Panel Statement

Panel: Intermedia Art in the Digital Age

Intermedia dissolves artificial boundaries between media, either through a poetics that operates on symbols or through extending formal compositional techniques. While not all intermedia art crosses sensory modalities, cross-modal form is a time-honored attempt to make sense of a world which we experience in all our senses. Correspondences among the senses frequently bear symbolic or visionary meanings. Computational technology enables new forms and disciplines for intermedia composition. The historically developed poetics of intermedia provide a context where the potential meanings and cosmological viewpoints of formal experiments can emerge. Digital technology vastly expands our ability to (re)create cross-modal experiences. This paper will examine some of the possibilities suggested by new technologies and old visions.

• Paul Hertz teaches in the Department of Radio, Television and Film and develops interactive multimedia applications for the Collaboratory Project at Northwestern University, USA. His work with intermedia art began thirty years ago, in Spain, without computers. As a Visiting Artist in the Center for Art and Technology he helped to develop Northwestern’s first program in virtual reality art. Currently he is working on a VR-based intermedia performance, funded by a grant from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at Northwestern University.

Full text (PDF) p. 122-123