Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication "Transmedia Navigation." But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.
Dick Higgins, an artist with the Fluxus movement in the 1970s, referred to his pieces as "intermedia," suggesting that they were not part of any existing media practice like drama, music, or poetry, but rather in between them, emphasizing "the dialectic between the media." For example, read the score to his "Constellation Number 4":
Constellation Number 4
A sound is made. The sound is to have a clearly-defined percussive attack and decay [such as produced by plucking strings, hitting gongs, bells, helmets, or tubes]. Each performer produces his sound efficiently and almost simultaneously with other performers' sounds. Each sound is produced only once.
The performance ends up as a set of performers playing a single note, almost simultaneously. What looks like a musical event to the audience is scored like a theatrical event, with no traditional musical notation in sight. Other Higgins works have instructions like "Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!" or "Volunteer to have your spine removed," which are either confusing or impossible. (The "Scream!" piece is called "Danger Music Number Seventeen," and is usually performed by someone screaming until they lose their voice. Seriously!) These pieces that cannot be performed are clearly intended to be read, and again stretch the boundaries of their media.
A major difference between "Danger Music Seventeen" and a transmedia story such as the Pokémon franchise is the focus on media. While Pokémon exists across a variety of media, "Danger Music" is about the variety of media. A performer encountering the instructions is prompted to think about how the piece could possibly be interpreted, drawing on modes of communication from multiple media traditions. Pokémon, on the other hand, is not specifically about the fact that it is on television, in a comic book, video game, or on a deck of cards.
Intermedia is about production and the generation of new media types (many of the works of Fluxus composers like Dick Higgins have come to be classified as "Happenings" or "performance art"), while transmedia usually describes the reception of a story through different media channels. Intermedia suggests that we might reconceive New Media Literacy as not only the ability to read and write stories across media, but also the ability to identify the spaces between the media and creatively open them up to enable new media forms.
