Irina Aleksandrovna Urmina¹, Kristina Konstantinovna Onuchina², Natalia Dmitrievna Irza³, Irina Anatolievna Korsakova⁴ & Ivan Alexandrovich Chernikov⁵

¹Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia
²Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia
³Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia
⁴Moscow State Institute of Music named after A.G. Schnittke, Moscow, Russia
⁵Military Training and Research Center of the Air Force “The Air Force Academy named after Professor N. E. Zhukovsky and Yu. A. Gagarin” (Voronezh) of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Russia.

Corresponding author: Irina Aleksandrovna Urmina. Email: n.yushenko@list.ru

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages  https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.02

First published: June 18, 2022 | Area: Aesthetic Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number2, 2022)
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Intermedial Postmodernism in Art: Concepts and Cultural Practices

Abstract

The study analyzes the existing and developing ideas of and approaches to the study of the multilevel concept of intermediality and its different aspects, forms, and phenomena considering the existing approaches and definitions. The study aims to reveal the capabilities of intermediality as a potential of innovative artistic creation. Research is conducted using sociocultural research methods including a comparative study of the recently proposed typical intermediality models, analysis of descriptive texts about the factually present models of art synthesis, as well as the context pointing to the presence of lack of correspondence between a particular fragment of text (the content of activity) and the real conditions in which activity is carried out. In the framework of an interdisciplinary comparative study, the emergent field of intermediality and its relationship to cultural practices in different spheres, including education, are defined at the qualitative level. The subject field of the study of intermediality as a key concept of modern culture is evaluated and its specific features in art, including music, are identified. The problems of the formation of synthetic media arts as a reflection of the postmodern perception of the world under the new conditions of digital technology, which transforms any creative cultural text into another type of information, usually of a quoted and multiple nature, are presented for discussion. It is proposed to pay special attention to the formation of “intermedial competence” – the ability to understand and interpret the process of the generation of new meaningful content, which occurs within the semantic modalities and communicative registers. The latter is only possible within the framework of the competence-based approach enshrined in the foundations of the universal system of European, including Russian, two-level higher education.

Keywords: Art, intermediality, theatre, communication. 

1. Introduction

Sociocultural reality in the conditions of the greatly accelerated spread of visual culture determines the specific problems in the formation of a person’s world image. Visual forms, which dominated mass culture throughout the 20th century, have now become basic in the context of the active expansion of the media space created by means of new mass communication media. As a result of the qualitative changes in the ways of influencing mass audiences, a new generation was brought up on the ubiquitous use of modern visual technology, which drastically differs from the traditional social and cultural forms of communication that have existed for centuries but only partially allow to maintain the connection with the experience of previous generations today. Modern mass culture has become almost exclusively visual and categorically offers ready-made images, depriving people of the ability to imagine and independently form individual perceptions of their surroundings. Even W. Benjamin, a German philosopher, cultural theorist, aesthetician, literary critic, essayist, and translator, emphasized the growing nature of the entertainment function of mass culture: “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation” [Benjamin 1996: 61]. The philosopher also indicates that the wide availability of works of art leads to the loss of the uniqueness of artwork, and a cult character is replaced by a consumer and commodity character.

The expanding presence of art in public life is undoubtedly due to the development of technical means, the duplication (copying) of works of art, mass production of works of fiction, reproductions of paintings, sculpture, and architecture. The qualitative technical and technological shifts in the digital sphere and the advancement of information and communication technology allow for the reproduction of virtually all forms and types of artistic products in the video and audio format on a mass scale. This list now also includes the phenomenon of virtual reality, which became a logical continuation of the methodological evolution of visual communication through media. The communicative potential of electronic and digital technologies has presented the entire society with new prospects for their use in social and cultural interaction. Thirty years ago, the German poet, writer, playwright, essayist, and translator H. M. Enzensberger wrote:

“The new media are oriented towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition <…> That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is always manipulation” [Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1986: 104-105].

The American film critic and theorist B. Nichols writes the following about the works of culture in the age of cybernetic systems: “Instead of reproducing, and altering, our relation to an original work, cybernetic communication simulates, and alters, our relation to our environment and mind” [Bill Nichols 1996: 128]. The very process of simulation and the phenomenon of a hypertrophied model of reality was revealed by French sociologist, cultural scientist, and postmodern philosopher J. Baudrillard in the concept of simulacra, which has become a representative model of modern culture:

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real <…> A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences” [Jean Baudrillard 2002: 181].

The phenomenon of art synthesis made its appearance in the earliest periods of art development. In the first half of the 20th century, there emerged an urgent need to create synthetic works that could have a complex effect on the viewer and listener by transferring the properties of one art form to another. For example, the Russian artist and fine art theorist V.V. Kandinsky created several stage compositions including “Green Sound”, “Purple Curtain”, “Black and White”, and “Yellow Sound”, the composition of which was intended to harmoniously combine music, color, plasticity, and word. Kandinsky believed that the combination of the means of various arts “can only be successful if it is not external, but principled. This means that one art must learn from the other how to use its means; it must learn in order to then apply its own means according to the same principle” [Kandinsky 2016: 17]. Russian composer and pianist, teacher, and representative of symbolism in music A.N. Scriabin was the first to use color in the performance of music, introducing a new concept of light music. In the musical poem “Prometheus”, he “sought parallelism – I wanted to strengthen the impression from sound with light”, but this also ceased to satisfy him: “now I am no longer satisfied with this. Now I need light counterpoints… Light goes its own melody, and sound its own…” [Sabaneev 2014: 239].

With the development of the information space, by virtue of the improvement of mass media, the established relationships between the visual and the verbal in public life were distorted in favor of the visual (the so-called visual turn). Art, in general, became part of the daily life and was attributed utilitarian meaning. At the same time, the borders of art were being blurred in structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism viewing the world as text and the works of art as “artifacts”, and in the development of constructivism in art. All this gave rise to multidisciplinary research not only on the interaction between particular types of art but also with other sciences and, later on, on the concept of intermediality primarily in the media-technological sense. Research practically split into two branches: technological and semiotic. The former is associated with the concept of “medium” or “media” consistently used as a material concept of “means of communication” or “technical means of publication,” and “communication channel”. The latter refers to the content aspect when media acts like a sign system or a sign code, and the interaction between the sign systems (languages) of different types of art generates the integrity of artistic and aesthetic perception.

In a broad sense, “intermediality” is now understood as a special type of relations emerging between media. The concept itself, however, generally has multiple meanings (in various scientific disciplines, there are no less than ten definitions [Khaminova, Zilberman: 2014: 39]), therefore, both the nature and the mechanism of the interaction of media also vary. For instance, in art, intermediality is the perception and experience of a different type of art, their juxtaposition, providing for a fundamentally creative movement and unpredictability of future states. Contacting media not only merge in a common space, but also influence, modify, and even transform one another (theater as a combination of plastics, action, music, images, etc.). It should be borne in mind that media is, first, a means of communication (a way of transferring information), second, a means of mass information, and third, a certain sign or code system. Then, in the interaction process, that is, in the process of intermediality, there emerges a polyartistic environment, in the space of which cultural codes are born, aesthetically developed, and translated through various cultural codes (for example, in various types of art). Here we would like to emphasize that the concept of intermediality started to appear in the terminological apparatus of such sciences as philosophy, philology, and art history only in the last decade of the 20th century coming to be the intersection of the concepts of “intertextuality” and “interaction of the arts” (interart). Such a split of the term into two separate sections calls for a double comparison with each concept. Intertextuality in literature and art refers to a special principle of citing previous works in a new philosophical and artistic context. The interaction of arts becomes their synthesis, which forms an independent interference environment that contains many different cultural texts.

Thus, by means of the new computer (digital) systems for transferring mass information via telecommunication networks (the Internet media), mass media or the means of mass information carry out the multichannel transmission of all types of information contained in the cultural texts of different types of art. In the postmodern era, the entire world can be viewed as cultural texts, conceptions, motifs, and cliches, which are distinguished into the uniform (homogeneous) and non-uniform (or intermedial, synthetic, heterogeneous) types. From this point of view, creation is a conscious or unconscious reference to its predecessors, hence modern art is reference art.

It is important to mind the fact that the technically electronic media of the last century (which appeared at the same time as print media), i.e. sound recording, radio, cinema, and television, used analog systems. As stated by D. Hesmondhalgh:

“…in analog broadcasting, the main components of communication and cultural expression – words, images, music, other sounds, etc. – were transferred to a continuous medium (radio waves), which in one way or another reproduced the form or appearance of the original performance, image, etc. <…> The radical innovation associated with the development of digital electronic methods of data storage and transmission is that the basic components of cultural expression – words, images, music, etc. – are converted into binary code (sequential series of zeros and ones) which can be read and stored by computers” [Hesmondhalgh 2018: 327-328].

It is believed that intermediality takes a special place in art by virtue of the interpenetration (synthesis) of its different directions reflecting the author’s emotional perception of events expressed in cultural texts. Semantically, however, people only perceive the part of a cultural text (as a reflection of the current worldview) that is stereotyped, recognizable, and does not require interpretation or multi-dimensional decoding of meanings. Therefore, the formation of modern individuals’ “intermedial competence” – the active ability to understand and interpret the process of the generation of new meaningful content, which occurs within the semantic modalities and communicative registers, to use various symbolic systems, scientific and general discursive practices for this purpose – becomes relevant. Effective development of such skills and abilities within the framework of the existing competency-based approach in the institutional system of higher education is a logical continuation of the development of a modern person in the digital age.

2. Methods

At present, there is a strong conviction of the need for interdisciplinary research in virtually all fields of science, including the humanities. “Accordingly, it has become appropriate to combine different theoretical models to solve certain social science problems. A condition for this combination is the compatibility of the models and not the strict correspondence to the commonly accepted provisions of the general theories that spawned them” [Orlova 2008: 290]. The methodology of intermediality is also based on interdisciplinarity [Tishunina 2001: 149]. The common ground for all classifications of this concept is the ways and forms of media exchange. Since the intermedial process, from a sociocultural perspective, is the communicative exchange of information generated by a person or a group of people and transmitted through different cultural codes, there arises the need for identifying the basic foundations for the study of such a multilevel concept comprising a wide range of humanitarian disciplines (communication theory, sociology of culture, cultural and intercultural studies, philosophy, theory of literature and music, art history, film, theater, etc.). Of primary importance, in this case, is the study of the aforementioned process in the conditions of a dynamic intersection, interpenetration, and interference of these disciplines generating new forms of artistic innovations, which rapidly spread in the virtual space and are with little comprehension used as the carriers of innovative education practices. What can become the primary method for the study of such a phenomenon is comparative analysis, which includes quite a wide array of particular techniques of analysis. However, the intermediality subjected to research today inherited the problematics of the long-known concept of “interaction of the arts”, and at a time when the concept of “cultural text” had become one of the leading ones in the humanities. Nonetheless, the broadened concept of text does not cover the peculiarities of the interaction of the “voices”, “languages”, “codes”, “textual units” of various arts. The more problematic becomes their interdisciplinary qualitative analysis – particular methodological principles of research in literature, the fine arts, music, theater, cinema, etc. have been developing for centuries. Such theoretically substantiated monomediality divides these special areas, which in practice have very successfully merged into new synthetic forms. It remains to select a common methodology for studying these innovations. The heterogeneity of types of individual arts united in new semantic manifestations should be levelled in the general methodological foundations of studying the process of interaction of these arts.

What unites them is the obvious anthropocentricity reflecting in the historical time the centuries-old social and cultural practices of human communities as the reflection of the world image, the reproduction of the present reality in artistic images. It is methodologically possible to determine the basic foundations for the analysis of these practices. Such methodological foundations emerge with the combination of the sociological and cultural-anthropological ways of cognition within the problem field, where it is necessary and possible. The problem field of intermediality research can be defined as the semantic intersection of mutually complementary and compatible sociological and cultural-anthropological concepts. It is also clear that such interdisciplinary research can utilize classic scientific methods:

– the functional method, which allows determining the significance of a specific and stable sociocultural interaction of individual social units for individuals and society;

– the structural method, which allows identifying stable bonds between symbolic objects;

– the semantic method allowing to study and evaluate the symbolic representedness of the content of sociocultural life in iconic and symbolic form;

– the dynamic method, allowing to determine the causes, forms, and driving forces of the occurring sociocultural changes and processes;

– the systemic method, which allows studying such cultural units as traits, patterns, and themes, as well as the possibility of logical links and transitions between them, at the level of theoretical conceptions.

It has to be noted that “at present, there are all conceptual grounds for the integration of sociological and cultural-anthropological knowledge into a common theoretical and methodological model of research that can be called sociocultural. First and foremost, both sciences are logically compatible. They have a common fundamental basis: both the social and cultural dimensions of human coexistence are considered as derivatives of people’s organized interaction and communication” [Orlova 2008: 300]. Particular attention should be paid to the analysis of the dynamic aspects of people’s life together, which are reflected in the processes of their communication and interaction, including in the sphere of art. Time will tell how this will be taken into account in research on intermediality.

3. Interpretations of the concept of intermediality in art

It can be argued that the digitalization of any creative cultural text transforms it into a different type of information, one of reference and plural nature. What then happens to such a text transformed into a cultural product in the qualitative sense? Let us more closely examine the process of transformation of cultural texts in the intermedial space of art starting from basic definitions.

The concept of intermediality is generally defined in our sign and multimodal culture as the interaction and mediation realized in texts. In essence, all contemporary social, cultural, and educational practices are carried out exactly in the field of intermediality. Without diving too deep into the analysis of historical and theoretical preconditions for the emergence of the phenomenon of intermediality, we will only note that as early as in the 19th century, it was showing itself in the interaction of different types of art, either within one type or crossing its borders and generating various synthetic forms. At present, such synthesis has become an active and commonly occurring phenomenon of artistic culture making use of the latest digital technology. Irina Rajewsky points to the fact that the concept of intermediality has been an umbrella term for different approaches from the very start and each time, intermediality is associated with different attributes and distinguishing characteristics. The specific objectives in different spheres (for instance, in medieval studies, literary studies, sociology, film studies, art studies, etc.) of intermedial research are constantly changing [Rajewsky 2018: 43-63]. As a result, there rises the need for deep additional study of both the methodology and lexical techniques of intermediality.

In art, intermediality presents the perception of another form of art as if from a distance, a kind of figurative empathy involving not only possible communications but also future joint interactions. It is in this exact case that different forms of media exchange come to be. For example, “transformative intermediality – the representation of one medium by another, the transition of an artifact into a different sign system, which it becomes part of, the relationship of manifestations of the same plot in different types of art; ontological intermediality as the ontological dimension of culture based on the inherent commonality of various media that does not rule out their differences (for example, the musicality of poetry, the cinematography of prose); conventional intermediality – the medial diversity of forms of artworks, a special type of interrelations inside text and interactions of cultural codes of different arts; normative intermediality – the same plot is developed in various media and each new era assesses the art of the previous ages differently – new thoughts and feelings arise, requiring new methods (mediums); referential intermediality – the text of one medium referencing the text of another” [Sinelnikova 2017: 808].

Without a doubt, intermediality has been showing itself in art in different forms since the 19th century, since the author of a work presents their unique image of the world with the means of communication available to them [30].

As noted above, not only works of various arts but also the very space of culture can be considered text. The concept of semiosphere or the semiotic space proposed by the Russian literary scholar, culturologist, and semiotician Iu.M. Lotman [9] best describes the conditions necessary for carrying out communication in this space. It is, however, also important to consider the fact that any cultural text or statement in the sphere of art exists within different semiotic (sign) systems, which are the works of literature, art, and culture as a whole. This problem has been analyzed by Iu.M Lotman and many other researchers in works on the semiotics of the space of culture [9; 21]. Essentially, they all rely on the idea of the world as text proposed by structuralists, including the French philosopher, literary scholar, aesthetician, and semiotician R. Barthes [Barthes 2016]. At the same time, the text can also be considered within the framework of discursive practice [10, 11, 21, 30].

4. Intermediality in music

The English essayist and art historian P. Walter pointed out that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” [Milian 2019: 1].

What can be considered a manifestation of intermediality is ekphrasis as a doubled statement in a cultural text in different semiotic codes. For example, the interaction of literary fiction and music has been a topical subject of communication and creative interaction of composers, writers, musicologists, historians, and literary theorists for centuries. The aesthetic connections between literature and other arts have been discussed since Antiquity, particularly concerning the link between literary works and musical pieces. This discussion concerns the phenomenological musicality of prose associated with the two-fold structure of an artistic text as a correspondence between the material and form, the plot and the composition. According to the Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, “the very essence of the impact of art on us” resides not in the depiction of events but in the “processing of the perception that comes to us from the events”. An important role in this processing is played by the “plot composition,” “the organization of the writer’s speech itself, their language, the structure, rhythm, and melody of the story” [Vygotsky 2016: 202-203]. What comes as a result of ekphrasis is a strong emotional impact on the listener (an emotional explosion). “The moment of explosion is at the same time the point of a sharp increase in the informativeness of the whole system” [Vygotsky 2016: 135]. This occurs by virtue of the interpenetration through the genre and type borders – in the literal sense, a textual literary work expands its semiotic boundaries at the expense of other art forms. This results in intermediality. Since the problem of ekphrasis is closely linked to the issue of the interaction between literature and other art forms, M.I. Nikola [Nikola 2009: 25-26] alongside fine art, sculpture, and architecture identifies such types of ekphrasis as literary and musical, A.N. Taganov lists the literary, musical, and theatrical types [Taganov 2005: 140-149], and D.V. Tokarev mentions musical, fine art and musical, and cinematography ekphrasis [12: 93-95].

The semiotic principle of the division of arts, which made a particularly strong appearance in the 19th century, draws a distinction between the pictorial and non-pictorial (or expressive) types of art. “Pictorial arts (fine art, sculpture, graphics, photography, literature, theatre, and cinema) use the ‘language of real-life impressions, recreating before the eye or imagination objects and phenomena of the real world as one perceives them in one’s practical experience’. The non-pictorial arts (music, dance, architecture, applied arts, design) diverge from ‘the form of a sensual image that emerges in the experience of a person’s daily life’” [Bochkareva et al. 2012: 5-6]. Different models of transition and interaction form between them inescapably. What we are primarily concerned with is the contemporary aspect of intermediality in music. In this sense, “a vivid example of ekphrasis is the musical “The Phantom of the Opera” based on the novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux, a legendary and world-famous masterpiece by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, which has not left the stage of the world’s theaters for almost 30 years” [Bigvava 2018: 34].

It is worth disclosing the concept of intertextuality, which was introduced by Iulia Kristeva based on “the discovery first made by M.M. Bakhtin in the theory of literature: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is a product of absorption and transformation of some other text” [Kristeva 2000: 429]. Kristeva operates with the terms “alien word”, “dialogue”, “multivoiced”, “polyphony”, etc., which Bakhtin used in relation to the texts of fiction. R. Barthes [Barthes 2013], specifying the definition of intertext, once again emphasized that in any text (intertext), other texts are inevitably present as fragments of cultural codes, formulas, rhythmic structures, fragments of social idioms, etc., absorbed and mixed in this text from the preceding linguistic culture [Bochkareva et al. 2012: 7].

Various methods for the analysis of literary works (mythological, biographical, comparative-historical, cultural-historical, psychological, formal, structural, sociological, culturological, narratological, semiological, etc.) have been developing in the sphere of literary art as the totality of any and all texts for decades, whereas the problems of analyzing the non-verbal (non-word) artworks remain unresolved to this day. Of most relevance appears to be the method of intermedial analysis, although it cannot be applied to all literary works since, at the very least, it requires defining the categories, levels, and common techniques of analysis universal for the works of different types of art.

Numerous definitions and approaches to the study of the concept of intermediality generate a wide array of intersecting and sometimes contradicting versions of seemingly the same thing. This is especially apparent from the works on the systematization of intermediality research by Lars Elleström [27, 31] who believes that all media are multimodal and intermedial in the sense that they contain a multitude of basic attributes and can only be considered in the general field of other types of mass information means.

Based on the formal method developed in structuralism, narratology, semiotics, communication theory, and interpretation, there are semiotic methods [1, 9, 21], which can be considered intermedial in a broader sense, meaning by that the analysis of relations and forms of interaction of the textual languages of different arts. This was indicated by the Italian scientist, philosopher, specialist in semiotics and medieval aesthetics, cultural theorist, and writer Umberto Eco in his book “Interpretation and Over-interpretation” [26]. The same idea is argued by Patrick Milian, who proposes four intermediate configurations of intermediality as the basis for interpreting the relations between different types of art [Milian 2019]. Milian himself relies on the work of Peter Dayan [Dayan 2011], who states that these relations rest on the fundamental incommensurability between the individual arts: the visual arts can never affect and communicate as music does, music does not come close to poetry, and poetry – to the visual arts. Nevertheless, there is the concept of transposition, which allows the author to represent another kind of art, its, so to speak, environmental peculiarity, which has recognizable signs of measurability and scientific repeatability. Thus, it becomes possible to maintain the existence of truth in art as a whole, to use the iconic features of one type of art in combination with the expressive features of another.

At present day, due to the lack of universal criteria and a terminological system for the study of the concept of intermediality, the search for a universal method for analyzing any work of art remains a topical issue.

“The main problem is that in different arts, the same terms refer to substantially different phenomena: the composition of a painting or a musical piece is not the same as the composition of a literary text. Different types of art arrange artistic time and space differently and use varying means of creating an artistic image. An example of this is the artistic image and the means of creating it in music, fine art, and literary works” [Chukantsova 2009: 140].

Since the artistic image is defined as a way of mastering and transforming reality [16, p.42], it is possible to identify the means used by music, fine art, and literature to the same degree. One of the primary tools in these arts is composition [18; 20; 21], which presents a system consisting of elements or components that are in specially organized relations with each other and can be distinguished by some formal attribute. Compositionally, these elements are the parts of an artwork that can be considered essential for its structure and content and are subdivided into external and internal [16, p. 216–223]. The external components or elements of a literary work can be individual chapters, stanzas, or phrases, stylistically isolated moments, as well as an introduction, conclusion, and epilogue. The internal components include the plot, theme, and individual characters of a literary work in their textual associations. The components or elements of the composition of musical and literary pieces can match or differ in terms of structure. For example, both types of works (cultural texts) are formally divided into parts, yet in music, this division is based on intonation as the foundation of musical thinking and communication. On the other hand, intonation is the unity of sound (the sound shell of a word) and meaning, same as words. The word, however, comprises a limited number of phonemes, whereas musical intonation uses the entire range of sound with different tempos, rhythmic patterns, volume levels, etc. The parts of a work are often marked by theme, motif, and leitmotif. Theme refers to the main idea of an artistic work lying at its basis and developing throughout its course. The motif is the semantic unit of any artistic text, including musical ones. The motif can be represented by a recurring word, phrase, situation, object, idea, image, or character. A leitmotif is a theme or motif that is associatively linked to a certain situation, character, or idea in a musical piece. In music, the leitmotif is a prominent, vivid, melodic phrase used to characterize a certain character, phenomenon, idea, or experience and repeated many times in the course of the plot development, i.e. it takes on the function of the motif of the artistic text. The main distinguishing feature of leitmotif in literary works is continuous reappearance in different qualities: as a word, gesture, action, image, idea, and so on.

It can be argued that multimediality emerging from the interaction of different arts describes the integration of semiotic operations and meaning modalities in a common phenomenal space. At present, such symbiosis has generated a vast space of intermedial artworks, new synthetic media-arts, in which importance is attributed not to the cultural texts themselves but rather their relations that form new meanings.

5. Discussion. Intermediality in the context of total digitalization

Intermediality “as the interference of the arts, particularly the verbalization of nonverbal art forms within fictional genres, is under serious pressure from the modern technological landscape, the main challenge of which should be considered the digitization of any content (music, video, photos, audio files, etc.)” [Zagidullina 2017: P. 60]. The era of panmediatization has brought about the transformation of both participants in communication in the sphere of art (the creator and the consumer), the channels of communication between them (as a condition for the existence of an artwork itself), and the nature of works of art. Same as many other technological innovations, digitalization generates immediate and delayed effects. The immediate effects can be considered to be the aforementioned transformations of any creative cultural text into another through interference with cultural texts from other art forms and the convergence of polycode structures in the space of an artwork, or even into another art form through changes in the very ways of forming the postmodern image of the world as a set of cultural texts. Finally, interactivity at the moment of communication or interaction between the creator of an artwork and its recipient (today, the consumer of a cultural product). Modern polycoding differs from the already existing accompaniment of text with video, audio, or photographic inclusions (the so-called longreads) because it relies on hybridization based on the possibilities of a protocol as a way to digitally replicate any work of art. Here we refer to the technologies allowing to convey color through sound and emotions through color, to the opportunity of describing a person’s state through musical composition. As an example, the British musician and artist Neil Harbisson who suffers from a disease that only allows him to distinguish the shades of grey, and who has expanded his ability to perceive color and became the world’s first officially recognized cyborg – with an antenna implanted in his skull and dental implants that can allow Harbisson to send messages over the Internet by clicking out Morse code with his teeth. This may be an isolated case, but the mass acceptance of synthetic art is not that far away. Moreover, as soon as digital technology becomes simple enough, art will immediately respond by creating new syncretic forms. As for the delayed effects of digitization, we should pay attention to the rapidly spreading hybrid forms of cultural texts in virtual space (newslore, medialore, journallore, netlore, etc.), new polycode genres (pins, instas, photoshop battles, memes, longreads, etc.), and new forms of language.

Considering the contemporary sphere of musical art, there is the rise of song culture as a polycode literary and musical genre, in which the meaning of a hybrid cultural text is formed through the synthesis of the meaning of the word itself and the image generated by the melody. It is melody and not the word that becomes primary in this synthesis of two arts – the meaning of words in a foreign language can be unclear, or the song itself can be deliberately arranged so that the lyrics are difficult to hear. The technical opportunities are extraordinary – smartphones and headphones allow any person to dive into the world of art “on the go”. Thus, the seeming easiness of perception creates the illusion of the simplicity of creating an artistic work, which results in a greater number of authors writing music and song lyrics and their demonstration on the Internet. Mass cultural practices have already generated the profane culture of the 20th century. Now, we propose to discuss what is to come in the near future.

A. Petho indicates the following: “‘intermediality’ has proved to be one of the most productive terms in the field of humanities, generating an impressive number of publications and theoretical debates. This popularity of intermedial researches was prompted by the incredibly accelerated multiplication of media themselves that called for an adequate theoretical framework mapping the proliferation of media relations. The other factor that propelled ‘intermediality’ to a wider attention was most likely the fact that it emerged on an interdisciplinary basis that made it possible for scholars from a great number of fields (theories of literature, art history, music, communication and cultural studies, philosophy, cinema studies, etc.) to participate in the discourse around questions of intermediality” [Petho 2010: 40]. This statement cannot be argued with since it is relations and not the meaning content of each of the interacting arts that have become the most topical subject of discussion today. The part of a cultural text (in the broad sense) that ends up perceived today is that which is stereotyped and recognizable and does not require interpretation or multidimensional decoding of meanings.

What comes to the fore then is a kind of “intermedial competence” as the ability to understand and interpret the process of generating new meaningful content, which takes place within the semantic modalities and communicative registers, the ability to use different symbolic systems, different disciplines, and general and scientific discursive practices for this purpose. For this ability to be developed, it is not enough to merely use the information and communication opportunities of the digital environment of the virtual space, it also calls for the exchange of knowledge of the entire sphere of culture. The conceptual content of culture, the management of knowledge, and the practical use of the enormous amount of information generated on the World Wide Web are immanent to education, science, creativity, innovation, education, upbringing, and everything that shapes both citizenship and identity of individuals. The rapidly advancing digital technology and intermedial discursive practices have started to play a special role in the development of modern educational and cultural policy and practice. The interactive nature of Internet communication networks, which attracts users looking for obtaining a cultural identity, also reveals the dark side of this activity – the more the users engage in information search, the less they seek social solidarity. The increase of mobility resides in the greater individualization it creates, since people can communicate and interact at distance regardless of their physical location, and individualization entails social passivity. The global nature of this problem is apparent today and manifests in all spheres of human life, including education.

On the Internet, especially in the creative field, a sense of belonging to the creation of something new, or even mutual exchange and cooperation, is formed. However, in reality, this rarely happens due to differences in the basic professional competencies of individuals, even if they have talent. Even in the professional sphere (for example, music), excessive use of network technologies can tear an individual away from active real life with its obligatory resulting interactions and information exchange. Network individualism is clearly manifested in the virtual space, where instead of the expected globalization, people have many changing sets of glocalized connections due to many changing cultural preferences. At the same time, through the Internet, people get access to the public sphere and the opportunity to express their personal opinions, which may not at all correspond to public information and professionally formed media. Thus, bloggers have appeared who consider themselves specialists in any field of everyday activity, and in the field of music – practically professionals. As a result, an imaginary community space is formed, in which the space of information flows replaces real life in the geographical space of places. Against this background, there is an obvious decrease in a person’s sense of social and personal responsibility to others, but real society may not forgive this (an example is cancel culture).

It is the sphere of education as a stable social institution that can use the growing volume of virtual network communications using forms of intermediality to represent reality as a dynamic process in which a person (as a formed personality) is defined in a variety of times and cultural spaces – genres, languages, groups, etc. The dynamics of culture then appear realized in discursive pedagogical practices and creative projects. The globalized virtual context with all its interactive forms is combined with glocalized training programs that consider the cultural and historical heritage, forming general cultural competence. It is already impossible to imagine it without understanding intermediality as a necessary component of the creative process of generating something new. This is especially evident in the field of culture and, in particular, art, when the teacher acts not only as a teacher-methodologist but also as a teacher-technologist, who forms an actively creative person who will continue to need an independent constant search for new knowledge and professional skills. This requires the teacher themself to be fully immersed in the changing context of the socio-cultural environment, as well as to master intermedial technologies in relation to the current life situation in society. In the field of art, various artistic trends, synthetically uniting in multidisciplinarity, have been creating new visual forms for more than a century (Russian modernism is an example). Disciplinary boundaries are being pushed but whether intermediality will become the basis of all humanities outside the realm of art is not yet clear. Discursive practices allow an art teacher, together with students, to form new professional competencies. At the same time, students also manifest the social position of citizens of a particular country. This is the function of the education system in any state – the formation of a general cultural and professional worldview of competent and responsible citizens. Hypothetical global cultural unity is hardly achievable today; rather, intermediality contributes to the expansion of knowledge in the field of culture as a dynamic content basis of social life (considering modern technological and technical achievements). Manifested in the media-technological, cultural-aesthetic, and socio-cultural-communicative trinity, intermediality is in the process of forming a new semiotic system as a result of the interaction of arts. This dynamic also corresponds to the educational process of forming general cultural and professional competencies in the field of art.

6. Conclusion

Youth as a special socio-demographic group occupies a special place in the reproduction of labor relations, i.e. in the market of the social division of labor. The atmosphere of the simultaneous presence of numerous opportunities and their inaccessibility is further aggravated by the fact that the only social model supported by ideological imperatives in any state (inviolability of private property, the prestige of people of science and education, tolerance, national dignity, etc.) has led the younger generation to strive for greater freedom of action and movement, to become aware of the value of their own private life as greater compared to corporate values in labor, and to seek creative self-realization. The model of success that had been viewed as the only possibility for decades no longer brings satisfaction to individuals. This means that the a priori desired “happiness”, a cultural concept closely related to the concept of “success” in this case, is not achieved. It should be noted here that the basis for modern youth’s self-identification became the orientation on understanding and not cognition and gaining knowledge.

Today, education has become, in the first place, a crucial socializing factor. Self-determination in life is viewed as a person’s active assertion of their position in relation to the social system of values (moral, social, communicative, aesthetic, professional, etc.), which allows them to manifest themselves in various life situations. This is directly associated with the competency-based approach enshrined in the foundations of the universal system of European, including Russian, two-level higher education. The formation, or, more precisely, the design of general cultural and professional competencies has become a demanded result of the educational process in higher education. It is possible that the development of intermedial competence has to become another component of this vital process.

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