In the introductory chapter, I argue that basic research in the area of media transformation — the transfer of media characteristics among media — is vital for further progress in understanding communication in general. I describe the aim of the study as twofold: first, to fuse a number of study areas that have been unduly separated into one overarching field of media transformation research and, second, to form a conceptual model that facilitates a analysis of transfers of media characteristics. The ultimate goal is a theoretical framework that provides a thorough explanation of what happens when cognitive import is changed or corrupted during transfers among different types of media. This chapter also includes a critical discussion of previous attempts to map the field of media interrelations.

The basis of this chapter is the distinction between mediation and representation. Whereas mediation is a presemiotic notion that captures the material process of media realization, representation is a semiotic notion designed to explain the process of meaning making. On the basis of this distinction, I launch a fundamental distinction between two types of media transformation: transmediation of media characteristics and representation of media. Whereas transmediation is repeated mediation by another type of medium (exemplified by adaptation), media representation involves the notion of one medium that represents another type of medium (exemplified by ekphrasis). Both types of media transformation may be present in simple and complex forms. This chapter includes investigations into both specific media products and qualified media: historically and culturally formed media types.

In this chapter, I explore the fundamental media properties that make media transformation possible: the transmedial basis. The most elementary but profoundly essential transmedial basis consists of the four modalities of media (categories of related media characteristics): the material, the sensorial, the spatiotemporal, and the semiotic modalities. I argue that the observation of differing modes of the modalities is necessary to pinpoint media similarities and differences and demonstrate that modal differences are essential for circumscribing processes of transmediation and media representation. The entities that are understood to be transferred across modal borders are termed compound media characteristics; although based on material mediation, these characteristics are ultimately cognitive entities. In this context, I scrutinize the crucial but problematic distinction between media form and media content.

In this chapter, I sketch an elementary model for analyzing media transformation intended to work for all conceivable media types and to simplify a methodical approach to media transformation. Whereas the proposed formula, ‘Compound media characteristics are Transferred from a source Medium to a target Medium’, is indeed exceedingly simple in itself, it is framed by developed explanations of notions such as modality modes, technical medium, and mediation, and a series of visual diagrams. The aim of this chapter is to summarize and specify various aspects of the process of transferring compound media characteristics and to point to the complications that arise as soon as one leaves the most clear-cut examples of media transformation.

This chapter focuses entirely on three empirical examples that are analyzed briefly to demonstrate the applicability of the theoretical framework developed in the previous chapters of the treatise. The examples, analyzed as target media of media transformation, are three animated short films by Jan Švankmajer: J. S. Bach — Fantasy in G Minor (1965), using music as the source medium; Jabberwocky (1971), using literature as the source medium; and Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), using painting as the source medium. These three films are methodically and narrowly scrutinized using the concepts established in the study.

The final chapter of the treatise offers a concentrated demonstration of how the theoretical notions developed in this study of transfer of media characteristics among different types of media may also be used to analyze transfer of media characteristics among similar media. I schematically map the border zones of intermedial and intramedial transfers of media characteristics. This chapter concludes with final considerations of the research field of media transformation.