CoMEDIA electrONica: Performing intermediality in contemporary theatre

Theatre Research International

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 34-45

  Boenisch, Peter M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449128436     PISSN: 03078833     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883303000130     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. See Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217-52
2. Discussions of 'Intermedialität' started to dominate the German academic discourse on theatre in the early 1990s, in the beginning without equivalent concepts abroad. Only recently, the translation 'intermediality' and the adjective 'intermedial' have emerged internationally
3. See Christopher Balme, Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1999), p. 154
4. Christopher Balme, 'Robert Lepage und die Zukunft des Theaters im Medienzeitalter', in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Christel Weiler, eds., Transformationen. Theater der Neunziger Jahre (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 1999), pp. 133-44
5. For the concept of medial specificity, see Noel Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially part I, chapter 2, 'The Specificity of Media in the Arts'
6. Carroll traces this concept back to the academic quest for media-strategic purity in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961)
7. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962)
8. John Wilson, 'Film Literacy in Africa', in Canadian Communications, 1, 4 (Summer 1961), pp. 7-14
9. Quoted in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, pp. 36ff
10. Derrick De Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture. Investigating the New Electronic Reality (Toronto: Somerville House Publishing, 1995), pp. 16ff
11. My peculiar typography of the term 'electrONic culture' stresses the reference to the Post-Gutenberg cognitive formation, distinguishing that cultural concept from electronic technology. At the same time, the upper-case 'ON' graphically reminds the reader of the inescapable ON-switches on today's computer accessories
12. See Derrick De Kerckhove, 'A Theory of Greek Tragedy', in Sub-stance, 29 (1981), pp. 23-36
13. and 'Theatre as Information-Processing in Western Cultures', in Modern Drama, 25, 1 (1982), pp. 143-53
14. De Kerckhove, 'Theatre as Information-Processing', p. 146
15. See the group's homepage, www.nestTV.com
16. All following quotations from Ishiyama are taken from an interview with the author on 17 March 2000 in Munich
17. For a brief description of their 'untitled event' at Black Mountain College, see RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. 126-7
18. 'We never treat the performance as a message conveyer. As we cannot escape from the time axis, we focused first on the time.' (Ishiyama)
19. See Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun (London: Quartet, 1998)