The Intermedial Cluster

What is it about?

Avant-garde aesthetic movements react on and appropriate new technological media in a process of breaking down the boundaries between different media and different “arts,” in an attempt to generate meaning from the sheer materiality of the artwork. Avant-garde artworks will therefore by necessity be marked by media in different ways, at the same time as these art forms are processual, performative and transgressive. One of the prime Swedish examples of this avant-garde strategy is Åke Hodell’s many realizations of his manuscript Lågsniff. The manuscript, written in 1963, was in the form of a text sound-composition, which means that Lågsniff, media modalities involved. Later the manuscript was realized as a series of of art works, I would like to suggest the term “intermedial cluster.” The point of departure for my discussion is the DVD, a remediation of the TV-cluster that this DVD represents: the package tour and warfare, and on two thematic foci in the film: media and memory, and man as automaton.

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Why is it important?

This article discusses avant-garde artwork as not simply consisting of one often physical work, but as an intermedial cluster, where the artwork is the totally of instances of the different nodes in the cluster, ie. in the case of Åke Hodell’s Lågsniff the manuscript, the printed book, the performances, the film, the DVD etc. Since avant-garde art is processual and performative, it is necessary to se to the totality of different realizations to experience it, and to understand that not one realizations is the artwork per se, but all the realizations (actual as well as potential) in toto.