Lars Elleström

The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations

Scholars have been debating the interrelations of the arts for centuries. Now, in the age of electronic and digital media, the focus of the argumentation has somewhat shifted to the intermedial relations between various arts and media. One important move has been to acknowledge fully the materiality of the arts: like other media, they are dependent on mediating substances. For this reason, there is a point in not isolating the arts as something ethereal but rather in seeing them as aesthetically developed forms of media. Still, most of the issues discussed within the interart paradigm are also highly relevant to intermedial studies. One such classical locus of the interart debate concerns the relation between the arts of time (music, literature, film) and the arts of space (the visual arts). In the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing argued famously in Laocoon that there are, or rather should be, clear differences between poetry and painting,1 but for the moment there is a tendency rather to deconstruct the dissimilarities of various arts and media. W. J. T. Mitchell is perhaps the most influential contemporary critic of attempts to find clear boundaries between arts and media. Many important distinctions have thus been made, and then successfully erased; much taxonomy has been construed, and then torn down, and this process has led to many valuable insights — Is that not enough? What is the problem?

Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality

Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality is a collection of sixteen essays dealing with theoretical questions concerning the relations between various forms of art and new media. Intermedial ...

Media Transformation : The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media

Why are some kinds of information and qualities possible to transfer from one medium to another type of medium, whereas others resist intermedial transfer? This basic question guides the investigations in Media Transformation of communicative phenomena that are in a way self-evident and yet highly complex and difficult to explain. The book is a methodical study of the material and mental limits and possibilities of transferring information and media characteristics among dissimilar media. Whereas media such as speech, gestures, writing, music, films, and websites are clearly different, they also have common traits that enable systematic comparison. Ellestrom proposes a theoretical model for pinpointing the most vital conceptual entities and stages of intermedial transfers and illustrates how the model can be used in practical analysis.

A medium-centered model of communication

Abstract The aim of this article is to form a new communication model, which is centered on the intermediate stage of communication, here called medium. The model is intended to be irreducible, to highlight the essential communication entities and their interrelations, and potentially to cover all conceivable kinds of communication of meaning. It is designed to clearly account for both verbal and nonverbal meaning, the different roles played by minds and bodies in communication, and the relation between presemiotic and semiotic media features. As a result, the model also pinpoints fundamental obstacles for communication located in media products themselves, and demonstrates how Shannon’s model of transmission of computable data can be incorporated in a model of human communication of meaning.

Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term "photography"

Abstract Given the complex reality of media and mediation, it is reasonable to question the meaningfulness of treating photography as “one medium.” This article suggests that it is necessary to distinguish between a number of complementary media aspects. It takes an intermedial perspective, based on the belief that one cannot understand photography without thoroughly comparing it to how other media are construed. First of all, photography can be understood in terms of media of production, storage, and distribution. This paper focuses primarily on the aspect of distribution and the critical meeting of the material, the sensorial, and the cognitive. It supports the view that photography, like all other media, should be analyzed in terms of what are referred to here as the four modalities of media. Minute investigation of the material, the sensorial, the spatiotemporal, and the semiotic features of media products that are understood to be photographs makes it possible to discern essential relations to other media. Finally, photography is discussed as qualified media. Media products cannot be fully understood without considering the historical and social processes that form our understanding of how they communicate and produce aesthetic import. At least two different types of qualification dominate our present culture: photography as documentation and photography as art.

Modelling Human Communication: Mediality and Semiotics

The article delineates a model of communication among human minds that is designed to work equally well for all kinds of nonverbal and verbal significance. The model thus allows for detailed analysis of and comparison among all varieties of human communication. In particular, the transitional stage of communication, which is termed the media product, is thoroughly developed and conceptualized in terms of mediality and semiosis. By way of mapping basic media dissimilarities that are vital for differing communicative capacities, the model explains both how various sorts of significance can be transferred among minds, and why they cannot always be realized. The article furthermore suggests a semiotic framework for conceptualizing the familiar notion that communication is also strongly predisposed by surrounding factors such as earlier experiences and cultural influence.

Coherence and truthfulness in communication: Intracommunicational and extracommunicational indexicality

Abstract The aim of this article is to construct a model that demonstrates how human communication, involving all kinds of media, may not only correspond to but also put us in contact with what we perceive to be the surrounding world. In which ways is truthfulness actually established by communication? To answer this, the notion of indices is employed: signs based on contiguity. However, an investigation of indices’ outward direction – creating truthfulness in communication – also requires an understanding of their inward direction: establishing coherence. To investigate these two functions, further concepts and various elementary categorizations are proposed: it is argued that there are several types of contiguity and many varieties of indexical objects, which invalidates the coarse fiction–nonfiction distinction.