International conference: 24-26 October, 2013, Cluj-Napoca, Romania,
Sapientia University
deadline for applications: 20 May, 2013.

In the past decades “intermediality” has proved to be one of the most
productive terms in the domain of humanities. Although the ideas regarding
media connections may be traced back to the poetics of the Romantics or
even further back in time, it was the accelerated multiplication of media
themselves becoming our daily experience in the second half of the
twentieth century that propelled the term to a wide attention in a great
number of fields (communication and cultural studies, philosophy, theories
of literature and music, art history, cinema studies, etc.) where it
generated an impressive number of analyses and theoretical discussions.
“Intermediality is in” („Intermedialität ist in”), declared one of its
pioneering theorists, Joachim Paech, at the end of the 1990s. However, we
may also note, that since then other theoretical approaches introduced even
newer perspectives that have not only revitalized the study of media
phenomena in general but have specifically targeted the emerging new
problematics raised by the new electronic media. Facing the challenge of
the daily experiences of the digital age, discussions of media differences
or ‘dialogues’ highlighting the ‘inter,’ the ‘gap,’ the ‘in-between,’ the
‘incommensurability’ between media are currently being replaced by
discourses of the ‘enter’ or ‘immersion,’ and the ‘network logic’ of a
‘convergence culture’ in which we have a “free flow of content over
different media platforms” (Henry Jenkins). At the same time the turn
towards the corporeality of perception in all aspects of communication has
also shifted the attention from the ‘interaction of media’ towards the
‘interaction with media,’ from the idea of ‘media borders’ towards the
analysis of the blurring of perception between media and reality, of humans
and machines – media being perceived more and more not as a form of
representation but as an environment and as a means to ‘augment’ reality.
Nowadays media continuously mutate, relocate and expand, while connections
between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media are being established with incredible
fluidity. Accordingly, we may ask: what are the new perspectives for
intermedial research in the digital age? While media are continuously
changing and expanding, how can we relocate the “in-between”? If we
consider ‘intermediality’ first and foremost – as suggested by Jürgen E.
Müller – as a “research concept” (Suchbegriff), how can this concept be
effectively applied to the media we see around us today? And if we believe
that the “ecosystem” of contemporary media can be understood not as a
unified digital environment that nullifies differences, but as a thriving
and highly diversified, “multisensory milieu” (Jacques Rancière) that poses
new challenges both for the consumer/producer and the theorist, how can we
address these challenges? How do media differences persist and how do these
differences still matter despite voices advocating the so called
“post-medium condition”?

As the former Nordic Society for Intermedial Studies launches its own
expanded, international format (International Society for Intermedial
Studies / ISIS), we think it is timely to address once more the major
issues for which this society exists, and to invite participants to examine
new forms of ‘intermedialities.’ In doing so participants may address a
broad range of questions relating to ‘old media’ and ‘new media,’ and their
possible interactions, focusing on the wide array of intermedia phenomena
and new type of relationships that new media have produced, but also on how
pre-digital media relations can be re-evaluated, and how historical
paradigms of intermediality may already be distinguishable viewed from the
standpoint of the contemporary media landscape.

Proposals may address (but are not limited to) the following questions
either from a theoretical point of view or through concrete analyses:

* Media on the move? Media relations produced by expansions and relocations
of media (e.g. “the virtual life of film,” the expansions of the
“photographic” and of the “cinematic” over other media, e-literature,
etc.), the emergence of mobile screens, the fact that media use is more and
more related to moving in the literal sense of the word: mobility and
navigation.

* Relocating the ‘in-between’: intermediality, inter-sensuality,
multimodality and interactivity, assessing the contribution of cognitive
theories (and neuroscience), phenomenology and post-phenomenology to the
study of understanding interactions of media and interactions with multiple
media.

* Performing in (new) intermedial spaces: intermedial performance in art
and society. Being ‘in touch’ with reality – being ‘in touch with media:’
researching new (trans)media practices.

* Intermediality and new forms of digital storytelling: new perspectives in
transmedial narratology, new media and narratology (e.g. narrativity and
e-platforms, games versus “old” media etc.), the aesthetics of the
intermedia flow, of complex, network narratives generated by the
experiences of the new media age.

* Modelling and mapping intermedialities: historical paradigms of
intermedial relations (pre-modern, modern, post-modern intermediality); the
aesthetics and ‘politics’ of intermediality before and after the digital
age; historical research on intermediality related to media migration,
cultural heritage and changing relationships between production,
distribution, and perception.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

* HENRY JENKINS, University of Southern California (USA), author of
Convergence Culture: where Old and New Media Collide (2007), currently
co-authoring a book on “spreadable media.”

* JOACHIM PAECH, University of Konstanz (Germany), author of Menschen im
Kino. Film und Literatur erzählen (2000), Literatur und Film (1997),
PASSION oder Die EinBILDungen des Jean-Luc Godard (1989), as well as
several seminal articles on the theory of intermediality in film,
literature, and new media.

* MARIE-LAURE RYAN, independent scholar, Colorado (USA), co-editor of
Intermediality and Storytelling (2010), author of Avatars of Story
(Electronic Mediations) (2006), Narrative across Media: The Languages of
Storytelling (2004), Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001), etc.

Deadline for the submission of proposals: 20 May 2013.
We will notify you about the acceptance of your proposals by: 1 June 2013.

Submission of proposals: please complete the submission form that you can
download from the conference website:
http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/rethinking-intermediality-in-the-digital-ageand
send it as an attachment to the following address:
2013.rethinking.intermediality@gmail.com

More information at the website:
http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/rethinking-intermediality-in-the-digital-age