New Definitions for Intermedia (a paper given at the Cross-Genre Poetry Festival, Greenwich, July 2010)
The object of this paper is to share a new way of thinking about Intermedia and possible intermedial aspects within the writing of poetry; intermedial aspects that are not necessarily revealed through the use of New Media components or digital or video texts. I will use examples from my own writing and research to try and explicate how poetries can uncover Intermedia that don’t have such an obvious presence in their writing or performance.
A bit about my work:- working in a poetics that educates itself through Sound Poetry, without directly continuing its project, I seek to test the interlocutory role of media in poetry and the various dynamics of voice and speech. For example I have been investigating the connectivity between The Radio Voice, analogue sound, and Sound Poetry. What relationships are at play within these units that are not simply an ‘inter’ or crossover? And what is intermedial about poetry that references them?
To answer this question I will start with the historical proposition for Intermedia as made by artist Dick Higgins in 1966. Taking the form of a newsletter for Higgings’ Something Else Press, the word Intermedia was claimed and defined in reference to the Fluxus art project. It laid out a strategy for practices that combined objects, forms and approaches to artwork in a way that ‘conceptually fused’ the discursive elements.
In contemporary terms this ‘conceptual fusion’ is now the homogenized site of the digital, where the digital interface is the meeting point – the intermedium. Like New Media, Intermedia is an umbrella term – in art school and institution speak – that generalizes the use of technology. I want to tease out meaning from the original definition, still with view to the modern interface, but with a focus on the relationships within the networks produced by cross-media work.
To facilitate this unraveling I will be drawing on the language of Michel Serres and his model of the parasite and the quasi-object, and then the extension on this made by Bruno Latour with his definition of hybrids. Both promote an alternative way of deconstructing boundaries, emphasizing the relational links between them.
First I want to look at this diagram ‘The Intermedia Chart’ made (possibly with tongue in cheek) by Dick Higgins to illustrate the process of work that probe the in between spaces of media and the extent of the cross-pollination of the Fluxus works. The Fluxus sphere incorporates the ellipses of happenings, actions music, conceptual art, mail art, concrete poetry, sound poetries, and graphic notation. The diagram is like a guide then, for a viewer encountering a Fluxus work – for example an event-score such as Alison Knowles’s Make a Salad; for them to decipher the role and origin of the score, the salad (or readymade) and the performer/audience dynamic.
We can then see that the purer forms keep a lip outside the organizing circle of Intermedia that designates the area of crossovers, where the language of one art form is transposed onto the syntax of another.
In this diagram, and indeed the thinking out of Intermedia, each circle is its own distinction, with boundaries, that indeed overlap, but have the form of objects. They share components on the basis of their objecthood and territories. By the laws of this 2-dimensional diagram the localized circles (modes of working), cross at the point of generic intentions (a musical instrument say in Robert Watts F/H Trace 1979, – takes a bow and ping-pong balls fall out of the horn?) and a new inter media or cross-genre is born.
Now, instead of a diagram with forms overlapping, I want to think about a cluster of relations. And then apply this relational network to Michel Serres’ paradigm of the parasite. The French implications on the word include a multitude of meanings – all at play in Serre’s writing – the biological, the social parasite, the infection, and the dual meaning of guest feeding from the table and also the host. And finally it also means static noise. All meanings are useful to this discourse.
In a system of circulation then, as partially represented by the Intermedia Chart, there are flows of activity, directing messages and information. A diverted flow, the introduction of a new media, is the interruption of a parasite – and so we have not shared elements – but one media parasitizing another. Performance art parasitizing a paradigm of everyday life (a happening), art parasitizing science (Science Art). So rather than medial fusions of Dada, oral traditions, concrete poetry etc, , Sound Poetry can be seen as poetry making parasitic interruptions on technology, the body, speech and language, song etc. The series of relations is a movement. A flow, with static noise.
For Serres the host and the parasitic guest make something new together – generates a new system. And the static noise within the system is not merely interruptive but creative. The noise, is what instigates change – creating multiple escape routes throughout a territory. And so perhaps I am interested in Intermedia as setting up systems of noise, and a generative diversion of relations within the process of making poetry.
In my research into radio I have homed in on two moments in its history that illustrate this. One is the broadcasted adaptation of H.G Well’s War of the Wars, directed and voiced by Orson Wells. The so-called hysteria that ensued on its airing signaled the impact of the radio voice. The event gave a new definition to radio as a media, and a new relationship between media and the voice.
The second example is the discovery of Pulsars – where data from a Cambridge laboratory radio telescope in 19— revealed regular pulsing emissions which was at first dismissed by the researcher Jocelyn Bell as meaningless interference –and she wrote ‘scruff’ on charts. When the pulses continued with similar regularity they were then cautiously/jokingly referred to as LGM (little green men). Further research located them as emissions from the core of a supernoved star – spinning on its jolted axis like a lighthouse.
This movement from scruff → LGM → pulsar; from noise → intelligent message → dead star is only in the reading through the radio media. The pulsing signal was a constant around which a system was organsied.
Serres would call the signal a quasi-object, where diverging relations to the same signal kept it in a state of flux. The noise generated a new system. The quasi-object, like a ball that lies on the ground, dormant outside definition, then becomes active when kicked or bounced, is the meeting point of relations. It is interesting to think about this in terms of a Fluxus action, where the performer revolves around a prop or score – each component being both quasi-object and quasi-subject.
I’d like to see my work, and intermedial poetry, as the setting up of such systems and allowing quasi-objects to emerge, and collapse and new ones emerge… Just as Jocelyn Bell affected noise into the system by writing scruff – and the scruff became the creative drive to change. A poetry that allows for the noise of the system, or the scruff, to be the instigator of a work, is surely intermedial – even if in its eventual transmission – it’s just voice and paper. Systems that broadcast the voice and voice the broadcast.
This framework, rather than in the DH model of an artist ‘taking this from that and that from that’ to make a new media, decentres the position of the poet, or the text, or the medium, or the voice. So it is not even as simple to say that the poem is the noise of an intermedia, nor is it simple to say what medium (or speech or language) is used in the making of a text or how the medium uses the text.
Michel Serres “I feed myself endlessly at the buffet of my language ; I shall never be able to give it what it gave me. I am the noise of its complicated harmony, or its wail. I would die from not writing; I would die of not taking my feast of words with a few friends, from whom, somehow, I get my language. I shall never be weaned from it” [Serres, 1982/2007, p. 231]
This decentering makes the matter of the poem, and its medium, a new, arguably more open space to work and write poetry in. Which is the parasite; guest or host, and what is the static? This is how this framework gives the intermedial poet more freedom, and space to explore relationships between the various dynamics at work in the work. To create a network around a quasi-object – to follow a quasi-object is to trace a network.
Bruno Latour, in ‘We Have Never Been Modern’ [1991] talks about Serres’ quasi-object as hybrids. He highlights the false distinctions between social, political, scientific and the mythical divide between culture-nature. Every daily newspaper reveals a Hybrid Network; a simple news article on a contraceptive pill is tracing a network of culture/nature, politics, fallopian tubes, drug companies and the Pope. The objects, systems and individual identities are not representatives from primary zones, because hybrids are not made up of pure districts – are not one pure ingredient combined with another. The world is nothing but hybrids, and there never have been pure forms. There are only actants impacting on and implicating connections. An actant; an actor and actions in an event-system pulls various hybrids into play (through a series of transformations). The actants in the hybrid poem may be the score, a recording technology, a radio, a microphone, a poet, a voice. The radio itself as an actant is at once a narrative, an object, a medium – “without ever being reduced to pure being”. Each actant transforms the role of the other, so that the work, the poem, the quasi-object is operating in a way that the original terminology for Intermedia doesn’t allow.
It would be Latourian to undo the line drawn between the analogue era and the digital in our approach to media. And instead to observe and experiment in our relations to the changing interfaces of each. It is important not to let the definition of Intermedia flatten these relations into a one sound.
Intermedia and Hybrids both represent a lack of borders, but this latter version maybe allows for an extended horizon. For example, it undoes the separation between the poem’s voice, the radio-voice, the TV’s voice, the tannoy’s voice. The experience of writing a poem is to see how it parasites these (hosts them, feeds on them)
A quasi-text, a hybrid poem – These non-separations, and therefore non-un-separations make it more interesting to work in, it is not so much an ‘inter’ or a between than the noise of parasites and the actants of hybrids. To not separate human subject and technological objects in the first place makes the relational networks between them more dynamic than a joining or even re-joining. I am body like an analogue sound wave, I am a node on a multi-dimensional network.
The voice continues to be pushed through new modes of media, Intermedia poetry should keep the relations influx, and keep introducing noise.
