International Conference on AFFECTIVE INTERMEDIALITY

Our conference aims to encourage studies that explore an emerging paradigm in intermediality studies centred on "affective intermediality", and we hope to initiate a friendly, scholarly debate regarding the relevance and productivity of this approach. The necessity of such an "affective turn" of intermediality studies arises from viewing intermediality as an intricate and highly performative process of communication between humans within a particular context of material reality and historical time, not just as a "transfer", a "combination" or "reference" of media characteristics or representations, i.e. not only as something that happens between media and affects media, but as something that affects us. Accordingly, we propose "affective intermediality" as a key term for a perspective over the experience of the in-betweenness of arts and media that pivots from concentrating on formal operations of media transgressions to examining the sensuous excess and complex affective performativity of cinematic intermediality and of intermedial artworks in general.
Cognitive and narrative theory has long considered cinema to be essentially an "emotion machine" (Ed S. Tan) capable of offering "ethically illuminating experiences" (Carl Plantinga). The great cinéphile philosophers of our times, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou both speak of cinema in affective terms, highlighting how the medium "overflows" itself (Rancière) towards the other arts and reality, or, reversely, allows reality and the arts to contaminate it, to "flow through" it, "using and magnifying them", whilst "according them a distinctive emotional power" (Badiou). However, the wide spectrum where intermediality intervenes into cinema's "affective regimes" is yet to be fully untangled. Furthermore, cinema serves as an eminent example and model for our proposed investigation and it may open up the field of analysis towards other contemporary media that are increasingly "cinematic". Cinephilia mingles with the enjoyment of the affordances of our high-tech devices. At the same time, cinematic liveness, presence, and affectivity itself have all acquired new meanings in our times, as digital mediatedness has become a part of reality and essential for personal interactions.
Looking at a variety of samples, we may find that the tensions in-between arts and media, which are inherent to any forms of intermediality, can reflect our affective responses to the world. Moreover, intermediality can also become an effective tool in a critical, ethical and emotional engagement with old and new media alike and with vital problems of contemporary reality.
Although we launch the call from the perspective of a research project on the art of moving images, we would like to encourage participants to cover as much as possible of the depth and breadth of the idea of "affective intermediality" and invite contributions from all fields of intermediality studies.