Inter-mediality in Digital Media Environment

Abstract

As a medium literature has always been characterized by a strong virtual dimension: the capacity to evoke alternative worlds, an imaginary universe which may clash with the real one, or even deconstruct the opposition between real and fictional. Postmodern fiction has stressed and expanded the inter-medial aspect of literature, showing a true obsession with visual media and extra-literary codes. Sometimes it goes well beyond infinite, playful rewriting and becomes a true inter-medial phenomenon, a significant synergy between media and the arts, strongly linked to narrative strategies and symbolic values, as in the so-called maximalist novel. The digital revolution has already changed, and is still changing, the classical notions of author, text, public and intellectual property. Instead of defending the purity of a lost tradition, literature must now face the complex and multisensory logic of contemporary mediality, based on acceleration, simultaneity, and hyper-mediation. If literature is comparable to a medium, then, according to Derrida, the postmodern tendency to narrate the de-centration of the book might allow us to consider it as technology. Starting from this premise, the paper will endeavor to illustrate how the material supports of literature, i.e. the book and the printed page, are technological forms involved in a continuous process of computerization. We shall be analyzing The GRAMMATRON and Remix the Book, two projects by Mark Amerika, using examples showing how inter-mediality becomes a theoretical concept to express the complexity of aesthetical experiences in contemporary media contents.