is intensified by the use of low light, brief and nontraditional dance movements, temporal suspension and solemnity in the execution. The piece produces an immersion in this ambience. Contrary to any spectacular action, its mechanisms are very different from a conventional dance piece: there is no demonstration of extraordinary bodily ability and no rhythm alterations or climax to attract the attention of the audience. A peculiarity of this intersemiotic translation is the choice of the movement vocabulary. Each episode or fragment deals in a distinct way with the type of movement performed, presenting to the spectator a specific assemblage of body patterns focused on translating Stein’s work into dance. In the intersemiotic translation of the portrait If I Told Him observed in the dance piece ,e, the duet has an important role in the composition. It permits the viewer to observe the subtle variations in a choreographic sequence that would not be seen if it were executed by only one dancer. For instance, in ,e, even if the dancers perform movements based on the same text, they are not identical, but rather they belong to the same group or family of body movements. When associated with the canon, the duet observed in the second part of Always Now Slowly clearly modifies the perception of time. This way of relating duet and canon is very close to Stein’s constructions in which the present continuous is the result of insistence with slight modifications. Besides the syntax deformation connected to continuous repetitions, Steinean uses of gerundial verbal forms intensify the effects of the perception of time. To exemplify what we call time manipulation, we look at another experimentation with syntax that is frequent in the dance duets and that is based on the repetition of a small number of movements, creating different sequences. In ,e, they walk, sit and lie down in the restricted space of light. The repetition of only three movements made in different sequences during a relatively long time period creates an atypical composition. Even in most contemporary pieces, the sequencing of movements traditionally engenders a flux towards the next movement, framing the perception of time according to convention. By repeating only three movements over and over again, the action is frozen in time, which works against the principle of time progressing. One could assert that, similar to Steinean explorations, the translations tentatively create a deformed syntax, breaking with dominant traditions related to time perception. In idiosyncratic time perception, not only insistence or repetition but

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also movement vocabulary and composition de-emphasize the fluency of movements. ,e explores a delineated vocabulary that is based on discrete movements and includes long pauses, breaking the expectation of a fluid and continuous composition. The use of insistence plays a fundamental role in the continuous present effect, but it is not sufficient in itself to freeze time in dance. ,e is focused on modifying the perception of time by exploring other choreographic aspects that contribute to freezing action in time. These elements include a rigorous concern with motor vocabulary, the episodic fragmentation of the piece, and the syntactic composition that is based on the coordinated accumulation of trivial movement components.

5. Final Comments – Some Implications of Intersemiotic Translation as a Thinking Tool We have defended the idea that intersemiotic translation is a thinking tool that scaffolds creativity in dance. In order to structure and support this idea, we introduced the notions of semiosis (sensu Peirce) and distributed cognition thesis. In terms of explanatory modelling, artistic creativity is usually associated with psychological traits, cognitive abilities, emotional dispositions, mental illnesses and neural correlates. In all these cases, the research problem is framed in an internalist theoretical framework, according to which cognition is described as the processing of mental representations and in which the role of context and external tools is secondary. The narrative we have developed here suggests something radically different: creativity is described as a non-psychological process that is materially and socially distributed in space-time and strongly based on the design and use of thinking tools. According to our approach, intersemiotic translation is a thinking tool for scaffolding creativity, simplifying choice, perception and inference, and modifying the conceptual space of the target semiotic system for the anticipation of new events and the generation of competing ideas. Our approach suggests a new relationship between the emergent field of intermedial arts studies, creativity research, and embodied and situated cognitive science. This liaison, hopefully, will lead to a new research agenda and a new set of research questions.

Acknowledgements The authors thank Niklas Salmose, as well as the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) of Linnaeus University, Sweden, for comments and suggestions; this chapter is largely the result of discussions that happened in the context of the Transmediations! conference organized in 2016 by the IMS.

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Notes 1. Our use of the word cyborg here is based on the work of the philosopher of cognitive science Andy Clark (Natural-Born Cyborgs) and has no immediate relation to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”. 2. See Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild and “How a Cockpit Remembers its Speeds,” 265–88; Davies and Michaelian, “Identifying and Individuating Cognitive Systems,” 307–19. 3. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 3. 4. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 4. 5. Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, 193; Noë, Out of Our Heads. 6. Hutchins, “Cognitive Artifacts,” 126–8, Cognition in the Wild, and “How a Cockpit Remembers its Speeds.” 7. Clark, “Language, Embodiment,” 370–2. 8. Clark, Being There and “Language, Embodiment,” 370–2; Magnani, “Creating Chances,” 917–25; Hoffmeyer, “Semiotic Scaffolding,” 149–66; Sinha, “Ontogenesis, Semiosis,” 202–9. 9. Zhang and Wang, “External Representations,” 817–38; Bender and Beller, “The Power of 2,” 158–87. 10. Kirsh, “Problem Solving,” 264–306; Zhang and Norman, “Representations,” 87–122. 11. Pande and Chandrasekharan, “Representational Competence,” 1–43; Nersessian et al., “Research Laboratories”; Nersessian, Creating Scientific Concepts. 12. Bjorndahl et al., “Thinking Together,” 103–23. 13. Nersessian, Creating Scientific Concepts. 14. See Gronau, von Hartz, and Hochleichter, How to Frame; Vergo, Music of Painting; Clüver, “Inter textus,” 11–41. 15. Jakobson, “Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” 114. 16. Queiroz and Aguiar, “C. S. Peirce,” 201–15. 17. Ransdell, “Peircean Semiotic,” 157–78. 18. Peirce, Essential Pierce, Vol. 2, 411. 19. A formal demonstration of semiotic triadic irreducibility precedes any investigation of this property and is out of the scope of our approach here (see Brunning, “Genuine Triads,” 252–70 and Burch, “Peirce’s Reduction Thesis,” 234–51 (in the same book)). Indeed, a logical-mathematical analysis of the categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) should be done before any formulation in the domains of phaneroscopy, normative sciences (including semiotics) and metaphysics, which employ mathematical techniques and results to validate the categories (see Hookway, Peirce, 182; Atkins, “Comparing Ideas,” 562). This demonstration is related to results obtained in graph theory and belongs to mathematically oriented argument (see Burch, “Peirce’s Reduction Thesis,” 234; De Waal, Peirce, 40). 20. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 5, 484 and Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, 171. 21. In Peircean terms, we take intersemiotic translation to necessarily involve (but not to be reduced to) the communication of habits. This corresponds to a constitutive view of language that stands in opposition to seeing language as a system of reference to “things out there”. Under these premises, an intersemiotic translation does not simply refer to a “cultural product” as something taken for granted, but more precisely stands for (and simultaneously participates in the construction of) a semiotic regularity historically exhibited by the cultural product. 22. See Merrell, Peirce. 23. From a Peircean biosemiotic perspective, a translation machinery synthesizing proteins from a string of RNA or a membrane receptor recognizing a

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

João Queiroz and Pedro Atã given hormone can be regarded as an interpreter (see Queiroz et al., “Biosemiotic Approach,” 91–130; El-Hani, Queiroz, and Emmeche. “Semiotic Analysis,” 1–68). By “historical” here, we mean the history of interactions of any semiotic system, not “history” in the sense of “human history”. Savan, Introduction, 43. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, 303. Ransdell, Peircean Semiotic. Queiroz and Aguiar, “C. S. Peirce.”; Aguiar and Queiroz, “Semiosis,” 283–92. Scaffolding (see Clark, Being There, 45–7 and Supersizing the Mind, 44–60; Hoffmeyer, “Semiotic Scaffolding”; Vygotsky, Thought and Language) refers to the use of artefacts (including language both spoken and written) to support and/or augment cognitive activity. The term was popularized by Vygotsky and called attention to the notion of scaffolding in the context of child development and learning. Clark in Supersizing the Mind and Hoffmeyer in “Semiotic Scaffolding”, among others, apply the term to the uses of supporting structures in all sorts of cognitive tasks. Menary, Extended Mind; Clark, Supersizing the Mind; Kirsh, “Problem Solving,” 264–306; Noë, Action in Perception; Clark and Chalmers, “Extended Mind,” 7–19; Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins, “Cognitive Artifacts.” Hutchins, “Enculturating the Supersized Mind,” 440. Boden, Creativity and Art, 29. Boden, Creativity and Art, 32. The core of the team was constituted by the dancers-interpreters Rita Aquino (https://ritaaquino.wordpress.com/, accessed April 25, 2019) and Daniella Aguiar (https://daniellaguiar.wordpress.com/, accessed April 25, 2019), the architect Adriano Mattos, the composer Edson Zampronha (www.zampronha. com/, accessed April 25, 2019), and the graphic designer Phillip Rodolfi (http:// cargocollective.com/philliprodolfi, accessed April 25, 2019). See Figure 10.11. See https://youtu.be/h8Ghj8f31LQ, accessed April 25, 2019.

Bibliography Aguiar, Daniella, and João Queiroz. “Semiosis and Intersemiotic Translation.” Semiotica 196 (2013): 283–92. Atã, Pedro, and João Queiroz. “Iconicity in Peircean Situated Cognitive Semiotics.” In Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words: 100 Years of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, edited by Torkild Thellefsen and Bent Sorensen, 527–36. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. Atkins, Richard Kenneth. “Comparing Ideas: Comparational Analysis and Peirce’s Phenomenology.” In Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words: 100 Years of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, edited by Torkild Thellefsen and Bent Sorensen, 561–7. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. Bender, Andrea, and Sieghard Beller. “The Power of 2: How an Apparently Irregular Numeration System Facilitates Mental Arithmetic.” Cognitive Science 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 158–87. Bjorndahl, Johanne Stege, Riccardo Fusaroli, Svend Østergaard, and Kristian Tylén. “Thinking Together With Material Representations: Joint Epistemic Actions in Creative Problem Solving.” Cognitive Semiotics 7, no. 1 (2014): 103–23. Boden, Margaret. Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Brunning, Jaqueline. “Genuine Triads and Teridentity.” In Studies in the Logic of Charles S. Peirce, edited by Nathan Houser, Don Roberts, and James Evra, 252–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Burch, Robert. A Peircean Reduction Thesis. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991. ———. “Peirce’s Reduction Thesis.” In Studies in the Logic of Charles S. Peirce, edited by Nathan Houser, Don Roberts, and James Evra, 234–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Chuah, Johnny, Jiaje Zhang, and Todd Johnson. “The Representational Effect in Complex Systems: A Distributed Cognition Approach.” In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, edited by L. Gleitman and A. K. Joshi, 633–8. London: Erlbaum, 2000. Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 8 (2006): 370–2. ———. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58 (1998): 7–19. Clüver, Claus. “Inter Textus/Inter Artes/Inter Media.” Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura 14 (jul./dez 2006): 11–41. Davies, Jim, and Kourken Michaelian. “Identifying and Individuating Cognitive Systems: A Task-Based Distributed Cognition Alternative to Agent-Based Extended Cognition.” Cognitive Processing 17 (2016): 307–19. De Waal, Cornelis. Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. El-Hani, Charbel, João Queiroz, and Claus Emmeche. “A Semiotic Analysis of the Genetic Information.” Semiotica 1, no. 4 (2006): 1–68. Gronau, Barbara, Matthias von Hartz, and Carolin Hochleichter. How to Frame: On the Threshold of Performing and Visual Arts. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. “Semiotic Scaffolding in Living Systems.” In Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, edited by Marcello Barbieri, 149– 66. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. Hookway, Christopher. Peirce. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ———. “Cognitive Artifacts.” In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. A Bradford Book, edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 126–8. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. ———. “Enculturating the Supersized Mind.” Philosophical Studies 152 (2011): 437–46. ———. “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds.” Cognitive Science 19 (1995): 265–88. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 113–18. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Kirsh, David. “Problem Solving and Situated Cognition.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by P. Robbins and M. Aydede, 264– 306. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Magnani, Lorenzo. “Creating Chances Through Cognitive Niche Construction.” In Lecture Notes in Computer Science Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, 917–25. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74827-4_115. Menary, Richard, ed. The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Merrell, Floyd. Peirce, Signs, and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Nersessian, Nancy. Creating Scientific Concepts. A Bradford Book. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2008. Nersessian, Nancy, Elke Kurz-Milcke, Wendy Newstetter, and Jim Davies. “Research Laboratories as Evolving Distributed Cognitive Systems.” In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, edited by R. Alterman and D. Kirsh, 857–63. London: Erlbaum, 2003. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ———. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. Pande, Prajakt, and Sanjay Chandrasekharan. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935), Vols. VII–VIII (edited by A. W. Burks, same publisher, 1958). Vols. I–VI. Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation, 1931–1935. ———. “Representational Competence: Towards a Distributed and Embodied Cognition Account.” Studies in Science Education 53, no. 7267 (June 2017): 1–43. Peirce, Charles S. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, edited by R. Robin. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1967. (References to manuscripts and letters by Charles S. Peirce are in accordance with this catalogue). ———. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. II. Edited by Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. First published 1893–1913. Queiroz, João, and Daniella Aguiar. “C. S. Peirce and Intersemiotic Translation.” In International Handbook of Semiotics, edited by Peter Trifonas, 201–15. Berlin: Springer, 2015. Queiroz, João, and Charbel El-Hani. “Semiosis as an Emergent Process.” Transaction of C. S. Peirce Society 42, no. 1 (2006): 78–116. Queiroz, João, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, and Charbel El-Hani. “The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology: Theoretical Bases and Applied Models.” In Information and Living Systems: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives, edited by George Terzis and Rob Arp, 91–130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Ransdell, Joseph. Peircean Semiotic. Unpublished manuscript, 1983. ———. “Some Leading Ideas of Peirce’s Semiotic.” Semiotica 19 (1977): 157–78. Savan, David. An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Full System of Semeiotic. Toronto: Monograph Series of the Toronto Semiotic Circle, 1987–1988. Sinha, Chris. “Ontogenesis, Semiosis and the Epigenetic Dynamics of Biocultural Niche Construction.” Cognitive Development 36 (2015): 202–9. Sterelny, Kim. “Externalism, Epistemic Artefacts and the Extended Mind.” In The Externalist Challenge, edited by R. Shantz, 239–54. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. Vergo, Peter. The Music of Painting. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2010. Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Translated by Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. First published 1934.

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Wheeler, Michael. Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Zhang, Jiaje. “The Nature of External Representations in Problem Solving.” Cognitive Science 21 (1997): 179–217. Zhang, Jiaje, and Donald Norman. “Representations in Distributed Cognitive Tasks.” Cognitive Science 18 (1994): 87–122. Zhang, Jiaje, and Hongbin Wang. “The Effect of External Representations on Numeric Tasks.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A 58, no. 5 (2005): 817–38.

THE TEAM

Figure 10.11 The team, (,e), from left to right: Rita Aquino (dancer), Adriano Mattos (architect), João Queiroz (choreographer), and Daniella Aguiar (dancer)

Part IV

Transmediating the Anthropocene

11 “We’re Doomed – Now What?” Transmediating Temporality Into Narrative Forms Jørgen Bruhn

In this chapter I will discuss temporal aspects of the Anthropocene – a temporal concept often related to doom, distress and lack of future hopes, for instance in Roy Scranton’s We’re Doomed. Now What. Essays on War and Climate Change from 2018.What interests me are the ways in which the intangible notion of time itself (including the notion of deep time) and human-induced changes on large temporal scales can be represented in media forms outside the conventionally scientific channels. I am particularly concerned with how narrativity offers itself as a method for making time comprehensible to human beings. The general notion of time will be exemplified by the specific notion of the Anthropocene. I intend to suggest at least a few steps towards adopting an intermedial approach to the Anthropocene thesis. Understanding the Anthropocene in intermedial or multimodal terms could be done in several ways. As shown by multimodal studies (but also by Science & Technology Studies and Critical Science Studies), scientific discourse, exemplified by scientific articles dealing with the Anthropocene, inevitably employs a multimodal form. The standard scientific article is a medial and modal mix of written argumentative language, diagrams, and reproduced photography, and often includes different colours and typography, as well as a formalized system of notes and references. Demonstrating or discussing this is not my aim here, partly because the multimodal analysis of scientific discourse is not a new endeavour, but particularly because scientific articles dealing with the Anthropocene can probably not, from a modal or intermedial point of view, be distinguished from other publishing practices in the natural sciences. Instead I want to approach the Anthropocene from a transmediation point of view: this refers to the fact that the term Anthropocene reaches the average reader (as distinguished from experts in, for instance, climatology or geology) in the form of transmediations. Following Lars Elleström’s understanding,1 I define transmediation as the transfer and exchange of communicative content between different kinds of media, such as written text, moving images, gestures, songs and photographs. A few obvious examples are verbal interviews that are written down, novels that are made into movies and news reports that are translated

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into sign language. This means, in this particular case, that the scientific notion of the Anthropocene is rarely what we meet as lay readers. We encounter transmediated versions of scientific notions but never science itself: the scientific results have been translated into, for instance, articles in popular science magazines, journalistic renderings, short stories, art performances, or documentaries. After giving a very short definition of the Anthropocene, I suggest a possible theoretical synthesis between Paul Ricoeur’s ideas on the interrelatedness of time and narrative on the one hand, and the ideas of transmediality on the other. Thinking about not only time and narrative but also the notion of medial forms will, I hope, provide a useful introduction to the latter part of my chapter, where I consider probably the most urgent aspect of the Anthropocene: future human life under Anthropocene conditions. At that point, I add Aristotle’s notions of anagnorisis and peripeteia to Ricoeur’s idea of the narrative construction of time in order to understand four highly significant contemporary ways of responding or not responding to an Anthropocene future.

The Anthropocene In the last decade or so, the term Anthropocene has become surprisingly popular and gained remarkable breadth. In a recent comprehensive literature review, Yadvinder Malhi, offering an overview of the history, possibilities and limitations of the concept, notes that the term was originally “an eye-catching but ill-defined term for human dominated modernity” developed in environmental and earth system sciences, but that it has since reached a kind of academic stardom. He quotes researchers calling it a cultural fad, but he nevertheless acknowledges that the term captures a “cultural zeitgeist”,2 and in his concluding remarks, he notes that for a catch-all term encompassing several of the human-induced influences and feedback processes that are undeniably going on, the term Anthropocene “seems a good candidate”.3 The beginning of the term’s contemporary usage is often traced back to a short article from 2002,4 where it was suggested to describe a new geological epoch and thus to redefine geological chronology, but – and I shall return to this point – the hardcore geological basis of the term remains contested. More generally, the Anthropocene is defined by a handful of typical features, including a dramatic loss of biodiversity, a future lack of resources, acidification of the oceans, changed nitrogen and phosphorous circuits, and, finally and for most researchers and commentators most prominently, the greenhouse effect producing planetary global warming.5 In some specific contexts (particularly natural scientific fields), the concept defines a relatively objectively defined epoch whose borders and very existence need to be defined and discussed, but in wider circles the concept has been hailed as a historical and philosophical breakthrough of the most

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 219 dramatic importance. Thus, for posthuman philosopher Rosa Braidotti, the idea of the Anthropocene constitutes a “conceptual earthquake . . . sending seismic waves across the humanities and critical theory”.6 According to Bruno Latour, “[the] Anthropocene is the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological and political concept ever produced [to work] as an alternative to the ideas of modernity [idées de modernité].”7 Such quotes demonstrate not only that the Anthropocene is a concept under consideration in various largely unknown geological subcommittees, but also that it has a much wider meaning and function.8 Discussions concerning the Anthropocene may lead to a more widespread acceptance of the basic threatening phenomena behind it and thus transform what was initially an academic and scientific debate into a much bigger, and from many points of view more important, discussion. If the Anthropocene, used to describe a particular geological epoch, is generally acknowledged as a viable description of the condition of the planet (not only as a formal geologic term), it could indeed have significant implications for all future discussions relating to, for instance, climate change and the risk of radically diminishing biodiversity. The discussions concerning the historical starting point of the Anthropocene are lively, but even more heated are the debates about implicit historical consequences of the term itself and a more general but very complex discussion regarding its political impact, or the lack of it.9

Temporalities of the Anthropocene: Starting Point and Deep Time The basic feature of time is sometimes overlooked in discussions of the Anthropocene, perhaps because time is such an integrated aspect of the concept that it feels banal or superfluous to investigate it further. But because it is a geological concept (geology is the science which investigates the history of planet earth), the notion of the Anthropocene concerns the development and condition of the planet over time. What is specific and highly unusual about this geological understanding of planetary history is that the Anthropocene hypothesis specifies humanity’s influence upon this planet, and this has the fundamentally disruptive effect of combining what has hitherto been considered the natural history of the planet with its human or cultural historical frameworks. In the following sections, I mention the discussions concerning the establishment of a historical starting point for the Anthropocene, and I then briefly comment on the renewed interest in the “deep temporal” dimensions that have arguably resurfaced along with the Anthropocene hypothesis. The starting point of the Anthropocene is disputed because the answer to the question involves and requires numerous scientific as well as political and historical considerations. The field of opinions includes those of scholars who find the most precise starting point of the Anthropocene to be when

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the first humans settled down and established agricultural ways of life – a position that differs from the view of those who insist that the invention of the steam engine and the beginning of the Western fossil fuel economy is a more likely point of departure. And historians favouring the European colonization of the Americas, beginning in 1492, have qualms about the (probably most widespread and accepted) belief that the so-called Great Acceleration following WWII is the most helpful definition of the beginning of a clearly marked anthropogenic human influence on the planet.10 Another central notion related to the Anthropocene hypothesis that connects temporality and the Anthropocene is ”geological” or “deep” time – that is, the idea that planet earth has an extremely long history going back billions of years, which vastly exceeds the thousands of years that the Bible gives as the history of the world and humankind. Deep time dates back to the geological investigations of James Hutton, which inspired Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin. “His [Darwin’s] theory of evolution became imaginable thanks to the window that Hutton pried open onto these terrifying new temporal vistas”, as science journalist James Farrier puts it.11 Hutton demonstrated the existence of a timescale far beyond the human history of earth described in the Bible, and in the 19th century, the concept of deep time opened an abyss that was both frightening and exhilarating: frightening because the seemingly boundless ocean of time made humans seem very small and unimportant, as opposed to the central position that both humanist philosophy and Christian dogma had provided them with before; exhilarating because these grand temporal scales provided the Romantic imagination with new images and new sensibilities, for instance images related to different shades of sublime perceptions of nature (and geology).12 Part of the current fascination in art and literature with the Anthropocene hypothesis can probably be traced back to this experience of temporal vertigo and aesthetic exhilaration. However, accepting the concept of deep time, in light of the Anthropocene hypothesis, mostly leads to almost diametrically opposite affects. If we accept the idea that the earth system is now dominated by human interferences, time no longer seems infinite. Instead, the near-endless time is filled with all the traces of and waste products left by human activities. It seems to be the case that when time and space become subject to a human scale, in the sense that humans will dominate them, humans face a responsibility not only to themselves, their families, their workplace and their communities, but to the entire planet. It is a responsibility that fits badly with most humanly scaled understandings and definitions of responsibility and accountability.

Paul Ricoeur on Time and Narrative The question is, how can this overlapping of the Anthropocene with temporality be best understood? The natural and social sciences may

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 221 approach this question from their specific angles, but from a humanities point of view I want to argue that to fully connect the scientific concept of the Anthropocene with, or understand it in the light of, time and temporalities, a third, supporting, concept is needed. Any temporal perspective necessarily needs a transmedial process in order to be comprehensible and accessible. One of the crucial concepts that enables a connection between temporality as a chronological sequence and the specific aspects of the Anthropocene is narrativity. A productive way of understanding the temporal aspects of the Anthropocene is by referring to Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical considerations in his work Time and Narrative, where he discusses ways of understanding how the abstract, non-human notion of time can be made existentially significant for human beings. Producing an impressive arch combining Aristotle’s idea that narratives have specific forms and Augustine’s notion that time can only be subjectively experienced,13 he concludes that narrative ordering of time, in emplotments, is the only way in which human beings can experience time in a meaningful way. Media scholar Johan Fornäs, who has opened a fruitful discussion of the productive possibilities of relating media studies with Ricoeur’s philosophy, puts it this way: Ricoeur emphasizes the role of narrative as a genre dedicated to organizing events into comprehensible temporal forms, arguing that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of narrative”; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence.14 Narratives have the ability to bridge lived time and “objective” time (that can be measured with instruments) through “emplotment”: narratives organizes dispersed events into ordered form.15 Or, to put it in terms used in the context of intermediality and transmediation, time is a non-human form that must be mediated by qualified media forms such as calendars, clocks, or the generational sequence of families, and the traces collected by these media have, historically, been amassed in human archives. However, these basic measurements need transmediation to become forms with human meaning. Non-human time needs mediating tools and even transmediating processes, and narratives are, among these, privileged structuring forms. Narrativity, for Ricoeur, is first of all a question of materializing and ”emplotting” chronological and thus meaningless time sequences into forms that make sense to both writers and readers. He builds upon philosophical arguments when he discusses core elements of human action, including fundamental notions of action, agents and events. To this plotbased understanding of narrativity I would add the notions of enunciation and focalization: the knowledge and expressive choices of a narrator.

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For my purposes here, a rough definition of narratives is sufficient, and following Ricoeur but adding enunciation and focalization, I understand narratives as stories that are narrated by a creator (in different media) and his or her narrator or narrators, who represent human or non-human agents that partake in events that are temporally related to each other in a fairly meaningful way.16

Transmediation of Deep Time One rather banal but nonetheless important cultural insight to take away from Ricoeur’s philosophical work is that any supposedly direct representation of time is by definition affected by inherently anthropomorphic presuppositions (for instance, agency or meaning): there is no neutral or objective way to represent time. Let me take as an example the question of deep time, and its relation to the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene hypothesis does not collide with standard geohistorical divisions and periodizations. Not, at least, until we reach what in geological terms is considered recent history, meaning the very few millennia in which human beings have played a significant or even dominating role on a planetary level. It is this human activity in the earth system that leads to recognizable human “signatures” in what is sometimes called the geological “archive”.17 Now, while geologists would agree about almost all categories that divide the entire history of planet earth, something new happens when the Anthropocene is suggested as a scientific concept. This is not only because a new period has been introduced and discussed (but not approved – see above), but also, most importantly, because the Anthropocene geological model operates with a kind of agency which is a radically new feature in geology.18 If we take, for instance, Wikipedia’s visual representation of the history of the earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth), or a standard museum representation of the planet’s history through display cases filled with geological findings (for instance at the GeologischPaläontologisches Museum in Hamburg), we come across a logically structured teleological story divided into different parts, but with no explicit subject or agency. What or who, we might ask the curators of the German exhibition, enabled the dramatic, if also slow, development from single-celled organisms to multiple-cell organisms and all the way to the cognitively developed organisms that are able to organize, measure and look back at the geological archive, namely Homo sapiens? Most visitors would not be surprised to find that the answer to this question, as given in other display cases in other parts of the museum, is that the driving force behind all this change comes, roughly speaking, from a combination of two factors: background developments in climate, tectonic movements and other natural historic forces on the one hand, and evolutionary development and natural selection on the other.

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 223 In contrast, perhaps the most thought-provoking dimension of the Anthropocene thesis is that the advent of the Anthropocene epoch is not the result of the natural history of climate changes and tectonics or quasiagential natural selection but of an agency being installed in planetary history through the advent of mankind. So, in a way, only with the notion of the Anthropocene does planetary history become a fully fledged narrative as opposed to simple facts occurring in sequence.

Anthropocene Futures I have now argued that representations of time are necessarily narrative, and furthermore that these narratives can be understood as transmediations of basic scientific timelines established in scientific traditions that rely on measuring and archiving instruments and media. Even though an agency has been introduced to the narrative organization above, it is still a reduced narrative formation, with only the very basic parts in place, such as action, event and actor. However, Aristotle, one of the earliest theoreticians of narrative form and effects, was aware that for narratives to be existentially moving and effective (producing the cleansing function of catharsis), a much more thorough structuring effort than the mere presence of persons, actions and events was needed. And in order to conduct the discussions of different understandings of future life in an Anthropocene world, I will now supplement Ricoeur’s fundamental idea of narrative time with two Aristotelian concepts of narrative forms: anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis signifies a moment of enlightenment and recognition: it is the moment in a narrative when a protagonist, and with him or her the spectators of a play or readers of a literary text, finds out about a deeper meaning in life – or that the plot of one’s life has had a telos, a goal, all along.19 It is thus the moment when the protagonist sees things as they truly are. The second necessary component I want to borrow from Aristotle is peripeteia. This refers to the turning point in a plot, and in a person’s life. Often translated as ”reversal”, this is the moment when life, and a plot, take a new, often radical, turn, often as a direct result of the anagnorisis. Sometimes anagnorisis and peripeteia coincide in the same narrative moment. Now, let me return to the basic issues concerning the Anthropocene and time. I mentioned above that the origins of the Anthropocene, including which historical events or processes have produced which effects, are still under debate; this is a heated subject for several ideological and historical reasons. There is nevertheless no doubt that the most heated discussions concerning the Anthropocene relate to its possible future results, and in the remaining part of my chapter I would like to reflect upon Anthropocene futures. In their article, which argues in favour of the suitability of formally establishing the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, Waters et al.

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note the curious fact that the Anthropocene is the first geological epoch to be established while humankind is observing it. And, even more radically, humankind is also producing the geohistorical change that could validate the new epochal nomenclature.20 Given the fact that the Anthropocene as a geological epoch is defined by the presence of observable signs of human interference, and that many of the human marks on the planet are of an irreparable nature, it also seems to follow that the Anthropocene is the final geological periodization to be made. The planet can never turn back to a non-anthropogenic, pre-human state, not on any imaginable human timescale, nor perhaps even in deep future time. So even in a future world with no humans, the earth will still bear all the marks of human influence, including plastics, which are often indestructible, or traces of nuclear weapons testing and nuclear industries as well as the obvious changes to the planet’s surfaces resulting from mining, fracking, or simply the city structures, canals and dams.21 Putting it differently, if we accept that we have entered the Anthropocene condition (not in geologists’ formal sense, but in the broad sense that humans are a geological, planetary agent), it is hard to escape the idea that the future of the planet will be an Anthropocene future. It then follows that living at the current moment means looking forward into an Anthropocene future, and, given my arguments above, this also includes a narrative framing of the future. In the next sections, I will sketch out four ways of responding to scientists’ understanding of the future, each of them partly narratively ordered. When I briefly mentioned Wikipedia and the museum context earlier, I was working from a kind of basic chronological ordering of geological time that is transmediated. When it comes to a narrative of the future, it is, naturally, much more difficult to establish a scientific ground zero – a set of objective “future facts” – upon which there would be a general consensus. But if we were to offer a dramatically simplified version of what the natural sciences say about future life in the Anthropocene in one sentence, it could go like this: As a result of human influence on the planetary earth system, there will be a dramatically diminished diversity of plants and animals, and due to global warming, several parts of the world will experience severely changed living circumstances, including extreme weather conditions, floods and changes in agricultural, economic and cultural preconditions. This is a rough outline of the future we can expect. And it is this version which is transmediated in four different responses that I present below.

Four Narrative and Temporal Responses to the Anthropocene Because we are living in a historical moment when the Anthropocene has become an increasingly accepted condition of future life, four archetypal

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 225 positions seem to offer themselves as ways of regarding the future. Or, to formulate it differently, we are living in a moment when the time we are approaching, the future, presents itself in four narrative possibilities that can be regarded as four different reactions to the Anthropocene condition set out in my simplified scientific content from above – the denialist, the techno-utopian, the solastalgic and the pre-traumatic positions. They are, I will suggest, narratively structured transmediations of a temporally ”objective” idea of the future, and, I will argue, they exhibit four different ways of turning time into stories.22 First of all, when facing an Anthropocene future, some people might want to try not to react, and it is probably debatable whether this should be considered a transmediation of the scientific description at all. However, this position is discussed in climate change communication studies,23 and “living in denial”, as anthropologist Kari Norgaard has demonstrated, is something that occurs when the facts of anthropogenic climate change are acknowledged, and perhaps even collectively investigated, but then nonetheless ignored: people live their lives exactly as if there was no such thing as climate change and the Anthropocene.24 Haydn Washington and John Cook suggest the term “climate change denial”25 for a reaction that is either a passive or an active denial of the predicament we are living in. This denialist position is supported by huge economic interests, and it has been demonstrated that many of the same rhetorical techniques, and even some of the same well-paid advertising agencies and consultants that were hired by big tobacco companies to question the scientific discoveries about cigarettes, are now employed to manufacture doubt about whether there is scientific evidence of the human cause of global warming.26 Today, climate change denial, or “Anthropocene denial”, may take many, very different forms. The denial pattern ranges from entire documentaries “proving” that climate change, and thus the Anthropocene, is basically a hoax and that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a corrupt scientific community27 to political statements (typically from right-wing positions) and fictional works with a denialist agenda,28 not to mention all the advertising campaigns asking us to consume goods, services, and travel without any consideration of sustainability.29 Climate change denial is an option preferred by many economic stakeholders and politicians, as well as ordinary people around the world, even though more and more people now make the effort to leave behind the artificial safety of the denial mode, facing the fact that the status quo is not an option. In narrative terms, the denialist position is characterized by not being able or not wanting to change the idea of a regular and non-dramatic temporal continuity. The continuity of the already familiar will not be disturbed by anthropogenically inflicted changes. In Aristotle’s terms, people who have this point of view experience no anagnorisis (enlightenment) concerning the human-made changes to the planet, and consequently do

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not expect any peripeteia (dramatic turning point) to occur; the history of humankind and the planet forms a steady line, climatewise. The second response, the techno-utopian position, can in Aristotelian terms be described as a kind of mental transmediation of future life under Anthropocene conditions that includes anagnorisis but excludes peripeteia. Living with this perspective consists of accepting the scientific evidence of possible dramatic anthropogenic influences on the earth system (as opposed to the denialist position), but believing that the problems will be fixed by way of technological solutions (including finding new energy sources and improved exploitation of the energy already in use, changed and “smarter” ways of living, improved products with less destructive side effects, etc.). Therefore, insight into the problem is not, and should not be, followed by any dramatic epiphanies about things that need to be done. A representative version of this position is the so-called Ecomodernist Manifesto.30 For this group of scholars and activists, anthropogenic climate change and the other destructive aspects of the Anthropocene are factual, but they believe that future technological inventions and ameliorations will save humanity from what is considered dystopian pessimistic visions of the future, and to contrast with the pessimism of the more conventional environmentalist movement, they go as far as to talk about the “good Anthropocene”.31 Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the third response, the psychiatric diagnosis of “solastalgia”, is that it is an involuntary, psychological transmediation. This response, which we find reflected in cultural products and in individual states of mind across the globe, was first described in an article published in Australasian Psychiatry in 2007. Here, Glenn Albrecht and his co-authors declare that as “human impacts on the planet increase, it should come as no surprise that in addition to bio-physiological pathology induced by environmental pollution, there should be psychological illness linked to a negative relationship between humans and their support environment”.32 They talk about soma-terric effects, that is, psychological issues caused by earth-related changes, one well-known form of which is of course nostalgia, the sentimental homesickness that affects people who start longing for a home they have, voluntarily or involuntarily, left behind. Albrecht and his co-authors find that a comparable condition exists for people who do not leave their homes but nonetheless experience a change to their home environment: People who are still in their home environs can also experience placebased distress in the face of the lived experience of profound environmental change. The people of concern are still “at home”, but experience a “homesickness” similar to that caused by nostalgia. What these people lack is solace or comfort derived from their present relationship to “home”, and so, a new form of psychoterratic illness needs to be defined.33

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 227 This is “solastalgia”: a feeling of “injustice and/or powerlessness” caused by “the violation of connections to place”.34 Widening the scope from their geographically specific (Australian) case study, the authors end their article by proposing that the condition is probably not an isolated local phenomenon but a widespread global condition: “Climate change for one, might, unfortunately, be a globally significant source of psychoterratic distress expressed as nostalgia and solastalgia.” In narrative terms, an intellectual or cognitive anagnorisis is probably less prominent here, whereas a violent, affective peripatetic turning point results in a deep nostalgia bordering on depression. Finally, a fourth way of facing future anthropogenic change is to make oneself confront coming disasters in fictional transmediations. This response has less to do with a longing for a lost home or past (the solastalgia condition) than, paradoxically, with a longing for a future lost in advance. The fundamental idea that the Anthropocene might have global effects on a population level as well as on an individual one is the hypothesis of film and literature scholar Ann E. Kaplan in her 2015 book Climate Trauma. Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction from 2015. She ends a prologue describing her own traumatic experience of what might have been a result of climate change, Hurricane Sandy in New York City in 2012, by suggesting a wider diagnosis: Generalizing from my experience, I suggest cultures may now be entering a new era in which pretrauma is pervasive in the public sphere. In this new era, media of all kinds – journalism, the Internet, television, film, and literature – offer catastrophic futurist scenarios. Such identifications result in a pretraumatized population, living with a sense of an uncertain future and an unreliable natural environment.35 She supplements the well-known diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, with pre-traumatic stress disorder. We live, she argues, in a culture so stressed out and depressed about future dystopic threats related to the Anthropocene and global warming that before – and this is the new aspect of her thinking – catastrophes take place, they inflict psychological wounds (traumas) upon us. And these traumas, she argues, are being represented and partly worked through in the pre-trauma works, particularly films, she analyses in her book. The future lacks openness and hope and is instead a virtual wound ready to be filled with pain and distress. In Aristotelian terms, a violent peripeteia in the form of pre-trauma is the direct result of a cognitive or sometimes perhaps more instinctive precognitive anagnorisis. In combination, the last two responses, or even diagnoses, encapsulate our present moment in a particularly dire way: there is solastalgic yearning for a place that is no longer here (Albrecht) and a pre-traumatic

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working through of disasters not yet experienced (Kaplan). Together they add up to an extremely difficult contemporary moment with, literally, no escape. Both the past (as a nostalgic refuge) and the future (as a possible way out), and the longing and the hope, seem to implode before our eyes, and as such, perhaps, our current moment is the logical fulfilment of several of the tenets of modernity’s fundamental makeover of first the West and later the rest of the world since the mid-19th century.36

“We’re Doomed. Now What?” The Future as a Cultural Fact37 What can be done in such a menacing and claustrophobic here and now, with an outlook to terrifying futures that bars us from any ideas of a consoling past? Are there ways out beyond the threatening, numbing passivity and negligence that seem to be the logical result of living in this present that seems to have no escape routes? We have to acknowledge that the future is not like a found object or an already given condition – the future is constructed, in two senses of the word: from a scientific point of view (notably via computer simulations) and in a more cultural or perhaps existential sense. Let me briefly explain these two dimensions of the constructed character of the future. In climatology and related areas, a future is constructed as a scientific fact by way of the computer simulations which have become the major methodological tool in almost all natural sciences since the 1950s, when there was a boom in computing power. ”Tool” is probably an understatement here. Eric Winsberg remarked in 2010 that “the last several decades of the history of science have been the age of computer simulation”,38 and he convincingly demonstrates that a computer simulation is much more than a banal methodological application or tool that merely supplements the theoretical breakthroughs:, computer simulations are, instead, the precondition for these breakthroughs. While meteorologists, whose weather forecasts are transmediated into the TV news every evening, are still having problems making relatively limited predictions (due to the enormous complexity of even local weather phenomena), climate modelling, described as “changes over decades rather than hours”,39 has proven to be surprisingly efficient.40 But what exactly is a climate prediction, which constitutes such a fundamental aspect of our understanding of future existence in the Anthropocene? Basically, climate predictions use current and past observation data from several disciplines and data sets to predict the future, and they have developed dramatically from the models of the 1970s, which solely analyzed CO2 emissions, to the current data sets that include CO2 and meteorological facts but also chemical aspects, vegetation data and data concerning ice and oceans, to mention the most important features. The huge data sets are then rendered through a complex group of

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 229 mathematical equations and algorithms and used to create interrelating models. The synthesis of all this is yet to be constructed, but working models are already being employed today. Such immensely complex models are, in principle, able to describe certain characteristics of time sequences in the past, the present and possibly the future. Metaphorically, a static photo of a moment in time is not very attractive as a realistic representation of the future of the world. So scientists add the process of time to the model, thus pushing the start buttons for what are generally called computer simulations. Simulations “put models into motion”.41 The simulations can work back in time (so-called ”hindcasting”), co-referencing past data – and the assumption is that if the model corresponds with data in a hindcasting simulation, this might confirm that the model, used in a computer simulation, would work as a prediction of the future. These models-turned-simulations are undoubtedly the best possible ways of producing scientific predictions about the future, but commentators have noted that simulations are characterized by a certain “fictionality” and “virtual indexicality”,42 and the relationships between rhetorical elements (decisions, contexts, relatedness to other texts) and computer simulations have been investigated by Roundtree.43 It is crucial to keep in mind both the fictional and the “virtual indexical” elements, as well as the obvious risk of uncertainties rising exponentially if a minor mistake enters the algorithms at some point, of computer-simulated predictions about the future. But there are other reasons to think carefully about the science-generated versions of the future. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai invites us to think of the future as a cultural fact, arguing that when thinking about future scenarios we need to take into consideration the deeply human, and partly unpredictable, agencies such as imagination, aspiration and hope. Neoclassical economics (and its many derivative policy fields) is still the most important of these [fields that predict the future], having formed itself primarily around the study of needs, wants, estimates, calculation, and the projection of macro-outcomes from microactions and -choices. In alliance with specialized techniques derived from statistics, and more recently from linear algebra, operations research and the computational sciences, economics has consolidated its place as the primary field in which the study of how humans construct their future is modelled and predicted. Other fields, such as the environmental sciences and planning and disaster management have built themselves on the confluence of sophisticated computational techniques and new techniques for mapping, visualization, and highorder information processing.44 Being even more specific, climatologist Mike Hulme has warned against what he calls the determinist fallacy of contemporary understandings

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of  the climate threats: “Such sentiments [of hopelessness facing future threats] . . . are enabled by the methodology of facing climate reductionism (i.e., a form of neoenvironmental determinism). Simulations of future climate from climate models are inappropriately elevated as universal predictors of future social performance and human destiny.”45 So in our approach to the future we need to balance two equally important insights: on the one hand, we are obliged to respect the scientific facts of anthropogenic changes to the planet that may have devastating future consequences; and on the other, we need to have an understanding of the future which takes into consideration human agency, and in particular the human ability to aspire, imagine and hope, and to narrate, in the broadest sense of the term, time into new and unexpected patterns. We need scientific investigations and inventive solutions, and we need myriads of combinations of scientific knowledge and existential, nondeterminist visions – transmediations across aesthetic and non-aesthetic media! – to guide us through a future. And whether geology chooses to follow what has become almost a household name – the Anthropocene – or construct a more outlandish term is actually of less importance. Literature and the arts hold a particular promise to conduct this transmediating work, having access to dystopic scenarios and hopeful parodies, sensorial experiments and verbal explanations. And, needless to say, the aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene range widely: we have Danish writer Caspar Colling Nielsen’s satirical vision of an artificial mountain in famously flat Denmark resulting in new lifeforms, biotopes and conflicts, side by side with artist Olafur Eliasson’s Greenlandian ice placed in the vicinity of political hotspots in Copenhagen, Paris and London.46 Aesthetic transmediations also include Chinese director Zhao Liang’s fictional documentary Behemoth from 2015 – in which an original reuse of Dante’s medieval visions of hell makes us see, sense and perhaps understand anthropogenic effects upon contemporary life – and Swedish artist Hanna Ljungh’s videos and installations that documented how, because of conditions altered by climate change, Kebnekaise is no longer the highest mountain in Sweden.47 These direct or indirect narrative aesthetic transmediations of the Anthropocene help prepare us for a future we simultaneously know too little and too much about.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Elleström, Media Transformation. Malhi, “Concept of the Anthropocene,” 80, 78. Malhi, “Concept of the Anthropocene,” 97. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind.” A basic defining text is that of Waters et al., “A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene?” 6. Braidotti, Posthuman, 81. 7. Latour, quoted in Bonneuil and Fressoz, L’évenément Anthropocène, 36.

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 231 8. While this article was being prepared, there was a debate among proponents of different geological nomenclatures: the scientific committee that decided how to name the geological epochs in the summer of 2018, to the surprise of most observers, maintains that the “Anthropocene” as a geological concept is a misnomer. This decision has been met with criticism and even outrage from other geologists, who have insisted that signs of human activities need to be taken seriously as geological “signatures” in order for the extraordinary nature of recent history to be taken seriously. Masslin and Lewis, “Anthropocene vs Meghalayan.” 9. Three influential and particularly critical voices are Malm, Fossil Capital, Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, and Demos, Against the Anthropocene. 10. See Malhi, “Concept of the Anthropocene.” 11. Farrier, “Concept of Deep Time.” 12. For a short discussion of geology and the sublime, see Parikka, Geology of Media, 69. 13. “For Augustine, time is a matter of distention, enhanced by the dialectic of temporality and eternity. Time does not bring linearity to narrative but rather compels it to respond to time’s essential aporetics in kind. For Aristotle, narrative temporality has an opposite responsibility, since emplotment is all about the ‘inventing of order’ or of discordance.” See Matz, “Narrative and Narratology,” 282. 14. Fornäs, “Mediatization of Third-Time Tools,” 5213. 15. See Fornäs, “Mediatization of Third-Time Tools,” 5215. 16. For a helpful suggestion of definitions of a transmedial narrative position, see Elleström, Transmedial Narration. 17. These terms, typical of geological jargon, are used in Waters et al., “A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene?” 18. To see agency behind planetary history is new in geology but not in history: most people around the world had cosmological or theological ideas about what created and moved the planet. 19. Here I gently rephrase Downing, Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, 9. 20. Waters et al., “A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene?” 21. Imagining a world after human beings are extinct is a well-known science fiction trope, and it has recently been developed in Alan Weisman’s quasiscientific, and very popular, book The World Without Us, 2007. 22. The four positions I construct here overlap slightly with Malhi’s three responses, the “managerial”, the “optimistic” and the “catastrophist”. Malhi, “Concept of the Anthropocene,” 94–6. 23. For an excellent overview of that field, see Chadwick, “Health and Risk Communication,” and for a recent summary of climate change communication see Nisbet, Oxford Encyclopedia, 2018. 24. Norgaard, Living in Denial. 25. Washington and Cook, Climate Change Denial. 26. See Washington and Cook, Climate Change Denial but also Oreskes and Conway, Merchants. 27. For instance, the British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007) directed by Martin Surkin. 28. Michael Crichton’s 2005 novel State of Fear is a prime example, effectively criticized in Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions. 29. For a meta-study on the presence of climate-change and environmental denial in the Swedish context, including comments on how to define these denial structures, see Edvardsson Björnberg et al., “Climate and Environmental Denial.”

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30. Available at www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english/) – accessed April 25 2019. 31. Among the many critical reactions to the eco-modernist position, see the special commentary section on the manifesto in Environmental Humanities, vol. 7, 2015, including the critical response by Bruno Latour. 32. Albrecht et al., “Solastalgia,” 96. 33. Albrecht et al., “Solastalgia,” 96. 34. Albrecht et al., “Solastalgia,” 96. 35. Kaplan, Climate Trauma, xix. 36. For the relationship between modernity, nostalgia, and the Anthropocene, see Salmose, “Behemoth.” 37. Here, as in the title of this text, I borrow from two different book titles. First, from the title of Roy Scranton’s recent collection of essays We’re Doomed. Now What (a follow-up to his shorter book from 2015 with the equally dark title Learning to Die in the Anthropocene) – and second, from Arjun Appadurai’s influential The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, to which I return below. 38. See Winsberg, Science, 135. 39. “How Do Climate Models Work?,” Carbon Brief. 40. Concerning the largely successful climate predictions, see Cowtan et al., “Robust Comparison of Climate Models.” 41. Roundtree, Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, 11. 42. Klaus Pias argues that computer simulations work with what should be understood as a “hypotetischen Index” (a hypothetical index) and that the researchers “bekennen sich zur ihrer Fiktionalität, positionnieren sich in einem Bezugsrahmen, thematisieren ihre Performanz, wissen um ihre problematische Genese und spezifizieren ihre limitierte Geltung” [”acknowledge [the models’] fictionality, position [the models] in a frame of reference, adress their own models’ performativity and are well aware of their problematic genesis and specify the limited validity [of the models]”, my translation]. Pias, “Klimasimulation,” 115. 43. When I say that the computing adds time to a model, it is a simplification: time here covers many possible uncertainty factors that exponentially add up; one small misrepresentation of a data point may add up to almost infinite errors in the end result. 44. Appadurai, Future as Cultural Fact, 285–6. 45. Hulme, “Reducing the Future to Climate,” 508. 46. Partly documented at Eliasson’s homepage https://olafureliasson.net/archive/ artwork/WEK109190/ice-watch, accessed April 25 2019. 47. Exhibition photos available at Ljungh’s homepage: www.hannaljungh.com/ past%20events_I%20am%20mountain.html, accessed April 25, 2019.

Bibliography Albrecht, Glenn et al. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused By Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry 15, suppl. 1 (February 2007): S95–8. Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso Books, 2013. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-baptiste Fressoz. L’évenément Anthropocène: la Terre, l’histoire et nous. Paris: Seuil, 2016. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Carbon Brief. “How Do Climate Models Work?” January 15, 2018. www. carbonbrief.org/qa-how-do-climate-models-work.

“We’re Doomed – Now What?” 233 Chadwick, Amy E. “Health and Risk Communication, Journalism Studies, Media and Communication Policy.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.22. Colling, Nielsen. Mount København: fortællinger. København: Gyldendal, 2015. Cowtan, Kevin, Zeke Hausfather, Ed Hawkins, Peter Jacobs, Michael E. Mann, Sonya K. Miller, Byron A. Steinman, Martin B. Stolpe, and Robert G. Way. “Robust Comparison of Climate Models with Observations Using Blended Land Air and Ocean Sea Surface Temperatures.” Geophysical Research Letters 42, no. 15 (July 2015): 6526–34. Crichton, Michael. State of fear. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415, no. 6867 (January 2002): 23. Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017. Downing, William C. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: An Introduction to “Temps et récit.” Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Edvardsson Björnberg, Karin, et al. “Climate and Environmental Science Denial: A Review of the Scientific Literature Published in 1990–2015.” Journal of Cleaner Production 167 (November 2017): 229–41. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation [Elektronisk resurs] the Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. Transmedial Narration: Narratives and Stories in Different Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Farrier, David. “How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.” Atlantic, October 31, 2016. www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/aeon-deep-time/505922/. Fornäs, Johan. “The Mediatization of Third-Time Tools: Culturalizing and Historicizing Temporality.” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 5213–32. Hulme, Mike. “Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism.” Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 245–66. International Commission on Stratigraphy. “Collapse of Civilizations Worldwide Defines Youngest Unit of the Geologic Time Scale.” www.dur.ac.uk/earth. sciences/news/?itemno=35201 Kaplan, E. Ann. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Mahli, Yadvinder. “The Concept of the Anthropocene.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 42 (October 2017): 77–104. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016. Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (January 2014): 62–9. Masslin, Mark, and Simon Lewis. “Anthropocene vs Meghalayan: Why Geologists Are Fighting Over Whether Humans Are a Force of Nature.” The Conversation, August 8, 2018. https://theconversation.com/anthropocene-vsmeghalayan-why-geologists-are-fighting-over-whether-humans-are-a-force-ofnature-101057?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source =Twitter#Echobox=1533746299. Matz, Jesse. “Narrative and Narratology.” In Time and Literature, edited by Thomas M. Allen, 273–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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Meyer, Robinson. “Geology’s Timekeepers Are Feuding.” Atlantic. www.theatlantic. com/science/archive/2018/07/anthropocene-holocene-geology-drama/565628/ Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. Nisbet, Matthew. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, 1. U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pias, Claus. “Klimasimulation.” In 2 – Das Wetter, der Mensch und sein Klima, edited by Petra Lutz and Thomas Macho, 108–15. Dresden: Wallstein Verlag, 2008. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988. Roundtree, Aimee Kendall. Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination: How Virtual Evidence Shapes Science in the Making and in the News. (E-Book) Lexington Books, 2014. Salmose, Niklas. “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency.” In Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability, 239–56. London: Transcript Verlag, 2019. Scranton, Roy. Learning to die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Franciso: City Lights Books, 2015. ———. We’re Doomed Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change. New York: Soho Press, 2018. Sörlin, Sverker. Antropocen: en essä om människans tidsålder. Stockholm: Weyler, 2017. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Washington, Haydn, and John Cook. Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. London: Routledge, 2011. Waters, Colin N., et al. “A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene?” Geological Society of London, Special Publications, 395, March 24, 2014. https://doi. org/10.1144/SP395.18. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007. Winsberg, Eric B. Science in the Age of Computer Simulation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Zhao, Liang. Behemoth (film). Paris: StudioS, 2015.

12 Transmediations of the Anthropocene From Factual Media to Poetry Emma Tornborg

The Anthropocene is a complex concept: initially it was only used as a geological term, but it has been transmediated to many other disciplines and areas. It is therefore not solely a natural scientific notion but a political, cultural, philosophical and economical concept as well. Anthropocene is often used as a name for our time, in which humans’ relation to other species and the environment, and the consequences of this relationship, are in acute focus. Just as the term Anthropocene has travelled between disciplines, it has travelled between media, too. We can now encounter the Anthropocene in non-fiction books, films, documentaries, scientific journals, novels, poems, art exhibitions and on the internet. Thus, it is now a transmedial phenomenon, but it made its first appearances in scientific journals and became widely known through other more mainstream factual media, that is, media that communicate facts, such as documentaries, news programmes, et cetera.1 This chapter explores the transmediation of Anthropocenic issues from factual media to poetry. It is, however, not a case of a transmediation from one specific source to one specific target. Instead it is factual media concerning Anthropocenic issues in general that constitute the source, whereas the targets are specific poems. The concern is the transmediation of properties shared by many kinds of factual media. In this process, the poems incorporate characteristics from these types of media, which affect them in certain ways, both in terms of semantic content and in terms of form and stylistics. One purpose of this chapter is to investigate how the analyzed poems are affected by the transmediation. The other purpose is to study what effect the transmediation has on the characteristics that are transmediated: can properties travel unaffected from medium to medium? Examples of such properties are the truth claims associated with factual media. These types of media claim that they are trustworthy, and we generally treat them as such,2 but what happens with truth claims usually associated with such media when their subjects and different modes of expression appear in poetry? I argue that when a poem uses a discourse that we normally associate with various kinds of factual media, it can strengthen its objective truth claims.

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First I present Elleström’s theories on transmediation and how they can be applied to the notion of the Anthropocene. After that, I address how the two media’s discourses differ and what happens when they mix, followed by an account of different kinds of truth claims. Finally, two poems by Swedish poet Jonas Gren will be analyzed in order to illustrate these notions. The poems are very different in terms of transmediation and truth claims, even though both deal with Anthropocenic issues, and in the concluding remarks they are contrasted with each other.

Transmediations of the Anthropocene Between Media There are two qualifying aspects of media, according to Elleström.3 The first aspect is the contextual qualifying aspect. This aspect considers the medium in an historical, cultural and social context. For example, whereas mere text on paper is not a qualified medium, poetry is. The other qualifying aspect is the operational qualifying aspect, which has to do with norms and conventions. For us to be able to recognize a medium as that medium, it must follow certain rules that have developed over time: a bodily movement is not dance; for us to recognize it as dance, we expect certain conventions to be followed. These two aspects are crucial when it comes to understanding, first, what a medium is and second, the process in which form and content are transferred from one media type or media product (the source media type or media product) to another (the target media type or media product), a process Elleström calls transmediation. A common and well-known form of transmediation is when a novel is made into a film, which we usually call adaptation. When analyzing such a process, one is applying what Elleström calls a diachronic perspective: “how can transfer and transformation of media characteristics be comprehended and described adequately?”4 In his work, Elleström focuses on this perspective, in which he includes “an emphasis on both the notion of transfer – indicating that identifiable traits are actually relocated among media – and the notion of transformation – stressing that transfers among different media nevertheless entail changes”.5 In this chapter I am investigating both which elements are transferred from factual media to poetry and which changes these elements undergo during that process. The transmedial process is, as mentioned above, often described as the travel of form and/or content (a division, obviously, that can only be made heuristically)6 from one distinct medium or media product to another. In the present case, however, there is one distinct target media product, namely the poem, but the source medium is not as easy to define, since I regard the various factual representations of the Anthropocene, as presented to us via news media, documentaries and popular science magazines, as well as via academic science journals, as source media. In Elleström’s terms, the source media in this case are to be viewed as “clusters of media products that tend to present a certain type of sensory

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configuration”,7 in this context a group of media products that mediate the same content in partly the same way (scientific content mediated in a factual matter) but that are realized in different technical media: journals, documentaries, radio programmes, et cetera. Even though transmediation normally designates the transfer between qualified media consisting of different basic media, for example from a photograph to a poem (still image to visual text), there are instances when a qualified source media type or media product is transmediated to a different qualified target media type or media product that nevertheless consists of the same basic media. Elleström calls this phenomenon intramedial transmediation, and it differs from intermedial transmediation. For instance, the two media types (written) poetry and scholarly article are qualified in very different ways, although they are both typically understood to consist of visual, static and symbolic signs that are sequentially decoded from a flat surface. Whereas the interrelation between poetry and scholarly article is intermedial in a broad sense, it is not intermedial in a narrow sense.8 The two media types scientific article and poem are very different in their qualified aspects even though they consist of the same basic and technical medium, and a transmediation between them can therefore be studied from an intermedial perspective. There are, however, differences between studying a classic intermedial transmediation and an intramedial transmediation. In the former case, the interest lies to a high degree in the affordances, limits and media specificities of the technical aspect of the involved media: what can film do that literature cannot, and vice versa, for example. In the latter case, one could approach the texts without mentioning media or transmediation at all; instead, one could discuss intertextuality, references, genre mix, et cetera and keep the analyses within the boundaries of classic close-reading practice. Even so, there are good reasons not to do that and to instead use intermedial theory in the analysis. First, Lars Elleström’s intermedial theory has the advantage of providing useful and exact models of the relations and transmediations between all kinds of media. Second, even though some of the source media products in this case consist of text, other technical media such as television programmes and documentaries are involved as well. Last but not least, the Anthropocene is a media phenomenon,9 and I will now explain in what way. The Anthropocene, a geological term suggested as the name of earth’s present epoch,10 has become a recognized and widely used concept since the year 2000, when Eugene F. Stoermer and Paul Crutzen published a cowritten article in which they presented the term,11 although the term or versions of it had already been introduced quite a few times during the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st centuries. Bonneuil and Fressoz state that [w]hile awaiting official validation by stratigraphers, however, the Anthropocene concept has already become a rallying point for

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Emma Tornborg geologists, ecologists, climate and Earth system specialists, historians, philosophers, social scientists, ordinary citizens and ecological movements, as a way of conceiving this age in which humanity has become a major geological force.12

According to Bristow, “the term Anthropocene marks a distinct geological epoch shaped by humankind”,13 and Clark describes the term as having rapidly become adopted in the humanities in a sense beyond the strictly geological. Its force is mainly as a loose, shorthand term for all the new contexts and demands – cultural, ethical, aesthetic, philosophical and political – of environmental issues that are truly planetary in scale, notably climate change, ocean acidification, effects of overpopulation, deforestation, soil-erosion, overfishing and the general and accelerating degradation of ecosystems.14 Since the year 2000 the term Anthropocene has become more and more of a buzzword. We come across the term in newspapers, on TV and radio programmes, in an ever-increasing number of non-fiction books and on the internet. The Anthropocene is thus a phenomenon communicated to us mainly through factual media, and, like many scientific concepts these days, it has rapidly become popularized and widely known through these channels. It is therefore correct to say that the notion of the Anthropocene is at least to some degree a media phenomenon; its popularity and many usages are due to how quickly and widely it has spread. It is also a transmedial phenomenon: it moves between different media and media products, and even though the modes in which it is represented change, transform, with every new transmediation, it keeps its core meaning: the negative impact of the human species on the planet. There are now some recurring tropes that we can identify as Anthropocenic, regardless of the media product in which they are found. When discussing Sir Andrew Motion’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Mirror” (2009), Matthew Griffiths points to the familiar image of the polar bear: as the concept of Nature becomes more fixed and certain in such a vision, so climate change also crystallizes into a particular entity, reduced to one of the topics that constitute the media category of environment. Motion is self-conscious enough about borrowing from the climate discourse of other media, such as “the already famously lonely polar bear”.15 Climate change is the main topic of the Anthropocenic discourse and it is often illustrated with melting ice and lonely polar bears, just as Griffiths

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points out. The image of the polar bear, most common perhaps in documentaries and news programmes, is transmediated between media and has found its way into poetry as well.

Two Kinds of Discourse This chapter is focused on the fusion of factual and scientific discourses with poetic discourses. According to Paul Ricoeur,16 the two discourses are opposite to one another; however, both proceed from what he calls “ordinary language”. Ricoeur claims that scientific speech and poetic speech have different solutions to the same problem, namely that of polysemy of language and the ambiguity that follows: At one extremity of the possible range of solutions, we have scientific language, which can be defined as a strategy of discourse that seeks systematically to eliminate ambiguity. At the other extremity lies poetic language, which proceeds from the inverse choice, namely to preserve ambiguity in order to have it express rare, new, unique and therefore – in the proper sense of the word – unpublished [inédites, i.e., non-public] experiences.17 Scientific discourse and poetic discourse are seen as two different systems with different “goals”. When two discourses meet, it affects what in cognitive terms is called the reader’s formal schemata, which can be described as “the organizational forms and rhetorical structures of written texts”:18 They include knowledge of different text types and genres, and also include the knowledge that different types of texts use text organization, language structures, vocabulary, grammar and level of formality differently. Formal schemata are described as abstract, encoded, internalized, coherent patterns of meta-linguistic, discourse and textual organization that guide expectation in our attempts to understand a meaning piece of language [sic]. Readers use their schematic representations of the text such as fictions, poems, essays, newspaper articles, academic articles in magazines and journals to help comprehend the information in the text.19 Thus, when two types of text collide, or when a reader finds one specific discourse where another was expected, the formal schemata are disrupted. In literary terms, this is often called defamiliarization. Viktor Shklovsky discusses defamiliarization in his text “Art as Technique” and takes Pushkin as an example of how one type of language, or discourse, which is unexpected in one context, can have a defamiliarizing effect:

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Emma Tornborg The usual poetic language for Pushkin’s contemporaries was the elegant style of Derzhavin; but Pushkin’s style, because it seemed trivial then, was unexpectedly, difficult for them. We should remember the consternation of Pushkin’s contemporaries over the vulgarity of his expressions. He used the popular language as a special device for prolonging attention, just as his contemporaries generally used Russian words in their usually French speech (see Tolstoy’s examples in War and Peace).20

The Pushkin example can be applied in our case as well, but instead of the poetic language being trivialized, the poetry of interest for us includes a scientific, or at least factual, discourse. If we agree with Ricoeur, scientific discourse strives to lessen the latent ambiguity of language and therefore is very different from traditional poetic discourse, thereby creating a defamiliarizing effect.

Subjective and Objective Truth Claims Since the Anthropocene started out as a geological term, and because of its strong connection to the natural sciences, it is associated to a large degree with objective truth claims. Other kinds of truth claims also exist, namely subjective ones. Francis Phil Carspecken describes the two as follows: Critical epistemology differentiates between “ontological categories” rather than between “realities”. Ontologies are theories about existence making it possible to formulate diverse truth claims. There is a subjective ontological category (existing states of mind, feelings, to which only one actor has direct access). Subjective truth claims are claims about existing subjective states (I/you are feeling such and such; I/you think such and such; I/you are being honest, etc.). There is an objective ontological category (existing objects and events to which all people have direct access). Objective truth claims are claims that certain objects and events exist (or existed) such that any observer present could notice them.21 Georgia Christinidis discusses objective versus subjective truth claims and concludes that subjective truth claims concern subjective responses to an exterior world. She states that “the choice to sincerely represent one’s subjective reaction to outside events can be termed ‘authentic’” and uses authenticity “to designate the fictional representation of subjective responses to external events”.22 Christinidis, however, points out that the notion of authenticity is problematic, since it would mean that the self is always “transparent to itself”.23 In this article, subjective truth claims are

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to be understood as propositions made by a poetic persona regarding his/ her inner state, propositions that we interpret as truthful unless we have reasons to believe otherwise. However, they are “true” only as subjective experiences constructed within a poem. Subjective truth claims thus have very little to do with science or with factual media, and therefore are quite different from objective truth claims. Objective truth claims, I argue, can either be made in a text or be associated with a text. In the latter case they are the result of a negotiation between audience and media form: certain types of media have a high number of objective truth claims because we historically associate them with a high degree of factuality, which it is also their purpose to provide. This association is based on earlier experiences of that media type. It is impossible once and for all to establish the exact boundaries between fictional and factual media. When we examine them more closely, the boundaries tend to dissolve. However, in our everyday life we do seem to be able to distinguish between the two, and in practice they are not hard to separate. This differentiation is often context-bound: when we read a poem, we regard the propositions differently compared with when we read a scientific article. That is why it is both disturbing and effective when the two forms meet and get mixed together in conspicuous ways; it creates a kind of defamiliarization that disrupts our reading. When a qualified media type, for example poetry, to which we do not usually ascribe high objective truth claims, engages in factual discourse in a formal manner, there is, I argue, a possibility of strengthening a poem’s truth claims and thus its ability to make us interpret its propositions about the world and its conditions as factual. When I discuss objective truth claims I thus refer to two things: claims made in the text in various ways, implicit or explicit, regarding being truthful about external conditions, and texts that we as readers by means of experience and habit consider to have truth claims in the sense of “not lying” about such conditions. It is important to stress that making objective truth claims is not the same thing as stating the truth. I am thus not primarily interested in what is true or false in the analyzed poems, but in how they convey their propositions: objectively or subjectively. As indicated above, poetry traditionally does not have strong objective truth claims. Ricoeur claims that “poetry teaches nothing about reality. Only scientific statements have an empirically verifiable meaning. Poetry, however, is not verifiable. At least not in this sense.”24 Regarding poetry’s relation to historical facts, McGann writes as follows in his study of Byron: In literary criticism, for example, the classic argument against a historical method in criticism has been that facts in poetry are not like facts in history: a fact is a fact in history (whether we mean by

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This does not mean that poetry cannot state facts or be objective. Poetry that deals with Anthropocenic issues, that is, issues that concern scientific findings, can place itself in a classic symbolist tradition, making use of traditional lyric imagery and stylistics. This type of poetry corresponds with Ricoeur’s characterization above. But, as Griffiths asks, “[m]ust poetry about climate change belong in the tradition of the pastoral or the elegy?”26 Poetry about Anthropocenic issues such as climate change or pollution can also keep the factual characteristics (including the stylistics) of its scientific origin, placing itself in a more avant-gardist, modernistic tradition where the Objectivists, for example, are important predecessors. We can also place the Imagists in this tradition, and, to a certain degree, the Concretists, as well as poets such as William Carlos Williams (who has been associated with the Objectivists) and Wallace Stevens, with their exact and carefully balanced, yet poetic, descriptions of everyday objects and situations. Griffiths stresses the important role that factual language can play in poetry dealing with an Anthropocenic issue such as climate change. When reading Frances Presley’s poetry, Griffiths studies how the process of finding proof for climate change is mediated in her poetry and how essential factual language is in this process. He writes: That process is an explicitly mediated one as well, revealing the significant role language, in particular the discourse of the press, plays in our comprehension of the phenomena . . . . This mediation is also seen in the way she transplants into literary form two justified columns of text, of the kind found in news reports.27 Even though both kinds of poetry are grounded in an awareness of the issues included in the concept of the Anthropocene, and even though they both say something about real conditions, they do it with different claims to objectivity. Hence, it could be argued that the kind of poetry that places itself in a classic lyric tradition, and that is not ironic or undermining its own credibility in other ways, makes subjective truth claims; it presents itself as authentic, even though, as Christinidis points out, “the ‘authenticity’ of literary texts is necessarily a construct”.28 It conveys personal reflections and emotions, and even though it speaks of facts, it does so from a subjective, personal point of view, where the feelings of the poetic I (specifically stated or merely indicated) are in focus.

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Transmediations and Subjective Truth Claims in Anthropocenic Poetry In order to illustrate my reasoning, I would like to present a poem by Swedish poet and environmental activist Jonas Gren, from his poetry collection Antropocen. Dikt för en ny epok (2016), or Anthropocene. Verse for a New Epoch. The whales I believe in the whales In schools of krill in ocean chains from abyss to surface Plumes of whale shit Carrying nourishment Death Fertiliser of schools I believe in the glacier crowfoot and the spring flood The May sun Witnesses by waterfalls In fluctuations and moon songs Woodbine hours before dawn Believe in the moths in the rubble of rocks on mountain tops where grizzlies root in hunger The fat reserve The bear pit In entering the morning when the foot turns to clay In the left over parts in humans The third side of the desert sand The crane chick in the hand Legs thinner than nails.29 The poem is traditionally lyrical, has a conventional layout, contains assonances, anaphors and alliterations, has a poetic persona and the claims are subjective: “I believe”. In the Anthropocenic poetry that Bristow studies, he notes how the lyric’s perilinguistic bandwidth portends cognitive and intuitive possible worlds as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, which includes insight into the possibilities of placation and celebration in poetry. . . . Apostrophe (turning away from the world to address an abstract idea) and appeasement (by the human, of the other “more-than-human” world) are reconceived within contemporary nature poetry (sometimes transposed onto

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Emma Tornborg urban environments) to the extent that they establish new terms for the elegy and the ode: plaintiveness for what has been forgotten and what can be praised, lost worlds to be lamented and remembered, and the emotional cost of such modes of expression. This ecological plaint, witness to our various modes of feeling, isolates moments of human experience and moments in the lyric with particular contemporary significance. And you are its witness.30

This description can be applied to Gren’s poem as well; it is both a description of nature and a celebration of the natural life and the ecological cycle, of its fragility and persistence. Humans are not solely ignorant or harmful, or at least there is one part of us worth believing in: the part in us that is “left over”, perhaps the part that is not efficient, that is not acting or consuming in a time when we are rewarded for doing just that. The poem is permeated by a sense of loss and a longing for something that is still here but might be gone soon, as well as sadness over what will be lost in a near future. As Donna Haraway states in relation to our current ecological situation: “There are so many losses already, and there will be many more.”31 Just as Bristow describes it, Gren’s poem turns away from the human world, except for the “left over parts” in us. Humanity and humans are placed next to places and non-human habitants in this world. This is in line with an Anthropocene discourse about the decentring of humanity: “As the Anthropocene names the human as a species – one among many – the term is potentially useful for displacing human mastery in favour of human-animal relationality.”32 Ben Dibley claims that “in its scientific exposition the Anthropocene is as much about the decentring of the human as it is about the escalating geological agency of the human species, it is in some important sense not about the human at all”.33 Humans are not absent in Gren’s poem, but they hold no superior position, and we can easily imagine that the places described in the poem may still be there when we are gone – there will still be “witnesses by waterfalls”, but the witnesses do not have to be us. The poem connects to the Anthropocenic discourse in several ways, for example contextually: knowledge of the author’s interests, the title of the collection, and the themes and motifs of the rest of the poems in the collection all indicate that the poem should be read with “Anthropocenic glasses”. Its themes and motives are Anthropocenic: by focusing on nonhuman agency and by placing humans, animals and nature side by side and not putting the human condition at its centre, it conveys a profound critique of the negative human impact on the planet – visualized by the image of the fragile bird’s legs in the human hand – and presents an alternative way of regarding our place, and role, in the ecosystem: as equals, not as masters. Bristow discusses the “situated knowledge of place as it is experienced”:

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When coupled with Anthropocene lyricism, place is felt as it is encountered as being lived out by others, by more than ourselves, by our situatedness in history and ecology. It is the space in which we best witness the fragility, beauty and indifference of flora and fauna, climate and season – the more-than-human world.34 Instead of lingering on the human condition, the poem turns to nature, to places where humans don’t belong: the bear pit, the ocean depths and the desert sand. According to Elleström, “deciding on whether a trait or a set of traits originates from another specific media product or is part of a more general pattern in one or more qualified media is not always possible or even meaningful”.35 Although we cannot single out one specific media product as a source in this case, we can assume that since the Anthropocenic discourse is originally a scientific one, the transmediated source media consist of clusters of media products that present the Anthropocene in a scientific or at least factual way. This means that the source media’s compound characteristics36 include presentations, in news reports, documentaries or scientific journals, of findings from various scientific fields: biology, climate studies, marine ecology, geology, et cetera. The formal traits include aiming for objectivity and often the usage of a scientific terminology. Both form and content create objective truth claims: the source media make implicit claims that they are to be trusted and we as the audience believe we are being told the truth insofar as it is possible. This is due to previous knowledge of these types of media and of an ongoing negotiation between sender and receiver. Both the scientific content and the formal language activate this negotiation, which affects how the message is received. Much has changed in the transmedial process from source to target, most significantly the form. Apart from the first stanza, about the ecological cycle of the oceans (excrement turning to nourishment in the ocean), there are no traces of a formal scientific discourse. And even in this section, the lyric form dominates. The line breaks put a focus on structure and rhythm, as does the prolonged spacing in the first two verses. The poem is elegiac and slow-paced and its repetitions are meditative. It is focused on the relation between the poetic persona and nature, as he37 perceives it. The poetic persona tells us how he sees the world and what really matters in the end, or close to the end. The discourse on how an Anthropocenic worldview has caused the major problems we now see regarding climate, pollution and extinction is transmediated to a lyrical poem and the formal properties of the source media are thus transformed: the striving of scientific discourse to eliminate the ambiguity of language has turned into a poetic wish to preserve it, in Ricoeur’s words.38 Because of that, the content does not clash with the form: both have transformed into something new, and therefore the defamiliarizing

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effect is absent in this case. Furthermore, the objective truth claims of the source media have transformed into subjective ones: the poem is an invocation, a prayer, and it does not have an informing effect.

Transmediation and Objective Truth Claims in Anthropocenic Poetry My second example is Jonas Gren’s poem about great white sharks and nuclear power plants (no title) from his first collection, Lantmäteriet (The Surveyor) (2014). The poem does not have a conventional layout. It is formed into a specific shape, reminiscent of the kind of nuclear power plant that is common in Sweden but that can be found in other parts of the world as well, for example the Fukushima power plant in Japan. There is a spaced-out word in the middle of the poem: härdsmälta (meltdown). Here is the poem as translated by me (with the approval of the author), but without the layout of the original: Inactive great white sharks suffocate. When water does not flow through the gills, the inside of the shark collapses just like nuclear power plants. The shark shares with the nuclear power plant the fact that external conditions, which they do not control themselves, can be the reason for the breakdown. For example sabotage, when someone cuts off the shark’s fins or someone blows up the cooling system of the power plant. It can also be tidal waves that drag the shark out of the water when they flood the land so that it beaches and/or knocks out the plant’s power. There are occasions when it is the shark itself, or the workers at the nuclear plant, that cause the breakdown – Most of the people who work at nuclear power plants do not think about sharks. Most of the people who, because of the soup, sell the fins and throw the shark back in the water, still alive, do not think about meltdown. People who work at nuclear power plants come to work. People who work at nuclear power plants finish work, because of people’s arrival and certain rules. Those who go home say: “We had an alarm.” Those who arrive say: “We’ll check.” When the people who arrived check they find nothing wrong. The alarm keeps going off. People who work at nuclear power plants control every routine on the schedule. Everything seems to check out. Then someone points to the basin and says: “Look, a fish!”39 The poem transmediates the source media’s scientific, fact-based content. We are first met with the quite commonly known notion that “inactive great white sharks suffocate”, followed by an explanation: “When water does not flow through the gills the inside of the shark collapses”, but then something unexpected follows: “just like nuclear power plants”, and there is no punctuation between the two descriptions. By introducing

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nuclear power plants, the poem places itself in an Anthropocenic context: many scholars date the beginning of the Anthropocene era to 1945, “after which a layer of identifiable radioactive material shows up in the geological record thanks to the emergence of nuclear military technologies”.40 The juxtaposition of the shark and the power plant begins here, and they are continually juxtaposed throughout the poem. They are both regarded as systems that can fail if the conditions are not right. A nuclear meltdown happens when the cooling mechanisms stop working, and the cooling process works by means of circulating coolant, usually cold water.41 Sharks need water to flow through their gills to get oxygen. Thus, both the shark, which is an organic system, and the nuclear power plant, which is a non-organic system, depend on circulating water in order not to collapse. They are also both sensitive to external conditions. In the shark’s case, the system breaks down if someone catches it, cuts off its fins and throws it back into the water, still alive but badly wounded. This is called “shark finning” and is a very common phenomenon, since the fishermen are primarily interested in the fins. Without fins, the shark cannot swim and thus no water can flow through its gills: it suffocates. The nuclear plant can be the target of sabotage: someone might blow up the cooling system. In both cases, the reason for breakdown is human agency. In the poem, shark finning is also called “sabotage”, a rather technical term, but if a shark is regarded as a system, it is definitely sabotage to remove its fins. The next sentence includes two propositions: “It can also be tidal waves that drag the shark out of the water when they flood the land so that it beaches and/or knocks out the plant’s power” (Det kan också röra sig om flodvågor som genom att skölja upp över land drar med sig haj vilken strandar och/eller slår ut kraftverkets elektricitet.). The two propositions concern the shark and the plant respectively: 1. Tidal waves make the shark beach. 2. Tidal waves knock out the electricity of the power plant. Both systems are thus vulnerable to tidal waves, which are often the result of human agency, for example of human-induced climate change leading to the rising of sea levels or the collapse of artificial dams. The shark can also cause its own breakdown by swimming too close to the shore and thus beaching. The workers at the nuclear plant check their security systems but do not take into account the fact that their workplace is located close to a larger system, the ocean: “Most of the people who work at nuclear power plants do not think about sharks.” The nuclear plant workers do not think about sharks and the fishermen do not think about meltdowns, even though that is what the latter cause when they cut off a shark’s fins. At the power plant, people come and go, following the organizational system of this specific workplace. No one has ultimate responsibility. The human factor is always present. And sooner or later it happens: meltdown. In the end, the two systems, the shark and the power plant, unite: “‘Look, a fish!”’

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What is it, then, that is transmediated in this poem, and how does it happen? Elleström discusses compound media characteristics and their relation to real events: Additionally, note that compound media characteristics may originate in the real world. The various details and dramatic structure of the bombing of Pearl Harbour [sic] on 7 December 1941 can and have been mediated in many ways: by voices and other sounds, by journal and book pages, by television, cinema and computer screens, and so forth. Nevertheless, these different types of mediation may trigger representations of compound media characteristics that are understood to be the same, albeit not perfectly identical.42 The Pearl Harbor “content” has been transmediated in various media and some of the characteristics have been kept intact, for example the structure of the event, some of the details, et cetera. Therefore, even though it is mediated to us in the form of different media, it triggers representations of the same compound media characteristics. Similarly, the scientific discourse about the Anthropocene has its origins in the real world; it deals with actual events such as pollution, deforestation, climate change, and so forth. This content, so to speak, has been transmediated from scientific reports to newspapers and documentaries and further on to film, novels, art and poetry, just to name a few target media. In the present case, the transmediated content consists of shark finning, the danger that nuclear power plants pose to the ecological system, and the human ignorance about scale and effect when interfering with ecological systems, which are all topical Anthropocenic issues. By putting the two systems, the power plant’s and the shark’s, side by side, the poem points to, but should not be seen solely as an allegory for, the complex structure of various global systems, man-made or organic, that exist side by side but have conflicting goals: what is best for the fishermen is not what is best for the shark, and vice versa. This divergence is a theme in Anthropocenic discourse, according to Clark: [W]hat is self-evident or rational at one scale may well be destructive or unjust at another. Hence, progressive arguments designed to affirm individual rights and help disseminate Western levels of prosperity may even resemble, on another scale, an insane plan to destroy the biosphere.43 Or, to return to the example of the fishers, we want poor fishermen from low-income countries to be able to make a living, but we do not want sharks to suffer or to become an endangered species. The poem also thematizes the Anthropocenic issue of scale. Clark writes: “The size of my carbon footprint is of no interest or significance

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in itself except in relation to the incalculable effect of there being so many millions of other footprints having an impact over an uncertain timescale.”44 On an individual level, it does not matter much in the long run what we do, but as part of a collective, it is utterly important. The individual fisherman who cuts off shark fins probably does not reflect on this action on a global scale; when thousands of fishermen do it, the sharks’ numbers are critically reduced and the total amount of suffering is enormous. The workers at a nuclear power plant in their turn might not think a lot about how the plant affects ecosystems in the short or long term. The poem’s form relates to its factual content. It is a prose poem, which means that it does not consist of verses; instead its layout is similar to that of non-poetic media types. However, it is different from ordinary prose poems or other prose media types because of its obvious iconicity.45 Just as the use of nuclear energy leaves a concrete ecological and geological mark on the planet, the presence of the nuclear power plant leaves a mark on the fabric of the poem, turning it into an icon of its content. The layout also underlines specific sentences and words such as meltdown, creating a certain rhythm during recitation, which is also the case with its repetitions, especially “most of the people” and “people who work”. The qualifying aspects of this poem – what make us identify it as a poem – are its iconicity and its rhythmical and repetitive structure as well as its overall contexts (author, paratexts, etc.). The poem is epideictic in Culler’s sense of the word: it includes “public poetic discourse about values in this world rather than a fictional world”.46 It states facts that do not normally belong to the poetic realm, which can be falsified and which we can obtain if we read, listen to or watch factual media, such as scientific journals, news programmes or documentaries. It is not subjective, in the sense that there is no discernable poetic persona that utters the propositions. The poem has little, if any, figurative language. The sentences are short and matter-of-fact. The words, expressions and stylistics originate from fact-based texts. By injecting a language associated with factual media, the poem produces an air of truthfulness. Traditionally, expressions and words such as “nuclear power plants”, “external conditions”, “schedule”, “cooling system”, “routine” and so on are uncommon in poetry; usually they belong to another discourse. Regarding Jeremy Prynne’s poetry, Solnick states that “the inclusion of specialist languages disorientate the reader and necessitate a different sort of reading practice, one which often requires a philological dictionary and, more recently, a search engine”,47 which was true for me in my reading of Gren’s second poem. When factual discourse is transmediated to poetry, it can have a defamiliarizing effect, especially if the reader has to look up not just single words but complete processes to be able to understand what the poem is saying on a semantic level. As Elleström notes, a scientific journal and a poem are qualified in very different ways, meaning that they have different contexts and conventions.

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A transmediation of form or content, or both, from one of these media to the other should thoroughly affect the transmediated characteristics. However, in this case, both the factual content and the scientific language of the source media remain relatively unaffected by the transmediation. The defamiliarizing effect comes from meeting them in a new context: a poem. The question is, does this new context affect the truth claims? The contextual qualifying aspect of poetry does not include objective truth claims. In other words, poetry is not traditionally associated with them. Even so, I argue that by means of the factual content and the formal stylistics, the poem implicitly makes the same objective truth claims as the source media do, since the kinds of truth claims that are associated with factual media are transmediated in this case to a certain degree. The subjectivity associated with poetry appears to be reduced – and, because of its direct relation to provable scientific facts about our world – to some degree it actually is.

Concluding Remarks I have investigated two poems by Jonas Gren in which an Anthropocenic discourse is transmediated. The results of the transmedial processes are very different in the two poems. In the first poem, the Anthropocenic discourse has lost its “factualness” and is instead transformed into a poetic persona’s lyrical meditation about the parts of nature where humans do not belong. Humans are not absent from the poem: in the end, it is the poetic persona who holds the thin legs of a crane in his hand. However, humans are not central –not in the poem, and not, as I interpret the poem, in nature at large. The originally scientific form of the Anthropocenic discourse is not transmediated. Instead, the stylistics are traditionally lyrical and include poetic imagery, anaphors, repetitions, assonances and alliterations. The objective truth claims of the source media are transformed into subjective ones: it is the thoughts and feelings of the poetic persona that we get to reflect upon and believe in. The second poem is structured around the juxtaposition of two systems, one man-made and technological and the other natural. The poem points to the intricate and contradictory relations of systems and scales, locally and globally, that characterize the Anthropocene era. The poem should not be seen as an allegory but rather as a concrete example of Anthropocenic divergence. This poem transmediates not only the factual content of the Anthropocenic discourse but also the stylistic characteristics of the source media. When we read provable scientific facts conveyed in a manner that we associate with factual media, the objective truth claims of the source media are, to a certain degree, intact. Even though we do not usually associate poetry with objective truth claims, we do not usually encounter poems like this that, to such an extent, implement both scientific form and content.48

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Transmediations of Anthropocenic issues to all kinds of media are necessary if we want as many people as possible to understand the gravity of our situation. We need many different channels to successfully communicate – to ourselves and to others – what has happened and what is about to happen. Each medium can do this in many different ways, as I have tried to show in this chapter. Poetry can express the grief we feel when we think about our damaged planet, and poetry can inform us of that damage. So the question is, “Can poetry save the earth?” John Felstiner asks us this at the end of the poetry anthology of the same name. And his answer is, “For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.”49

Notes 1. “In writing, this includes certain rhetorical modes of discourse (exposition, description, and argument), and particular forms such as reports, interviews, surveys, biographies, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, academic monographs, and textbooks. .  .  . In television, factual genres include news reports, current affairs programmes, documentaries, public ‘events’ coverage, sports and leisure programmes, consumer programmes, and specialist programmes (history, religion, and so on).” Oxford Reference, accessed March 6, 2019, www. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810104856107. 2. From around 2017 to the time of writing in 2019, the discussion of “fake news” and the scepticism in some groups towards mainstream media have been a bit of a game changer. However, I think that people in general tend to believe that what is reported in the news, for example, is actually the truth. 3. Elleström, “The Modalities of Media,” 24–5. 4. Elleström, Media Transformation, 3. 5. Elleström, Media Transformation, 3. 6. “Although thinking in terms of form and content is sometimes problematic, it is unavoidable. The dichotomy is also fundamental for our minds when we make sense of all types of nonmaterial phenomena and when we form ideas and concepts, which is central to our perception and conception of the external world” (Elleström, 42). 7. Elleström, “The Modalities of Media,” 21. 8. Elleström, “The Modalities of Media,” 89. 9. Patrick McWilliams defines a media phenomenon as “the existence of an element within the differentiated realm of mass media as opposed to the personal domain of individual experience”. McWilliams, “Phenomenon.” 10. Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, 1. 11. Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene, 5. 12. Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, 5. 13. Bristow, Affective Geography, 2. 14. Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 2. 15. Griffiths, New Poetics, 3–4. 16. Ricoeur, “Science and Poetry,” 59. 17. Ricoeur, “Science and Poetry,” 63. 18. Li, Wu, and Wang, “Analysis of Schema Theory,” 19. 19. Li, Wu, and Wang, “Analysis of Schema Theory,” 19. 20. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 4. 21. Carspecken, Critical Ethnography, 20 (italics in the original).

252 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

Emma Tornborg Christinidis, “Truth Claims,” 35. Christinidis, “Truth Claims,” 36. Ricoeur, “Science and Poetry,” 68. McGann, Byron and Romanticism, 223. Griffiths, New Poetics, 5. Griffiths, New Poetics, 8. Christinidis, “Truth Claims,” 36. This can be, and has been, disputed in the case of poetry (see, for example, Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 2015), but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. Gren, Antropocen, 27. The title of the collection, as well as the poem, was translated by Jonas Gren and Dougald Hine. The translation has not yet been published. Bristow, Affective Geography, 4. Haraway, “Making Kin,” 160. Boyd et al., Animals in the Anthropocene, introduction. Dibley, “Enigma of ‘the Geomorphic Fold’,” 26 (italics in the original). Bristow, Affective Geography, 7. Elleström, Media Transformation, 24. Elleström writes: “[E]verything that is understood to be transferred among media should be conceptionalized in terms of compound media characteristics” (Elleström, Media Transformation, 41). I refer to the poetic persona as “him” since the writer is male, for the sake of simplicity. Ricoeur, “Science and Poetry,” 63. Gren, Lantmäteriet, 28. Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene, 5. Matson, “What Happens During a Nuclear Meltdown?” Elleström, Media Transformation, 41. Clark, Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, 73. Clark, Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, 72. Iconicity is the similarity between the form and meaning of a sign. Verbal signs are generally conventional: they bear no resemblance to what they represent. However, words and texts can be shaped to imitate their semantic content. There are many kinds of iconicity. In this chapter, the poem can be placed in the emblematic tradition of the 17th century, when poems often had shapes that resembled their content: wings, cups, et cetera. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 115. Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene, 14. However, I have noticed that in a number of Swedish ecocritical poems, in which factual and even scientific expressions are not uncommon. Felstiner, Field Guide, 357.

Bibliography Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso, 2016. Boyd, Madeleine, Matthew Chrulew, Chris Degeling, Agata Mrva-Montoya, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Nikki Savvides, and Dinesh Wadiwel, eds. Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015. Bristow, Tom. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Carspecken, Francis Phil. Critical Ethnography in Educational Research: A Theoretical and Practical Guide. New York: Routledge, 1996. Christinidis, Georgia. “Truth Claims in the Contemporary Novel: The Authenticity Effect, Allegory, and Totality.” In Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations, edited by Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter, 33–48. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Dibley, Ben. “The Enigma of ‘the Geomorphic Fold’.” In Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures, edited by Madeleine Boyd, Matthew Chrulew, Chris Degeling, Agata Mrva-Montoya, Fiona ProbynRapsey, Nikki Savvides, and Dinesh Wadiwel, 19–32. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ———. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 11–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Gren, Jonas. Antropocen. Dikt för en ny epok. Stockholm: 10TAL, 2016. ———. Lantmäteriet. Stockholm: 10TAL, 2014. Griffiths, Matthew. The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65. https://doaj.org/ article/0ddadd557ca64af49869cc895d704851. Li, Xiao-hui, Jun Wu, and Wei-hua Wang. “Analysis of Schema Theory and Its Influence on Reading.” US-China Foreign Language 5 (2007): 18–21. pdfs. semanticscholar.org. Matson, John. “What Happens During a Nuclear Meltdown?” Scientific American, March 15, 2011. www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-energy-primer/. McGann, Jerome J. Byron and Romanticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. McWilliams, Patrick. “Phenomenon.” The Chicago School of Media Theory, March 27, 2019. https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/phenomenon/. Oxford Reference. “Factual Genres.” Accessed March 6, 2019. www.oxfordreference. com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810104856107. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Power of Speech: Science and Poetry.” Translated by Robert F. Scuka. Philosophy Today 29 (1985): 59–70. https://doi.org/10.5840/ philtoday198529128. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Muratgermen Wordpress, 2009. Accessed April 3, 2017. https://muratgermen.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/art-as-technique.pdf. Solnick, Sam. Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. London: Routledge, 2017. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

13 Three Transmediations of the Anthropocene An Intermedial Ecocritical Reading of Facts, Sci-Fi, PopSci and Eco-Horror Niklas Salmose The publication of Silent Spring in September 1962 began a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides. When the US author and marine biologist Rachel Carson died 18 months later in the spring of 1964, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban of the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grassroots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation. Although it would take almost four decades until Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene, Silent Spring is a work from the era of the Great Acceleration, identifying the impact of human behaviour on our planetary systems and the imbalance between humans and nature long before Anthropocene became a buzzword. “DDT enabled the conquest of insect pests in agriculture and of ancient insect-borne disease,” writes Linda Lear in the foreword to the new (2002) edition of Silent Spring, “just as surely as the atomic bomb destroyed America’s military enemies and dramatically altered the balance of power between humans and nature.”1 Obviously, the chemical industry and its lobbyists reacted strongly to Carson’s work and tried in various ways to dismiss Carson’s scientific work and her as a person (a woman and marine biologist rather than a biochemist). Biochemist Robert White-Stevens called her “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature,” while Ezra Taft Benson, former US Secretary of Agriculture, was reported to have written in a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower that because she was unmarried yet physically attractive, she was “probably a Communist.”2 The campaign organized by the chemical industry was unsuccessful, especially after a 1963 CBS Reports television special, The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, when the use of pesticides became a major public issue. Less controversial but inherent in its success was the fact that Silent Spring is a work of popular science and as such, in general terms, a work of blended genres. Science communicated through popular forms is not, as James Hannam so convincingly argues throughout “A Brief History of Popular Science: Explaining the World through the Ages,” a recent phenomenon but stems from vernacular expositions of natural philosophy

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in antiquity, such as the Dialogues of Plato.3 Nevertheless, as Hannam explains, popular science as a genre exploded when science in the early 20thcentury increasingly became entertainment, education and news.4 Silent Spring as popular science occupies a fascinating place in between the science fiction of the atomic era and the eco-horror of the anti-war era and hence epitomizes several stages of complex transmediations. Carson borrowed formal and generic ideas from science fiction that she incorporated into her book, merging discourses of science and popular communication. In addition, the eco-horror, or more specifically natureon-a-rampage, film genre of the 1970s used Silent Spring as inspiration. This chapter will be divided into three sections. “Silent Spring Retrospectively” will examine how Silent Spring was influenced by the science fiction films of the decade preceding its publication. In “Silent Spring Prospectively,” I will inquire into the nature of the transmediation of both the media content and the form of Silent Spring into the eco-horror film Kingdom of the Spiders. Finally, “Silent Spring Introspectively” will end by drawing some conclusions on the actual consequences of Anthropocene representation, mediation and transmediation. What is at stake here is how different media manage to communicate a certain media content: the Anthropocene. In order to analyze these different transmedial processes, it is helpful to discuss some basic intermedial and transmedial categorizations and concepts. Transmediality can be considered a subcategory of intermediality, and therefore its taxonomy and methods are within the broad field of intermediality. Intermedial and transmedial analytical tools are derived from the theoretical work of Lars Elleström, who has managed to successfully create an intermedial taxonomy that applies to all media types and media products. These theories are explored by Elleström in his chapter “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations” (2010) and in his monograph Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics among Media (2014). As the term popular science suggests, intermediality is at play when it comes to Silent Spring. Although intermediality is commonly understood in terms of relationships with and within different media forms, Elleström has suggested that we approach the idea of media in a looser sense. The term medium, he argues, is “divided into subcategories to cover the many interrelated aspects of the multifaceted concept of medium and mediality.”5 Elleström offers three categories: technical media, basic media, and qualified media.6 A technical medium is, according to Elleström, “any object, physical phenomenon or body” that mediates meaning.7 Paper is thus a technical medium, as is a tablet or cinema equipment (projector, amplifier). A technical medium is, accordingly, required for realizing media products. Media products can be divided into basic and qualified media, and qualified media relate to the content that is mediated through a technical medium; as such, qualified media are not material in the sense

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of technical media, and they are defined in terms of conventions, culture and history. “Basic” media refers to media that are identified by their modal qualities, for example the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality and the semiotic modality.8 Thus, basic media can be considered the raw forms of media such as “organized nonverbal sound”, moving images and still images.9 Basic media can then be “qualified” by certain contexts (historical, cultural, social, aesthetic). Intermediality, in its broad sense, can be explained as synchronic and diachronic relations between at least two basic media. The synchronic perspective engages discussions of multimodality and multimediality – in short, media relations within one media product – whereas the diachronic perspective “includes a temporal gap among media products” and constitutes media transformations and transmediations.10 In reality, any analysis of transformations between media also involves the synchronic perspective, since the actual medial relationships within media are evidence of the transformation processes. For example, the concept of media representation Elleström considers part of the transformation of media displays both diachronic and synchronic relationships between different media forms.11 If you put the focus on the target source, media representation of another media makes sense. However, if you consider the temporal transformation of media, media representation is also evidence of a transformative process. Elleström’s taxonomy of the modalities of media and different kinds of media transformations is the most developed model currently available. However, I use it more as a method and inspiration than a dogmatic set of categories and rules. Elleström acknowledges this attitude toward his own theories and to a looser theoretical framework in several instances at the beginning of Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics among Media: I view the notion of transfer and transformation of media as an analytical perspective: a way to methodologically explore media interrelations.  .  .  . Theoretical categorizations are vital for all types of science; however, in the end they do not represent absolute realities.  .  .  . Instead, transmediation should be understood as an analytical notion designed to understand media processes that are sometimes clearly apprehensible and vital, sometimes indistinct but still crucial, and sometimes only vaguely discernible and of marginal magnitude.12 Hence, Elleström’s theories on media transformation will be used to explore a set of actual and potential transformations of different sorts of media content and qualified media formats.13 Even if Elleström has some doubts about whether a specific media product can transmediate into a new qualified medium, he still considers such claims to make sense.14

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Transmediation theory is a tool that, I hope to show, can shed some light on matters that could have dire historical and aesthetic consequences. What happens to media content and media forms within a process of diachronic development and assimilation?15 Let’s return to popular science. The term does not suggest a particular technical or basic media; popular science can be communicated by a textbook, a podcast, a film or a dance. The qualified aspects cannot be specified either: popular scientific content can be presented through fiction film, documentary, experimental film, and so on. However, in one sense, popular science is a particular genre that has the characteristic of a transcendental medial homelessness.16 Genre definitions seem to unfold within the qualified aspects of media without being media-specific, since popular science has a well-defined aesthetic history and formal structure. Elleström writes that the “qualities of qualified media become even more  qualified .  .  . when aspects of genre are involved; a genre might therefore be called a sub-medium.”17 In this chapter, however, I will refer to a sub-medium as a genre. In terms of genre, then, popular science is a blend of the discourses of popular qualified media and scientific popular media that does not specify the technical or basic media involved. The medial relationships between the qualified media of the 1950s science fiction works Silent Spring and Kingdom of the Spiders are complex and at times even arbitrary. But they share a similar media content – ecological crisis – albeit within different basic and qualified media forms mediated partly through different media. For practical reasons, we can consider ecological crisis, or the Anthropocene, to be a critical discourse about media content involving science, narrative, emotions, activism, fiction, dystopia, time philosophy and religion and that occurs within different media forms. The Anthropocene discourse is, understandably, a fragmented one, yet it is possible to consider ecological issues within aesthetic or popular media as a specific type of media content. More specifically, we can observe three varied, disconnected transmediations of the Anthropocene discourse into the media of science fiction narratives, illustrated popular science books and eco-horror cinema. Much has been written about how different media approach the concept of ecological crisis, or the Anthropocene18 (Morton 2013; Mossner 2017; Murray and Heumann 2009, 2014; Svoboda 2014; Trexler 2015), but less common is analysis that pays attention to the actual transformations of scientific knowledge to aesthetic and popular forms of media. In my own articles “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films” (2018) and “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency” (2019), I have explored two diametrically opposed attempts to transform ecological concerns into aesthetic media that have opposite consequences for potential ecological agency. Other notable attempts include Jørgen Bruhn and Anne Gjelsvik’s “Cinematic Representations of a ‘Super

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Wicked Problem’: Climate Change in Documentary Film (Ice and the Sky and Chasing Ice)” (2018), Anna-Sofia Rossholm’s “Moving Mountains: Cinema, Deep Time, and Climate Change in Hanna Ljungh’s I am Mountain, to Measure Impermanence” (2018), and Bruhn’s “Visionary Cartography: The Aesthetic Mediation of the Anthropocene in Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s Mount Copenhagen” (2018). These kinds of media investigations, where intermedial and transmedial issues are essential in order to comprehend transmediation of scientific environmental issues to aesthetic media, has been referred to by Bruhn as intermedial ecocriticism.19 This analysis is concerned with the transmediation of the scientific discourse of the Anthropocene as a common “source” to three different qualified media products. However, there are also transmediations connected within these three mediations from science fiction to popular science to eco-horror. Therefore, in this particular form of intermedial ecocriticism, I will consider both transmediations from one discourse to different media types and transmediations between different media products.

Silent Spring Retrospectively The Anthropocene discourse, as defined above, is fragmented. In the case of Silent Spring, how are science and popular science linked? Further, where did Carson find topical and formal inspiration for her own transmediation of a scientific discourse into popular science? Finally, in what way can we incorporate Silent Spring into the critical discourse of the Anthropocene? Silent Spring was not a product of the scientific establishment; Carson’s gender and her field, biology, were held in low esteem in the nuclear age. Further, there was no real scientific consensus on issues concerning environmental disaster, which explains why Silent Spring uses bits and pieces of information from different scientific areas and disciplines in order to mediate an intelligible ecological warning. Perry Parks refers to this process as a synthetization of “scientific research on the toxicity of chemical pesticides.”20 The popular in popular science suggests a departure from scientific practices and seclusion where every scientist operates on their own without a proper understanding of, or desire to comprehend, how their findings are situated in a larger framework. “This is an era of specialists,” writes Carson, “each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.”21 And, according to Lear, in Carson’s view “the postwar culture of science that arrogantly claimed domination over nature was the philosophical root of the problem. Human beings, she insisted, were not in control of nature but simply one of its parts”.22 This statement foregrounds the most essential issue in the Anthropocene and ecocriticism, namely human interaction with nature, and is further echoed in Carson’s belief in the

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ecology of the human body, which was a major departure at the time in the thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Popular, diverse media such as reviews, releases, speeches and TV “allowed journalists to cover the pesticide debate not as a complex scientific issue but as a series of events”,23 which pays tribute to the intermedial aspect of its aftermath, creating a clear boundary with monomedial scientific discourse. The difference between this debate and scientific communication more generally is also acknowledged by Rob Dunn: Carson’s intent was to trigger change, but on the face of it, Silent Spring seemed unlikely to manage that. It was a beautiful book written by a scientist at a time when scientists were not ‘supposed to’ write beautiful books. It was about pesticides, chemistry and society—by a researcher who studied fish. And it concerned the perils of excessive use of pesticides at a time when pesticides were widely believed to be part of the progress of civilization.24 The idea that humans are part of nature rather than distinctly separate from it is one of the main concerns in the philosophical agenda of the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene is seen as a critical concept and method rather than a geological period, it is tempting, as Waters et al. do, to argue that the Anthropocene begins with the first atomic bomb explosion in 1945.25 This would situate Carson’s work in the advent of an emerging critique of anthropocentricity. The oxymoronic quality of the title (Silent Spring) suggestively comprises the ambiguity of both content and form. Even if the motive behind the title is linked to reports that “spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds” in some areas of the Unites States,26 it resonates with the larger concepts of blended submedia and technical media we find in Silent Spring. Carson alludes to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer by quoting words that it is disputed he wrote: “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”27 This seizes Schweitzer’s deeply humanist and ethical considerations. Neither traditional science nor realist fiction has been able to vent about the dangers and angst involved in the modern project of the post-revolutionary Western world. This, in a way, is in line with Amitav Ghosh’s harsh criticism of bourgeois literature in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh reads the realist literary tradition as intertwined with the concept of probability, and thus not an advocate for representing or mediating anything out of the ordinary, such as extraterrestrials, unknown monsters, or weird aspects of humanity, which would destabilize relations between man and nature.28 “Here, then,” writes Ghosh, “is the irony of the ‘realist’ novel: the very gestures with which it conjured up reality are actually a concealment of the real.”29 Instead, with support from Timothy Morton, Ghosh advocates in favor of a literature that captures the

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uncanny, the strangeness of the familiarity of rain with a dash of toxic waste, since the images of climate change are “too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein.”30 Timothy Morton has also addressed the difficulties involved in transmediating the climate crisis and refers to such complex phenomena as hyperobjects in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.31 The temporality and narrativity of the Anthropocene are also a challenge (Bruhn writes about this in this volume) since temporal concepts, such as deep time or Rob Nixon’s “slow violence”, are difficult to render within the constraints of spectacle-driven media or the realist novel. Nixon introduces the notion of “slow violence” in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, where he describes it as “slow and long lasting, calamities” that remain “outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media”.32 However, there is a distinction between truthfully representing climate change and communicating a medial, sensorial experience involving Anthropocene issues. One genre that obstinately tried to display the devil of humans’ own creation was the science fiction literature, comics, TV shows and films of the 1940s and 1950s. These low-budget products could, outside the mainstream of commercial cultural products, engage in contemporary ethical, moral and political issues that were not publicly or commercially considered of interest to a wider audience. It is within the subcultures of Hollywood that a critical scrutinization of the uncanny, fantastic, grotesque and dangerous aspects of humanity occur. These popular cultural products function on an allegorical level, or cathartically, as Susan Sontag argues in her highly influential essay “The Imagination of Disaster”. Sontag’s main premise is that these films should be read psychologically, either as escapism from the true terrors of the world through the formulaic structure of happy endings or “to normalize what is psychologically unbearable”.33 Related to Sontag’s cathartic approach but less politicized is the other main strain of analysis of science fiction films: the psychoanalytical perspective. Margaret Tarratt’s often-cited article “Monsters from the Id” is such an example, and it positions itself within a widely popular analysis and definition of the horror genre from a spectator perspective, discussing loss of identity, different repression theories, sexuality, destruction and death. Science fiction of the 1950s is thus a mirror of both the unimaginable or, in Ghosh’s words, the improbable, and the angst experienced by the population of that era. Joshua David Bellin, in his exemplary analysis “Us or Them!: Silent Spring and The ‘Big Bug’ Films of the 1950s” links the concern of those films with the growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s. He particularly draws attention to the relationship between Silent Spring and the big bug films. This book “is as much a work of science fiction as of science fact”, he writes, placing it in an odd genre between fact and fantasy. Silent Spring adds the danger of the pesticide industry to that of

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the more common nuclear and communist pests, Bellin argues.34 Carson herself acknowledges this heritage: All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of the developing of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects.35 Bellin’s article cleverly and convincingly demonstrates how Silent Spring is dispensed from a long tradition of invasion narratives (dating as far back as the Salem witch trials of 1692) where science fiction is a prominent subgenre.36 Bellin’s analysis describes the political contexts of this transformation as well as the aesthetic connections between the different genres. However, he does not pay much attention to the intermedial and transmedial features and the media specifications in the two different media, nor to the effects of these within the framework of the Anthropocene. Therefore, the following reading focuses on these two aspects. It is obvious that some of the impact of Silent Spring can be traced back to the aesthetics and concerns of the science fiction genre from the preceding decade; the form of the qualified medium science fiction permeates the form of the qualified medium popular science. As Perry Parks suggests, the book “may represent more of an acceleration point than a turning point”37 in relation to earlier popular science fiction. Hence, the audience was prepared for the style of Silent Spring since it represented a continuation of the aesthetic and political project initiated by popular science fiction. The fictive, or rather science fictive, aspect of the book can be found straightaway in the list of chapters, which lends much more from works of fiction than from works of science: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

A Fable for Tomorrow The Obligation to Endure Elixirs of Death Surface Waters and Underground Seas Realms of the Soil Earth’s Green Mantle Needless Havoc And No Birds Sing Rivers of Death Indiscriminately from the Skies Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias The Human Price Through a Narrow Window One in Every Four

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15. Nature Fights Back 16. The Rumblings of an Avalanche 17. The Other Road38 One immediately notices that the chapters are structured according to an Aristotelian dramaturgy; we can identify the inciting incident, “Elixirs of Death”, the rising action, “Rivers of Death”, the climax, “Nature Fights Back”, and the denouement, “The Other Road”. Most of these titles imply the literary genre rather than the scientific; “The Other Road”, for example, alludes to the famous poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, which discusses the choices we have as human beings. In his analysis of the poetic and Romantic side of Silent Spring, John Elder explains how the poem “expresses a sighing wistfulness about the unknowable meaning of our choices.”39 The transmediation of a literary style in a scientific work grants it something that science denounces: the improbable, the unknown, and the mysterious that are involved in human interaction with scientific facts. This intertext, common knowledge at least for citizens of the US at the time, opens up conceivable solutions to the threat and problem the book discusses. Hence, it situates the book in a historical and cultural, as well as literary, context that goes beyond science into the very deepest emotional and individual concerns of humans. The first chapter is titled “A Fable for Tomorrow”. It signals the genre of fairy tale (as far away from realist aesthetics as one can go) and the temporality of the future that is so accentuated in science fiction. In fact, the opening of Silent Spring could just as well have been taken from a science fiction or fantasy novel: “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept over the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.”40 Here we see the transmediation of the aesthetic formula of fantasy and science fiction into a work by a scientist, where the result is a blended genre: popular science. Firstly, the use of the past tense signals a fictive, fairy-tale quality that is, in a way, opposed to a work of present science. It refers to objects or metaphors of less scientific dignity, such as “evil”, “mysterious”, and “shadow of death”. It constructs an unknown threat to the US, our “community”, hence reproducing the typical formula of dramatic narration of crisis and relief. This is a language that nonprofessionals can relate to and its fictive connotations suggest “a happy ending”, or at least an imaginable way out of the “shadow of death”. This is science fiction aesthetics in the name of scientific communication. Silent Spring thus blends at least three different qualified media (science, popular fiction and science fiction) into popular science. However, the mixing does not stop there. Silent Spring is also a multimedial product in which several illustrations play an essential part in conveying the message of the book. The nature of these illustrations, as we will soon see,

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bolster the blending of the genre even further, since they are not the typical illustrations we expect from a work of science: diagrams, statistics, tables and detailed representations of flora and fauna. Rather, they are artistic, visionary sketches in black and white. The illustration for the first chapter, which surrounds the chapter title, is an example of what Maria Nikolajeva would refer to as a symmetrical illustration: the illustration and the text tell the same story.41 The idyll that is painted in words in the introductory paragraph is also visualized through the image of the little town “in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms”.42 The actual composition of the image, though, puts an added emphasis on the relationship between nature and humanity, since in the foreground we can observe a close-up of some flowers and leaves of a tree branch, whereas the small town is located in the distant background. Life as we know it, in terms of human progress and nature, is equally threatened, but .  .  . the image also encourages us to consider one of the essential aspects of the Anthropocene, namely the discrepancy in authority between humanity and nature. The foregrounded flowers, constructed in an art nouveau style, attempt to reverse these power dynamics. Visual descriptions can reproduce a depth of field in their representation of perspective, something words usually cannot do. In that sense, the illustration does not merely symmetrize an image and words but adds an emotional and more direct effect—the image is also complementary. Since the village and most of the attributes of the illustration are displayed as an establishing shot, with the exception of the tree branch in the foreground, this image is constructed very much as a miniature in relation to which we as viewers feel as if we are in control of the iconic representation. It might even grant us a sense of authority and power, yet at the same time, the small village is a vulnerable and delicate construction. The contrasting emotions such a composition yields are effective since they parallel the critical discussion of the Anthropocene about the relationship between humans and nature. In her analysis of the miniature folk book as an object, Susan Stewart describes how the small format in itself becomes a way to transmediate the popular and fantastic to the reader: “The miniature here became the realm not of fact but reverie.”43 Although Stewart is referring to children’s perception, she still explains how the miniature addresses the fantastic and improbable: “it is a world that is part of history, at least the history of the individual subject, but remote from the presentness of adult life.”44 The gaze the miniature invites, phenomenologically, is that of the human. “The miniature,” Stewart writes, “assumes an anthropocentric universe for its absolute sense of scale.”45 So, in addition to the blended genre of popular science, the illustrations add medial layers related to the imperative questions of Silent Spring within the context of the Anthropocene: authority, nature vs. culture and the self-reflexivity of our own ecological agency.

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The majority of the illustrations in the book fall into the category of dichotomic illustrations of the interaction between human technological progress and nature, mostly with a distinct negative emotional result: a tree branch that is crossed with a pesticide sprayer46 and a basket of flowers and fruit with two cans of DDT.47 Both these examples stress the visual similarities between poison and nature, further engaging the reader in considering the relationship between the two. A third image deconstructs the relationship between humanity and progress, exhibiting the aerial application of pesticide by a crop duster plane over an inhabited neighborhood where you see, among other things, children playing.48 This effectively juxtaposes our technological development with our susceptibility to our own madness. These images propel the distinct feature of the science fiction genre: we are against them, not only in terms of juxtaposing humans with their natural surroundings, which questions their absolute mastery over nature, but also in terms of humans being our own worst enemies because we create the framework for human annihilation. This narrative strategy, borrowed from science fiction, is an aftermath of the atomic era, when humans fully opened the doors to the possibilities of the fantastic, dangerous and improbable. Conclusively, in the publication of Silent Spring we notice a set of different multimodal and transmedial aspects: the illustrated book, popular science, the use of science fictive narrative and formal attributes, and elements of fairy tale. It is not far-fetched to claim that the impact and success of Silent Spring are owed to its multimodal and transmedial features. As we will see in the next section, Silent Spring reveals itself to be a transitionary work between the science fiction of the atomic age and the dawn of the environmental movement in the age of countercultures.

Silent Spring Prospectively “While Carson knew that one book could not alter the dynamic of the capitalist system, an environmental movement grew from her challenge.”49 There seems to be a consensus that Silent Spring played an important, if not decisive, role in defining the mode of modern environmentalism. Parks writes that “[d]ecades after its publication, Silent Spring stands as a powerful symbol and a convenient shorthand for the multifaceted civic upheaval of the 1960s. It continues to inspire environmentalists, act as a muse for artists, and provide a foil for conservative rhetoricians.”50 In this section, I wish to explore the second round of transmediations in the diachronic history of Silent Spring and Anthropocene media content, namely its direct influence on eco-horror from the 1970s, or what has been termed more specifically the nature-on-a-rampage genre. The latter-named genre in this reading will be represented by the 1977 nominee for Best Horror Film by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films: Kingdom of the Spiders.

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Eco-horror films are those within the horror genre that deal with ecological issues of varied kinds. In Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen, we find a broad, almost stretched, definition of films that are very different from each other, such as Robocop, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Bay, Land of the Dead, and Germany Year Zero. Nature-on-a-rampage films would more specifically include films in which nature in different shapes (animals, plants, viruses, the environment) turns against humans. Two early influential films in the genre are Steve Sekely’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). The genre reaches a high point during the environmentally concerned 1970s when animals or plants are the antagonists in films such as Jaws, Grizzly, Piranha, Alligator, Empire of the Ants, Killer Bees, Orca, Tentacles, Squirm and Kingdom of the Spiders. Several films within this genre seem to have been inspired by Silent Spring. The main difference between the big bug films of the 1950s and the nature-on-a-rampage films of the 1970s is the background context that creates the fear and political concern that the films’ premise rest on. The big bugs and giant mutated animals are the result of scientific experimentation with radiation and nuclear science. In the nature-on-a-rampage films, the animals become threatening because their natural habitat has been disturbed in various ways. Kingdom of the Spiders is created in this particular flux, and dangerous issues caused by human intervention in nature are identified by the modern environmental movement. This concern echoes the Darwinist perspective in Silent Spring: “This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used.”51 Carson describes how insects that we tried to extinguish have come back in huge numbers.52 This apocalyptic conclusion in Silent Spring foreshadows the 1970’s fascination for masses of naturally sized animals rather than the mutated giant animals of the 1950s big bug films. “At other times spraying,” writes Carson, “while reasonably effective against the target insect, has let loose a whole Pandora’s box of destructive pests that had never previously been abundant enough to cause trouble. The spider mite, for example, has become practically a worldwide pest as DDT and other insecticides have killed off its enemies.”53 If a giant spider is terrifying in its fantastic unreality, thousands of lifelike tarantulas in Kingdom of the Spiders are uncanny because they are not unreal—they are only unrealistically numerous. The scenario of a mass invasion of spiders is easier to digest in terms of suspension of disbelief than a giant spider and thus closer to the reality of ecological crisis and Carson’s exposé. This can be considered a more truthful blend between science and fiction than proper science fiction since it moves in the realm of the possible rather than the fantastic. The premise of Kingdom of the Spiders is as follows: In Verde Valley, Arizona, spiders gather in mass colonies and start to kill larger animals than

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their usual prey, first cattle and then humans. Arachnologist Diane Ashley arrives to investigate the mass invasion of spiders and teams up with local veterinarian Robert Hansen in the pursuit of explanations. A secondary plot, which we can observe in other eco-horror films, concerns the upcoming Verde Valley Fair, making the spider invasion exceptionally untimely from the perspective of making a profit. Ashley soon discovers that the reason for the mass invasion of spiders is a consequence of the mass use of pesticides that has eliminated the spiders’ natural food supply, causing them to group themselves in huge armies in order to eat larger animals. The danger hovering over Verde Valley is thus self-inflicted. The colonial order is reversed, and human’s self-centered, self-assured, authorial, and disrespectful attitude toward nature and other species is brilliantly and ironically channeled through images of extinct animals on the agricultural aircraft in the village. The media representation of illustrations on the crop dust plane not only reverses the order of global authority, it also congenially uses a similar tactic to the one Carson uses in Silent Spring. Where Carson combines words and illustrations (the modes of the illustrated book), Kingdom of the Spiders utilizes the illustrations in conjunction with the main sensorial modality of film: the visual. The sense of reversal of fortune permeates the whole film, from the numerous point-of-view shots from the spiders’ perspective to the chaotic and animalistic behavior of the townspeople during the attack, which makes them look like arachnoids or anthropoids themselves. Again, this parallels the composition of image and words in Silent Spring but it is done by using narrative techniques that are usually preferred in the qualified medium of horror cinema. I argue that we can see Kingdom of the Spiders as a transmediation of Silent Spring, but since it is not a direct adaption from a book to film, it is not as easy to distinguish the source text. What is actually being transmediated? Scientific theories? Emotional content? A will to act? Facts? Metaphors? Images? Before we focus on those important issues, let us try to define the medial qualities of the two media and the similarities and differences between them. If we look at the characteristics of the two different media, popular science in book form and eco-horror fiction in film form, through the theoretical prism of Elleström’s intermedial taxonomy of the four modalities of media, we end up with the following definitions: The material modality: Silent Spring consists of a flat unchanging surface whereas Kingdom of the Spiders consists of a flat surface of changing images combined with sound waves. Both surfaces are two-dimensional and can include a variety of signs such as words, illustrations and images. The sensorial modality: In Silent Spring, the sensorial perceptions are focused on seeing and hearing (as the phonemes indicate whether

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you read aloud or not). The sense impressions of feeling are activated through the touch of the book and pages, and in a limited sense we can also smell the book (and even taste it). When we are watching Kingdom of the Spiders, the visual and auditory stand at the center of the sense impressions, and those from audio waves are much more dominant than when reading Silent Spring; this means that the experience is more “sensational” in the film viewing. Tactile experiences are more or less abandoned in film viewing (unless we consider contextual aspects of the communication, such as the texture of the sofa we are sitting on, or the sensation of holding hands in the cinema, etc.). The spatiotemporal modality: The structuring of the sense data needs a form, or gestalt. Both books and films consist of the three dimensions width, height, and time. Their images are, as we saw in the above description about the material modality, two-dimensional, but they are not static since the sense impressions change all the time. The turning of pages simulates a certain change in surface but these changes are not as consistent and irrevocable as in the film medium. The person who controls the perception of the medium experiences more flexibility and integrity regarding the book. Silent Spring therefore has a partially fixed sequentiality since the materiality of the book as well as its cultural practice stimulate us to read in chronological order, page after page. However, doing this is not necessary—one can read the chapters in a different order than the one suggested. Kingdom of the Spiders has a fixed sequentiality (unless one uses reverse playback or random play of chapters functions). The conclusion is that the medium of the book offers more possibilities and freedom in its experience of the spatiotemporal modality. The semiotic modality: This is where meaning occurs through sensing and the perception of the former three modalities (which does not mean that this has not already started in the former modalities in a less cognitive manner). Elleström bases his three modes – convention (symbolic signs), resemblance (iconic signs) and contiguity (indexical signs) – on Peirce’s semiotic trichotomy symbol, icon and index.54 In Silent Spring, the text represents the symbolic sign function, whereas the few illustrations are iconic. The film medium of Kingdom of the Spiders displays a much more complicated array of relations among the three semiotic modes. Text in the form of letters, credits, and so on, are symbolic, as is the dialogue’s content. Music, sound effects, and voice quality would be considered iconic when the images are more or less indexical and iconic. With the exception of the more complex semiotic modalities in Kingdom of the Spiders in general, the main difference is the lack of indexical signs in Silent Spring.

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To conclude, when comparing the media specificities, one could argue that watching Kingdom of the Spiders is a more multimodal experience than reading Silent Spring. Watching the film should encourage a more emotional experience than reading the book, as the iconic, auditive signs in the film “mainly refer to motions, emotions, bodily experiences”.55 The book’s visual iconic signs in terms of illustrations are also less “realistic” in relation to the indexical images of the film, but also more interpretative. Finally, the fixed sequentiality of the film can be regarded as a restriction on personal involvement in the mediation of the narrative. The same question arises again: which aspects are actually transmediated and what consequences, beyond the ones mentioned above, are noticeable in the transformation from illustrated book to film? As we will see later on, the incorporation of sound and music has an emotional effect that might bring the ecological concern into focus. The modalities of horror films have the specific capacity to add levels of distress and fear to the topic of climate crisis. The different qualified media might attract a different spectatorship and thus supplement each other. But we also need to consider the temporal difference between “source” and “target” and the different contextual expectations of different generations. I must reiterate that what is at stake here, really, is how different media manage to communicate a certain media content: the Anthropocene. In fact, we might benefit from not only regarding the relations between the three different qualified media in terms of the transmediations between them (science fiction to Silent Spring to Kingdom of the Spiders) but also in terms of three different, isolated attempts to transmediate the Anthropocene into science fiction, Silent Spring and Kingdom of the Spiders. As discussed in the previous section, Silent Spring evokes the fairy tale genre, most prominently with the first chapter title “A Fable for Tomorrow”. Similarly, the title Kingdom of the Spiders and the opening song by Dorsey Burnette, “Peaceful Verde Valley”, trigger fairy-tale contexts: Early spring, peaceful Verde Valley who knows what tomorrow will bring Will it bring the love we need to last forever more or could it bring the unknown that we’ve never seen before As part of the auditive sensorial modality, the song (and the film as a whole) echoes a strong desire to go back to a more peaceful and uncomplicated time, an era before modernization. This occurs on a more emotional level than in Silent Spring. “Verde Valley” connotes all those nostalgic emotions, alluding to paradise myths through both the use of the color green and the valley as a place that is restricted by space and time. The use of “Kingdom” in the title also signals that this film should

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be placed in both a utopian and a nostalgic context. “Kingdom” appears to be something distinctly human, but it also alludes to fairy tales and fantasy and, as such, past times. The allusion to fairy tales also explains the somewhat fantastic and dream-like aspect of the film’s ending. The people in the house fall asleep, and when they awake it is quiet; the radio works but does not mention anything about the spider invasion. It is like waking up from a nightmare. Looking out of the window, though, the townspeople see the whole town covered in cobwebs, including the last text of the film through a wooden sign: “Welcome to Verde Valley Fair 77.” On the soundtrack, we hear the opening song once again. The last images of a dystopian future should be read as nightmare images outside the diegesis of the film and as a warning and political wake-up call. The ending, therefore, echoes the ending of Silent Spring in its metaleptic character. As a nightmare, dream, vision or fiction, both works engage their spectators in the cognitive act of introspection. The still image (painting) that is used at the end of Kingdom of the Spiders is a media representation of an art form that is unusual in a modern horror film. It alludes to a critical and existential historical practice of art and culture, just as the ending of Silent Spring suggests Frost’s poem.

Silent Spring Introspectively Much has been written about Silent Spring, much less on Kingdom of the Spiders. Still, any intermedial ecocritic must be pleased by the idea that they are somehow medially interconnected. Of course, history does not stop in 1977, and we see both remediations and remakes of the 1970s nature-on-a-rampage films in the 1990s and beyond. The ecological crisis is more imminent now than ever. Still, what 1950s science fiction, Silent Spring and Kingdom of the Spiders have added to ecological agency through their playful medial attitudes toward different qualified media and modalities is quite remarkable. In a chameleon-like way, they have embraced the gravest of earthly issues within the commercial, artistic and intermedial constraints of their respective ages. Science fiction was a medial form outside of commodified cinema where a discourse of the human impact on climate was conceivable. Silent Spring found an intermedial form that made nonprofessionals (not scientists) embrace scientific facts. Finally, Kingdom of the Spiders continued the trend of Carson’s achievement of blending fiction and science in a creative and compelling way. Within this transmedial history of the Anthropocene, Silent Spring stands out as the spider in the web. “To link Carson with the English Romantics,” as Elder acknowledges, “does more than note a literary affinity. It associates her with an ongoing community of celebration and effort.”56 That suggests another, less recognized, effect of media transformation: namely, that it allocates new emotional and existential

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dimensions to a media product. It adds value, meaning, ethics and importance, aspects that are fundamental for creating ecological agency. Ecological agency is, just like Frost’s poem, about choices. Humans today do not have the luxury to just think about the climate. We need to act. Careful constructions of art and culture can trigger a will to act, and the mechanisms of intermediality and transmediality play a significant part in these constructions. Dunn accentuates how Silent Spring ties into the contemporary discourse of climate and choice: In rereading this remarkable book, it is hard to avoid seeing it through the lens of modern problems—the latest opportunities to choose between apocalypse and reason. One thinks of the choices that we are making about carbon emissions and their impacts on climate change. One thinks of the new ways in which we are poisoning the environment—still with pesticides, albeit more targeted ones, as well as with industrial chemicals such as the phthalates that mimic oestrogen. . . . Silent Spring proves that we can choose the road of reason.57 In the final image of Kingdom of the Spiders, a painting of the cobwebbed Valley Verde, temporality temporarily halts. While the ticking sound of the projector and the horror sounds of the film continue, at least in a cinema in 1977, the media representation of a painting that incorporates completely different media specificities than that of cinema provides the best possible opportunity for ecological introspection. Just as an estranged giant spider in a 1950s science fiction film confronts the rational mind of the film’s scientists, or like the uncanny image of a DDT sprayer and a branch of a tree in Silent Spring, the very medial blending of the concluding image of Kingdom of the Spiders provokes its own medium and hence us.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Lear, “Introduction,” xi. Lear, Rachel Carson, 429–34. Hannam, “Brief History of Popular Science.” Hannam, “Brief History of Popular Science,” 37–43. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 12. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 12. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 30. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 17–24. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 27. Elleström, Media Transformation, 3. Elleström, Media Transformation, 27–8. Elleström, Media Transformation, 4, 10, 20. Elleström uses media content as a container for everything that is not part of the actual technical or qualified media forms (25). For example, media content can be narrative, emotional, philosophical, contextual, ideas, aesthetics, etc.

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14. Elleström, Media Transformation, 25. 15. These processes can be seen in such varied fields as adaption studies, translation studies and transmedia storytelling as configured by Henry Jenkins and Marie-Laure Ryan. 16. The term “transcendental medial homelessness” is inspired by György Lukács’ definition of the predominantly modern German novel as expressing a “transcendental homelessness,”, a desire to fit in everywhere and hence nowhere. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 41. 17. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 29. 18. See Morton 2012; von Weik 2017; Murray and Heumann 2009; Murray 2014; Svoboda 2014; Trexler 2015. 19. This term has been suggested by Bruhn in an unpublished paper. When I refer to ecocriticism, I adhere, in the broadest sense, to Greg Garrard’s definition of ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship of the human and the nonhuman, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself”. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 5. 20. Parks, “Silent Spring,” 1215. 21. Carson, Silent Spring, 13. 22. Lear, “Introduction,” xv–xvi. 23. Parks, “Silent Spring,” 1218. 24. Dunn, “In Retrospect: Silent Spring,” 578. 25. Waters et al., “Anthropocene,” 147. 26. Carson, Silent Spring, 103. 27. Carson, Silent Spring, 6. 28. Ghosh, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 16–17. 29. Ghosh, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 23. 30. Ghosh, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, 32–3. 31. Morton, Hyperobjects. 32. Nixon, Slow Violence, 6. 33. Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 42. 34. Bellin, “Us or Them!,” 146. 35. Carson, Silent Spring, 16. 36. Bellin, “Us or Them!,” 146. 37. Parks, “Silent Spring,” 1218. 38. Carson, Silent Spring, vii. 39. Elder, “Poetry in Silent Spring,” 93. 40. Carson, Silent Spring, 2. 41. Nikolajeva, Bilderbokens Pusselbitar, 16–38. 42. Carson, Silent Spring, 2. 43. Stewart, On Longing, 43. 44. Stewart, On Longing, 44. 45. Stewart, On Longing, 56. 46. Carson, Silent Spring, 5. 47. Carson, Silent Spring, 173. 48. Carson, Silent Spring, 154–5. 49. Lear, “Introduction,” xviii. 50. Parks, “Silent Spring,” 1216. 51. Carson, Silent Spring, 8. 52. Carson, Silent Spring, 246. 53. Carsson, Silent Spring, 252. 54. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 22. 55. Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 23. 56. Elder, “Poetry in Silent Spring,” 87. 57. Dunn, “In Retrospect: Silent Spring,” 578–9.

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Bibliography Bellin, Joshua David. “Us or Them!: Silent Spring and the ‘Big Bug’ Films of the 1950s.” Extrapolation 50, no. 1 (2009): 145–68. Bruhn, Jørgen. “Visionary Cartography: The Aesthetic Mediation of the Anthropocene in Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s Mount Copenhagen.” In Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures, edited by Anna-Karin Jonasson, Peter Degerman, and Reinhard Hennig. Lanhamn: Lexington Books, 2018. Bruhn, Jørgen, and Anne Gjelsvik. “Cinematic Representations of a ‘Super Wicked Problem’: Climate Change in Documentary Film (Ice and the Sky and Chasing Ice).” In Cinema Between Media: An Intermediality Approach, edited by Anne Gjelsvik and Jørgen Bruhn, 119–34. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, 40th anniversary ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Dunn, Rob. “In Retrospect: Silent Spring.” Nature 485 (May 2012): 578–9. Elder, John. “Withered Sedge and Yellow Wood: Poetry in Silent Spring.” In Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson, edited by Peter Matthiessen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Elleström, Lars. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. London: Palgrave, 2014. ———. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 11–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The Randy L and Melvin R Berlin Family Lectures. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hannam, James. “A Brief History of Popular Science: Explaining the World Through the Ages.” In Successful Science Communication, edited by David Bennett and Richard Jennings, 31–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kardos, John, dir. Kingdom of the Spiders. Dimension Pictures, 1977. Lear, Linda. “Introduction.” In Silent Spring, x–xix. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. ———. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. London: Allen Lane, 1998, 1997. Lukács, György. Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. First published 1920. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ———. “Why Ambient Poetics? Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (2002): 52–6. Mossner, Alexa Weik von. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. Murray, Robin L., and Joseph K. Heumann. Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge. Suny Series, Horizons of Cinema. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. ———. Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

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———. Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Nikolajeva, Maria. Bilderbokens Pusselbitar. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2000. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Parks, Perry. “Silent Spring, Loud Legacy: How Elite Media Helped Establish an Environmentalist Icon.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 94, no. 4 (2017): 1215–38. Rossholm, Anna-Sofia. “Moving Mountains: Cinema, Deep Time, and Climate Change in Hanna Ljungh’s I Am Mountain, to Measure Impermanence.” In Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures, edited by Anna-Karin Jonasson, Peter Degerman, and Hennig Reinhard. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. Salmose, Niklas. “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films.” Journal of Popular Culture 51 (2018): 1415–33. ———. “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency.” In Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability, edited by Nico Völker, Andressa Schröder, Robert A. Winkler, and Tom Clucas, 239–56. London: Transcript Verlag, 2019. Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Commentary 40, no. 4 (1965): 42–8. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Svoboda, Michael. “A Review of Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) Cinema . . . Past and Present.” October 22, 2014. www.yaleclimateconnections.org/dl/YCC_2014_ Svoboda_TheCompleteCli-FiSeries.pdf. Tarratt, Margaret. “Monsters From the Id.” In Film Genre Reader III, edited by Barry Keith. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism Series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Waters, Colin Neil, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, and Anthony D. Barnosky. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct From the Holocene.” Science 351, no. 6269 (2016): 137–49.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Page numbers in bold indicate tables. “4E” paradigm 192 5.sobre.o.mesmo (Queiroz, 2010) 195 Abrams, J. J. 23 absenting matter – forming a presence 101–5 adaptation 5–6, 20, 25, 27 affect theory 144 agential realism 99, 110n17 agential realism and rhetoric, ekphrasis 109–10 Aguiar, Daniella 187, 194 Albrecht, Glenn 228–29 Albreti, Rafael 88 alexithymia 159n22 Altered Carbon (2018) 68 Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) 18, 23, 26, 28–29n15 Always Now Slowly (Pedersen, 2010) 195, 202, 209 anagnorisis 225, 229 Angry Birds 70–71 Anthropocene 12; defined 233n8; definition of 220–21; mankind as agency of 224–26; as transmedial phenomenon 240 Anthropocene, four narrative and temporal responses 226–30 Anthropocene, temporalities of 221–22 Anthropocene, temporality into narrative forms: transmediating 220–21; Anthropocene futures 225–26; four narrative and temporal responses to Anthropocene 226–30; temporal aspects of the Anthropocene 219–20; temporalities of the Anthropocene 221–24

Anthropocene, three transmediations: Silent Spring (Carson) 256–60; Silent Spring introspectively 271–72; Silent Spring prospectively 266–71; Silent Spring retrospectively 260–66 Anthropocene, transmediations of: conclusion 252–53; from factual media to poetry 237–38; between media 238–41; objective truth claims in Anthropocenic poetry 248–52; subjective and objective truth claims 242–44; subjective truth claims in Anthropocenic poetry 244–48; two kinds of discourse 241–42 Anthropocene futures 220, 225–27 “anti-camera language” 31 anticipatory tool 193–94 anticipatory tool, intersemiotic translation as 194 Antropocen. Dikt för en ny epok (2016) (Anthropocene. Verse for a New Epoch) 245 “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films” (Salmose 2018) 259–60 Appadurai, Arjun 231 Aquino, Rita 187, 194 architectural ekphraseis: about Samambaia 118–19; ekphrasis and architecture 119–23; final thoughts 131–32; glass jewel box built in Paradise 123–27; wall-less house in the middle of the clouds 127–31

Index ARGs (alternate reality games) see Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) Aristotle 220, 223, 225–27, 233n13 “Art as Technique” (Shklovsky) 242–43 artists as cognitive cyborgs 186–88 Assassin’s Creed (2016) 67 Atã, Pedro 11–12, 186–211 “Atari Age” 60 Atkinson, Peter 80–81 Atlantic Forest biome 127 audience behavior 27 background music (BGM) 169–70 Bande à part (Godard, 1964) 84 Barad, Karen 110n17, 111n26 basic media types 9, 258 Bateman, John A. 59 Baudrillard, Jean 91 Behemoth (2015) 232 “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency” (Salmose, 2019) 259–60 Bekmambetov, Timur 67 Beller, Jonathan 57 Bellin, Joshua David 262–63 Belly of Paris (Baltard) 106 Benjamin, Walter 102 Benson, Ezra Taft 256 Bernardes, Sérgio 119, 129 Bernardo, Nuno 21, 23 big bug films 262, 266–67 big data approach 25 The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963) 267 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1872) 81 Bishop, Elizabeth 118–19, 123–27 Boden, Margaret 192–93 Bodies Under Siege (Favazza, 1987) 142 Bogost, Ian 55 Bolter, Jay 3, 165 Bonneuil, Christophe 239–40 Bordwell, David 45, 64 Bouchy, Karine 43 Braidotti, Rosa 221 Braque, Georges 186 Brenden, Sebastian 180–81 “A Brief History of Popular Science: Explaining the World through the Ages” (Hannam) 256–57 Bristow, Tom 240, 245–47 Brock (designer) 139 Bruegel, Peter 89 Bruhn, Jørgen 12, 120–21, 219–32, 259–60

275

Bruhn, Siglind 8, 84 Bullfrog Entertainment 179–81 Burch, Noël 53 Burelli, Paolo 59 Burnette, Dorsey 270 Cage, John 186 Caillois, Roger 177 Campos, Augusto de 186 canon, as religion 24–25 capitalist attitude 22–23 carbon footprint 250–51 Carlà, Filippo 166 Carson, Rachel 12 Carspecken, Francis Phil 242 Casetti, Francesco 53 centrifugal transmedia storytelling 44 centripetal transmedia storytelling 44–45 “century as a battleground” 91 Cézanne, Paul 195 chaos 142–44, 146, 157–58 chaotic state 147 Chimes at Midnight (Welles, 1965) 82–83 Chinita, Fátima 6–7, 10, 31–46 Christinidis, Georgia 242–44 cinema 10 “Cinema Militans Lecture” 31, 33, 35, 38, 47n24 cinema of games 61–63 “cinema of ideas” 38 cinematic experience 57–58 cinematic games 59 cinematic gaze 56 cinematicization of the visual 57 cinematic modality 57–59 cinematic praxis 45 “Cinematic Representations of a ‘Super Wicked Problem’: Climate Change in Documentary Film” (Ice and the Sky and Chasing Ice) (Bruhn and Gjelsvik, 2018) 259–60 cinematic simplification 65 cinematic society 56–57 cinematic transmediality 67 cinematization 10 cinematization and gamification 53–55 cinematization of the imagination 56–58 Clark, Andy 187 Clark, Jerusha 139–42 Clark, Timothy 240, 250

276

Index

climate change 219, 221, 227–29, 232, 233n29, 240–41, 244, 249–50, 260–62; see also Anthropocene futures climate predictions 230–31 Climate Trauma. Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (Kaplan, 2015) 229 Cline, Ernest 54 The Clone Wars 24 Clüver, Claus 3, 83, 119 cognitive cyborgs, artists as 186–88 cognitive processes 192–95 cognitive system 190 Collected Film Poetry (Harrison, 2007) 80–81, 83–84 “complete witness” 86 computer games 10–11 conceptual space 193 Conical Intersection (Matta-Clark) 97–110 contextual qualifying aspect 238 Convergence Culture (Jenkins, 2006) 24, 36 “core aesthetic impulses” 38 Cousins, Mark 83 creation, process of 77 creative production 108–9 creativity, Boden definition 192–93 A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling (Phillips) 22 Crowther, Paul 121 Crutzen, Paul 239, 256 ctrl-alt-delete ontology and the gaming “mod” 67–69 Cuisse de Boeuf 105–6 Culler, Jonathan 251 cult narratives 27, 29n20 cultural logic of immersion, of theme parks 164–65 cultural mediation strategies 166–67 Cunningham, Chris 55 cutting yourself, logic of: the aftermath, medium 2 148–50; conclusion 157–58; the cut, a mediation 146–48; the cut, medium 1 148; introduction 139; method and material 146; previous research 142; from senseless chaos to signifying order 156; theoretical points of departure 142–46; transmediation 150–54; transmediation, second level – the qualified media 154–57; transmediation from M3 b/c to a website 154; transmediation from

medium 2 to digital photo 153; transmediation from medium  2 to spoken verbal text 151; transmediation from medium 2 to visual verbal text 152 Danielewski, Mark 23 Dante 232 dark theming 169 Darwin, Charles 222, 267 The Day of the Triffids (Sekely, 1951) 267 decentring of humanity 246–47 deep time 221–22, 224–25 defamiliarization 242 Dena, Christy 33–34, 38 Denzing, Norman 56, 65–66 “determination,” logical aspect of 190 diachronic perspective, intermedial studies 2 Dialogues (Plato) 257 Dibley, Ben 246 Die Hard 66 difference-attentive mode of thinking 107 diffraction, dissolving dichotomies through 106–10 digital dogma 58–59 digital hyperlinking 46 digital revolution 58 discourse theory (DT) 144 Dis Voir 36 Doctor Who 25–26 Donald, Merlin 57 Doom 67 Dorst, Doug 23 dramatic, category of ekphrasis 87–88 Dungeons and Dragons 65 Dunn, Rob 261, 272 Duplass (artist) 139–42 Duplass, Teen girl with troubled or scared expression 141 dynamic modality 66–67 dynamics of visuality 108 e [dez episódios sobre a prosa topovisual de gertrude stein] (and [ten episodes on the topovisual prose of gertrude stein]) (Queiroz, 2008) 195–96 ecocriticism 260–61, 273n19 eco-horror films 267 ecological agency 272 ecological crisis 259 Ecomodernist Manifesto 228

Index Edge of Tomorrow (2014) 68 effects of difference 107 Eidt, Laura Sager 84–88 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 256 Eisenstein, Sergei 186 ekphrasis 7–11; defined 97–98; of Samambaia 128–31; various definitions 83–85 ekphrasis, leaving the white cube of: absenting matter – forming a presence 101–5; conclusion 108–9; conventional ekphrasis 97–99; dissolving dichotomies through diffraction 106–8; ekphrastic performances of space taking 105–6; performativity of ancient and agential rhetoric 99–101 ekphrasis and architecture 119–23 Elder, John 264, 271–72 Eliasson, Olafur 232 Elkins, James 122 Elleström, Lars: on Clüver 83; definition of ekphrasis 89; four modalities of media 268; intermediality 52; media transformations 257–59; semiotic framework of 147–48; signs, mediation and transmediation 141–42; transfer of media characteristics 119–20; on transmediation 238–39; transmediation defined 20–21; transmediation: theorectical considersations 1–14, 150 Elliott, Kamilla 5–6 embodiment, notion of 121–22 empathy and gaming 68, 70 enargeia 97, 100–105, 107, 111n32, 120, 126–27 Ender’s Game (2013) 54, 69 Environment and Horror on the Big Screen (Murray and Heumann) 267 Epic Mickey 168–73, 178 Epic Mickey: The Power of Two 168 epideictic 251 Étant d’art: pour locataire: Conical Inter-Sect 103 “Facing North” 77–92 “Facing Up to the Muses” (Harrison) 86–87 fan fiction 24 fans vs. industry discourse 24–25 Farrier, James 222 Feldman, Morton 186

277

film-poem, between words and image 79–81 Fludernik, Monika 122 The Force Awakens 26 Ford, John 45 formal schemata 242 Fornäs, Johan 223 Four Saints in Three Acts (Mark Morris Dance Company, 2000) 196–97 Freitag, Florian 166, 176 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste 239–40 Friedrich, Ernst 86 Führer, Heidrun 11, 97–110, 120 game-cinematographic mode 58–61 Gamer (2009) 69 gamers, world population statistics 54 games of emergence 177 games of progression 177 gamification 10, 27 gamification of cinema and cinematization of games: beyond amalgamization: the cinema of games 61–63; cinematization and gamification 53–55; cinematization of the imagination 56–58; ctrlalt-delete ontology and the gaming “mod” 67–69; everything will be gamified 55–56; gamecinematographic mode 58–61; gamification and cinematization in transmedial contexts 69–71; narrative modalities in cinema and games 63–67; overview 52–53 “gamification revolution” 55 gamified cinematic experience 67 gaming “mod” 67–69 gaming modality 63 gaming mode as opposed to cinema mode 52 Gaut, Berys 57–58, 66 “The Gaze of the Gorgon” (Harrison) 10–11, 79–92 Gehrhardt, Marjorie 86 Geiger, Jeffrey 58 general ludic immersion, theory of 69 generative tool 194–95 generative tool, intersemiotic translation as 195 Gertrude Stein to dance, intersemiotic translation of 206–7; choreographies 194–95; dyadic relation episode 206–8; gaze score episode 199;

278

Index

minimal and spasmodic episode 199–202; overhead projectors episodes 196–97; overhead projectors episodes – Listen to Me 202–5; Summary of episodes, main selected properties of Stein’s prose and the target 208–9; transcription of If I Told Him episode 202; walk, sit, and lie down episode 197–99 Ghosh, Amitav 261–62 Gilbert, Ron 173 Gjelsvik, Anne 259–60 Godard, Jean-Luc 84 Goehr, Lydia 8 Goodman, Nelson 166 Gorlée, Dinda L. 3 Goya, Francisco 78, 91–92 Great Acceleration 222, 256 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Ghosh) 261–62 Greenaway, Peter 31–46 Gren, Jonas 245–46, 248 Griffiths, Matthew 240–41, 244 Grusin, Richard 3, 165 “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (Baudrillard, 1991) 91 Hadjioannou, Markos 58 Hamon, Philippe 119 Handley, Agata 10–11, 77–92 Hannam, James 256–57 Haraway, Donna 107–8, 246 Hardcore Henry 67 Harrison, Tony 10–11, 77–92 Harry Potter 17, 20, 24 Harvey, Colin 25–26 Hawks, Howard 45 hearer orientation 23 Heffernan, James 83, 119, 128 Heine, Heinrich 87–88 Heinze, Rüdiger 26 Henslin, Earl R. 139–42 Heumann, Joseph K. 267 Hitchcock, Alfred 267 House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000) 23 Hulme, Mike 231–32 Hutcheon, Linda 6 Hutchins, Edwin 192 Hutton, James 222 hyperbolic praise 22 Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Morton) 262

I am Mountain, to Measure Impermanence (Ljungh, 2018) 260 iconicity 152, 251, 254n45 If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso 202, 209 Iliad (Homer) 97 The Iliad (Weil) 81, 90 illustrations, Silent Spring 264–65 imaginary worlds, Ryan 48n57, 48n59 imagination, cinematization of 56–58 “The Imagination of Disaster” (Sontag) 262 immersive substitutes 69 incarnation, art as 106 Indiana Jones 61 industrialization of mythology 28 industry discourse 22–23 Inside a Cutter’s Mind (Clark and Henslin, 2007) 139–42 intellectual property 22–23 interactivity, saving old media 23 interfacing media and matter, in parks and on screen 166–68 intermediality 52 intermedial translation 3 interpretive category, ekphrasis 84–85 intersemiotic translation 3, 11–12 intersemiotic translation, as creative thinking tool: artists are cognitive cyborgs 186–88; defined 188–91; of Gertrude Stein to dance 195–211; how it works 192–95 intersemiotic translation, models 1 & 2 190–92 intersemiotic transposition 98 intramedial transmediation 239 Jakobson, Roman 3, 188 James, William 195 Jenkins, Henry 18–21, 23–25, 31, 33–34, 38, 41–42, 48n60, 69, 166 Jumanji 2 (2017) 62, 69 Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) 61, 67–68 Jumper (2008) 62 Kandinsky, Wassily 186 Kaplan, Ann E. 229 Killander, C. 83, 89, 94n93 kinematic imagination 57 King, Geoff 66–67 King, Margaret J. 165 Kingdom of the Spiders 12, 257, 259, 266–71 Klee, Paul 186

Index Knott’s Berry Farm 164, 181n1 Kraus, Anna 11, 97–110 Kress, Gunther 3, 61–62, 144 Krieg dem Kriege! (Friedrich, 1924) 86 Kristeva, Julia 106 Krzywinska, Tanya 66–67 Labyrinth of Ariosto 29n20 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Bruegel) 89 Lantmäteriet (The Surveyor) (Gren, 2014) 248–52 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) 66 Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – Cradle of Life (2013) 66 Lashai, Farideh 78–79, 81, 90–92 Latour, Bruno 221 Lear, Linda 256, 260 Le Corbusier 119, 121–22 Leeuven, Theo Van 61–62 Lefebvre, Henri 103 Les Halles 101–2, 105–6 Lessing, G. E. 98 Levi, Primo 86 Levinas, Emmanuel 77–79 Liman, Doug 68 Liminal presents Gertrude Stein (Liminal Performance Group, 2012) 196 Linman, Doug 62 literary cubism 195 Littau, Karin 58 Ljungh, Hanna 232, 260 loci of interpretants 192 Lord of the Rings 17, 20, 62 “Lord of the Rings” (LotR) 65 Los Desastres de la Guerra (Goya 1810– 1820) 78 Lost 26 Lucas, George 24, 173 LucasArts 173 ludus 177 Lukas, Scott A. 169 Lutas, L. 83, 89, 94n93 Makai, Péter Kristóf 6–7, 11, 164–81 Malhi, Yadvinder 220 mankind as agency of Anthropocene 224–26 Manovich, Lev 45, 58 Marvel Universe 44 massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) 64, 167 material modality 149

279

The Matrix (1999) 19, 21, 27–28, 34, 36–37, 39, 44, 61, 68–69 Matsch, Franz 89–91 Matta-Clark, Gordon 11, 97–110 McGann, Jerome 243–44 McGonigal, Jane 63 media, technical, basic, and qualified 257–58 media myth 57 media phenomenon 253n9 media product 148–49 media representation 3, 20, 151 media specificity of games 68 media theory 17–22 Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (Elleström, 2014) 3, 257–59 media types 9 medium independent stories 19–20 Medusa myth 81 Miessen, Markus 105 mimesis and poiesis 98–99 mimetic immersion 64 mise en abyme 90 mise-en-scène 45 “the misery of repetition” 68 Mitchell, W. J. T. 83 Mittell, Jason 26 modal interaction 60 modalities 52–53 modalities of immersion 70 “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations” (Elleström 2010) 257–59 modality: defined 67–68; markers of 63 modality markers 66–67 “modality modes” 52 model from Elleström 150 models-turned-simulations 230–31 mode of cinematography 58 Mole Antonelliana, Turin 29 May 2002 33 Monkey Island series 173–76 The More I Owe You (Sledge) 118, 123–27, 132 Moretti, Franco 25 Morton, Timothy 261–62 Mother Ship 21, 25–26 Motion, Sir Andrew 240 “Moving Mountains: Cinema, Deep Time, and Climate Change” (Rossholm) 260 multimodal transference 62 Murray, Robin L. 267 mythical structures 27

280

Index

Naishuller, Ilya 67 “narrative architecture” 166 narrative architecture of storyworlds, themed space vs. digital worlds 167–68 narrative immersion 64 narrative modalities in cinema and games 63–67 narrative modality 63–65 narratives and time 223–24 narratology 25–28 nature-on-a-rampage genre 266 New Criticism 25, 97 Newman, Michael 60 Nielsen, Caspar Colling 232 Nietzsche, Friedrich 81 Nikolajeva, Maria 265 Nixon, Rob 262 Noche de guerra en la museo del Prado (Albreti, 1955/56) 88 Norgaard, Kari 226–27 North, poetic 77 notion of embodiment 121–22 Nvizzio Creations 180–81 Nyman, Michael 35 objective truth claims 243–44 objective truth claims in Anthropocenic poetry, transmediation of 248–52 Objectivists 244 Oliveira, Carmen 118, 131 Ong, Walter 18 ontological categories 242 ontological modality 63 operational qualifying aspect 238 Orel, Marc 49n83 “organic” part, of war 80, 92n25 Orta or One Dancing 208 paideia 177 paragone 98 Parkitect 180–81 Parks, Perry 260, 263 “Peaceful Verde Valley” (Burnette) 270 Pedersen, Lars Dahl 196 Peeters, Heidi 33 Peirce, Charles Sanders 188–89, 212n21, 212n23 Peircean model 188–90 performativity of ancient and agential rhetoric 99–101 periegesis 122, 124–25, 127 peripeteia 225, 228 Phillips, Andrea 22

physical modality 63, 70 Picasso, Pablo 195 Pierrot le fou (Godard, 1965) 84 Pirates of the Caribbean film series 174 Planet Coaster 181 platformers 169 Plato’s cave, games as 60 player identification 69 ”Poet” (Harrison) 85, 87, 90 Pop, Doru 6–7, 10, 52–71 popular science 257, 259–60 possible world theory 24–25 posthumanist rhetoric 99–100 Powers, Tim 173 “present tense cinema” 48n50 Presley, Frances 244 pre-traumatic stress disorder 229 Prince of Persia 67 The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia (Bernardo) 22 Prynne, Jeremy 251 qualified media type 9, 154–55, 165, 258 Queiroz, João 11–12, 186–211 Rancière, Jacques 100 Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (Oliveira) 118, 127–31 Rasmussen, Steen Eiler 121–22 Ready Player One (2018) 53–54, 68–69 “reflexive-voyeuristic,” cinema as 65–66 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag, 2003) 86 religion, Star Wars as 24–25, 27 Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin) 3 Renner, Karl 23 replay, ontology of 68 Ricoeur, Paul 220, 222–25, 241, 243 Robinson, Peter 79–80, 82 Rollercoaster Tycoon 177–81 Rollercoaster Tycoon World 180 Rosa, Miriam de 44 Rossholm, Anna-Sofia 260 Rovio Entertainment 70 Run Lola Run (1998) 68 Ryan, Marie-Laure 6–7, 10, 17–28, 34–37, 39–41, 64

Index S (Abrams and Dorst, 2013) 23 Saint-Gelais, Richard 21–22, 25 Säljö, Roger 145 Salmose, Niklas 12, 256–72 “Samambaia” 11 Samambaia, about 118–19 Sawyer, Chris 179 scaffolding 187, 193, 210, 212n29 Schmidt, Karl-Heinrich 59 Schober, Regina 3 Schumann, Robert 88 Schweitzer, Albert 261 scientific and poetic language, two discourses 242 Scranton, Roy 219 Sekely, Steve 267 self-cutting 159n6, 159n10, 160n43 self-referencial multimediality 31–46 semiotic modality 269 semiotic triadic irreducibility 211n19 senses, triggered by medialities 120–21 sensorial modality 149 seriality as identity 39, 41–46 Shklovsky, Viktor 242–43 Shoard, Catherine 35 Shouse, Eric 143 Shutters Shut (Nederlands Dans Theater, 2004) 196 Silent Spring (Carson) 12, 256–72 “Silent Spring Introspectively” 257 The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson (1963 CBS Reports television special) 256 “Silent Spring Prospectively” 257 The Sims 58 Sledge, Michael 118, 132 slow violence 262 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon) 262 Soares, Lota de Macedo 118–19, 123–27 sociocultural theory 145 “solastalgia” 228–30 Solnick, Sam 251 soma-terric effects 228–29 “Song for a Rainy Season” (Bishop, 1960) 124, 126–27, 129 Sontag, Susan 86, 262 “The Sorcerer’s Mirror” (Motion, 2009) 240 “source medium” 21 source medium: Clüver on 83–84; as difficult to define 238; Elleström on 4–12, 20–21, 89; transmediation

281

by proxy 171; transmediation of 150–54 Space Invaders 70 space taking, ekphrastic performance of 105–6 spatializing storyworlds 164–81 spatiotemporal modality 149, 269 Spencer, Luke 77 Speranza, Robert Scott 80 Spielberg, Steven 53–54, 68–69 Spitzer, Leo 83–84 staccato 201 Star Wars 10, 17, 19, 24, 26–28 Starwars.com 24 Star Wars Legends 24–25 Stein, Gertrude 186–87, 194 Sternudd, Hans T. 11, 139–58 Stevens, Wallace 244 Stewart, Susan 265 Stoermer, Eugene F. 239 storytelling, transmedia see transmedia storytelling Storytelling Across Worlds (Dowd, Fry, Niedermann and Steiff) 22–23 On Stranger Tides (Powers) 173 Strukelji, A. 83, 89, 94n93 subjective truth claims in Anthropocenic poetry 245–48 Suhor, Charles 4 Symes, Peter 79, 87–88 synchronic perspective, intermedial studies 1–2 Syphilis (Demosthenes) 87 “target medium” 21 target medium 20–21, 83–84, 89, 98; Elleström on 4–12, 119; transmediation by proxy 171; transmediation of 150–54 Tarrant, Margaret 262 Taylor, Norman 58, 65 technical media 148, 154, 257–58 Temple Run 61 temporality into narrative forms, transmediating: the future as a cultural fact 230–32; transmediation of deep time 224–25 “Tetris effect” 60–61 Texel Raptor 180 text-based storytelling 18 themed entertainment 166 themed hubs 171–72 themed spaces vs. digital worlds, narrative architecture of 167–68

282

Index

Theme Park (Bullfrog) 178–81 theme park management simulators 164–81 theme parks 11 theme parks, transmediating: allegory of immersion in the Monkey Island series 173–76; constructing theme parks in Rollercoaster Tycoon 177–81; interfacing media and matter in parks and on the screen 166–68; theme parks as media 164–65; theme park that guests forgot: Epic Mickey 168–73; transmediating the theme park world 181 theming 164–65 A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon, 2006) 6 thinking tool, intersemiotic translations as 210–11 Three Lives (Stein) 195 time 233n13 Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 222–24 Time and the Other (Levinas) 77–78 TLS website www.luperfoundation.com 46n10 Tomb Raider 66 Tomkin, Silvan 143 “Tool” 230 top-down highbrow transmedia storytelling 34–38 top-down transmedia pieces 18–19 Tornborg, Emma 12, 237–53 “transcendental medial homelessness” 273n16 transduction 3 transfictionality 21–22, 25, 27 transfictional practices 25 transmedia as medium 28 transmedia contexts, gamification and cinematization 69–71 transmedia experiences 52 transmedial ab ovo, theme parks as 164–65 transmediality 1–3 transmedial process 223, 238, 247, 252, 257 transmedia storytelling 6–7, 10, 69; discourse of fans vs. discourse of the industry 24–25; discourse of media theory 17–22; discourse of narratology 25–28; discourse of the industry 22–23; as low brow 38; as self-reference multimediality 31–46 transmediation, defined 219–20

transmediation by bootstrapping 171 transmediation by proxy 168, 171 transmediation narration 6–7 transmediation: theorectical considersations: adaptation 5–6; media products and media types 8–12; media representation: ekphrasis 7–8; transmediality 1–3; transmedial narration and transmedia storytelling 6–7; transmediation and media representation 3–5 transmedia world-building 19 transmedia worlds 25 transmutation 3 transposition 22 triadic relation 188–90, 189 The Triumph of Achilles (Matsch, 1892) 89–91 Tron (1982) 54, 69 Tron: Legacy (2010) 69 truth claims, subjective and objective 242–48 The Tulse Luper Journey (computer game) 40 The Tulse Luper Suitcases Project (Peter Greenaway 2003−2005): 92 Drawings of the Mole (2002–2008) 32; 100 Objects to Represent the World (Greenaway, 1992) 35; 100 Objects to Represent the World: A Prop Opera by Peter Greenaway (1997) 35 The Tulse Luper Suitcases Project (Peter Greenaway, 2003−2005): The Baby of Mâcon 44; The Belly of an Architect 44; The Children of Uranium (2006, Charta) 32; Dear Phone (1976) 45; The Draughtsman’s Contract 44; expanding authorial narrative universe 38–41; The Food of Love (Greenaway, 2014) 36; Gold (no date, Dis Voir) 32; Goltzius and the Pelican Company (Greenaway, 2009) 35–36; Greenaway bios 49n72; Joseph (Greenaway 2016) 36; Luper at Compton Verney (2000) 32; Lupercyclopedia (2010–2012) 44; The Lupercyclopedia Live Cinema VJ Tour (2010–2011) 33; The OK Doll (Greenaway 2014) 36; Part 1 − The Moab Story (Greenaway) 32; Part 2 − Vaux to the Sea (Greenaway) 32; Part 3 − From Sark to the Finish

Index (Greenaway) 32; the project 31–34; Prospero’s Books (1991) 35, 44; seriality as identity: a network of self-referencial multimediality 41–46; top-down highbrow transmedia storytelling 34–38; Tulse Luper in Ghent (Galerie Fortlaan 17, Ghent, Belgium, 2003) 32; Tulse Luper in Turin (Greenaway) 32; Tulse Luper in Venice (Greenaway) 32; The Tulse Luper Journey (computer game) 32; Tulse Luper’s Drawings (2000) 32; Tulse Luper VJ Tour (2005–2009) 32; Vertical Features Remake (1978 ) 42–43; Walk Through H – The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1979) 42; A Walk Through Prospero’s Library (Greenaway, 1991) 35; Wash & Travel: Luper at Lille (2004) 32; A Zed and Two Noughts 44 The “Unflinching Gaze” 77–92 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 227 “Us or Them!: Silent Spring and The ‘Big Bug’ Films of the 1950s” (Bellin) 262–63 Verses in the Celluloid: Poetry in Film 1910–2002 (Speranza) 80 video-game immersion 65 video games 164 videogamization of cinema 61 Viera, Miriam 11, 118–32 “Visionary Cartography: The Aesthetic Mediation of the Anthropocene in Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s Mount Copenhagen” (Bruhn, 2018) 260

283

visual economy 56 visual modality 59–60, 67 Volumina 33 Vygotsky, Lev 145 Wachowski Siblings 36 Wallace, Alfred Russell 222 Walt Disney World 166 Warcraft (2016) 61–65 Ward, Jim 24 Ways of Worldmaking (Goodman) 166 Webb, Ruth 119–20, 122 website, as technical medium 154 website www.luperfoundation.com, The Falls (1980 ) 42 Weil, Simone 81 Welles, Orson 82–83, 186 We’re Doomed. Now What. Essays on War and Climate Change (Scranton, 2018) 219 Westworld 68 When I Count, There Are Only You . . . But When I Look, There Is Only a Shadow (Lashai) 78–79 White-Stevens, Robert 256 Williams, William Carlos 244 Winsberg, Eric 230 Witt, Bruno de 103 Wolf, Werner 19–20, 120 Wollen, Peter 45 “work to work ekphrasis” 8 world-building 38–39 World of Warcraft (WoW) 58, 62–65 Wright, Frank Lloyd 119 Zeitfluss Festival 35 Zhoa Liang 232 Zichermann, Gabe 55 Zola, Emile 106