A reflection on intermediality

Intermediality has become an often-used concept across different discourses and for this reason requires definition and contextualisation. As early as 1967, Fluxus artist Dick Higgins uses the term ‘intermedia’ to ‘emphasize the dialectic between media’, as opposed to the Renaissance idea of medium purity (Higgins 1967).    

From a formal perspective, intermediality brings about the attenuation of medium specificity and the diffusion of ‘monomedia’ through an affective interaction between and across monomedial forms (Schröter 2010, 107). Whilst it is possible for a specific medium – video, film, photography, live action - to be identified, apprehended or sensed in intermedial performances, medium specificity is always troubled by the intervention, co-presence and co-engagement of another medium. The concept of intermediality is, therefore, reified in hybrid forms associated with poststructural, postmodern and postdramatic performance practices. 

The hybridity produced by intermedial processes is often compelling at a formal level, but performance making requires an equally captivating thematic content to sustain engagement beyond the surface of audio-visual spectacle.

Phantoms of the Aperture

Phantoms of the Aperture: a reflection on autobiographical photography and live performance.

Phantoms of the Aperture is a practice-led research performance interrogating the role of superimpoisition of live video and photographic images in performance. It was staged in High Wycombe and Manchester Metropolitan university in April 2015.
          Current debates contend that the digitisation of the photographic image and its manipulation through software have brought about a post-photographic paradigm.[1] Claims that the photograph offers an indexical trace to reality are attenuated by notions that the digital image ‘privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy and heterogeneity’.[2] The aggressive nature of the photograph as index to a specific reality at a certain moment in time, a view examined by Sontag in On Photography as early as 1979, gives way to a more fluid approach that ‘emphasises process or performance’ as opposed to ‘objective truth’.[3]

Phantoms of the Aperture, interrogates these issues through a meditation on photographs of my father, Edward Kelly, and interpretations of what they might mean. In performance, I intervene with the projected photographs in an attempt to become consubstantial with the father through a technique of visual overlay, or dissolve. The compound image is a palimpsest in which the father and the son combine in a montage of past and present. Sound is used as a channel to evoke the tone and tenor of the virtual encounters, as well as a mnemonic key by which to elicit specific times.

Phantoms of the Aperture will be evaluated in a paper presentation at the T@PRA conference as part of the Performance and New technologies Working Group, Winchester, 8th September, 2015.

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[1] Mitchell, WJ, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic Era, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. P7

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.