This chapter initially offers a general discussion of the concepts of intermediality and transmediality, which is followed by a brief overview of the development of the transmedial concept that is here called transmediation: repeated representation of media traits by another form of medium. Transmediation is also considered in relation to the concept of media representation: media representing other media. After these foundational explanations, the chapter scrutinizes adaptation as a special form of transmediation and compares transmediation to transmedial narration and transmedia storytelling. In a similar fashion, ekphrasis is explored as a certain kind of media representation. Finally, the chapter advances a broad discussion of varieties of transmediation with specific emphasis on the other contributions to this volume.

The term transmedia storytelling has gone viral in media studies. But to what extent does it label a truly new phenomenon, different from the older concepts of adaptation and transfictionality? What does it really mean to tell a story through different media, and under what conditions is it desirable? This chapter examines several types of projects that could be considered “transmedia storytelling,” and it contrast three types of discourses associated with the phenomenon: the discourse of the industry, the discourse of the fans, and scholarly discourse, in the hope of distinguishing scholarly discourse from the other two and of defining some of its goals.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases project, which ran at full throttle from 2003 to 2005, is a lesser-known transmedial enterprise than most, due in part to its intrinsic characteristics and the concomitant nature of its authorship. Conceived by the art house film director and Welsh artist Peter Greenaway, it was always meant to be a multitudinous outlet for his work across a profusion of media channels. In 1997, long before Henry Jenkins’s theory of media convergence and transmedia storytelling, Greenaway stated that he wanted to reach other audiences on several media (namely the internet) by making a project with works that could operate autonomously but also interact in crossover situations. This ambitious project, which spells transmediality avant la lettre ended up being composed of only part of the intended material, but it still included five films (among them a trilogy, that here goes by the abridged subtitles Part I, Part II, Part III ), original books, a computer game and many webpages. Other materials were added over the years, not part of the original structure but complying with the overall intent of dissemination in the most diverse media possible: more books, art installations and exhibitions, theatrical plays and VJ performances. Using Henry Jenkins’s two necessary conditions for the production of “good” transmedia storytelling – world building and seriality – I want to give this project its long overdue accolade. Yet, the real importance of this project for transmedia storytelling is to be found less in its chronological precedency over others than in its art house status, which stands in contradiction to what both Henry Jenkins and Marie-Laure Ryan claim about such (blockbuster) projects and their commercial orientation. Indeed, Greenaway’s transmedia project belongs, explicitly, to the “artistic” variety that Ryan considers non-existent in practice. The Tulse Luper Suitcases, while obeying the condition of repetition with variation, which calls both for the constant resurfacing of some core narrative elements and the existence of narrative gaps, is a perfect example of a top-down transmedia storytelling project, attributable to a single creative personality. It exemplifies this so well that I contend the most effective operation of The Tulse Luper Suitcases project is the successful marketing of Greenaway’s authoritative voice, his own artistic persona spread over his own multifaceted artistic oeuvre. Regardless of the project’s point of entry, the users’ efforts always lead them to Greenaway, in a centrifugal manner.

Contemporary moviemaking indicates a predisposition for gamification, with some spectacular examples like Ready Player One showcasing how Hollywood movie productions are increasingly “gamified”. Game developers integrate cinematographic elements into their productions, creating what appears to be a form of digital cinema. This chapter is designed to question the theoretical framework of the modes and modalities of gamification and cinematization, reviewing recent transmedial exchanges between films and games. Using examples from recent film productions, the cinematic versions of games such as Angry Birds, Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed, Lara Croft and Jumanji, I analyzes the transformations happening in the interchange between the two converging media. The examples from games that have been transformed into movies allow the reconsideration of several concepts such as modality and multimodality, mode and modal experience, media specificity and transmediality. This analysis of games that have been transformed into cinematic productions, which is based on the key assumption that gamification and cinematization maintain their profound media-specific characteristics, questions the presumed transmedial nature of the two cultural mechanisms.

Tony Harrison is preoccupied in his work with the representation of suffering. He argues that the poet’s “unflinching gaze” – the continuous observation of reality – must be maintained, even in the face of atrocities. The question which looms over any work of art which encompasses extremes of suffering is the im/possibility of representation: in other words, the need to find a form for what appears indescribable, or beyond representation. Harrison’s own poetry probes boundaries and analyzes liminal experiences – doubting the power of language, and yet never abandoning it as a tool of resistance. Harrison has created some of his most powerful works in the form of film-poems, which focus the viewer’s gaze on the “human being in all its corporeality”. This chapter examines the way that the film-poem, as an intermedial form, creates a multi-layering of voices and perspectives and engages the viewer on different levels. Harrison’s “The Gaze of the Gorgon” (1992) is a film-poem concerned with war, death, and the reification of the human body. It uses a montage form in the struggle to confront “a mass contemporary audience” with a “radical theatre of atrocity”. In one sequence, “the Trojan War, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Hitler, Wilhelm II and Second World War concentration camps are conjoined” in dizzying succession. The film is also full of ekphrastic gestures: its fragmented composition includes various representations of paintings, sculptures, architecture, press cuttings and documentary photography. One ekphrastic image is set against another, creating the mirroring, self-reflexive effect of a mise en abyme. The “recycling” of art works and images from different periods only emphasizes the endless and absurd return of the horrors of war. The result is to turn the viewer into a witness who has to share in the poet’s struggle: to continue to face the “Gorgon” in their own time.

This chapter reconsiders the conventional conceptualization of ekphrasis as a “double representation”. In a case study, intertwining ancient rhetoric with contemporary agential rhetoric, we present Gordon Matta-Clark’s (1943-78) Conical Intersect (Paris, 1975) as ekphrasis in its reality-producing dimension and beyond the subjectivism of intentional actions. In our proposal, we introduce ekphrasis as rooted in agential realism and multimodal performative rhetoric. Our rhetorical understanding of ekphrasis ties in with the ancient sense of mimesis and poiesis as crafting, forming and “pro-ducing” something into the light. Endowed with the energy of affect, ekphrasis shows and “presences”, before eyewitnesses, something absent. This rhetoric of “presencing” is described in terms of the light-shedding performativity of “agential cuts”, which bring something hidden or absent into presence by way of “intra-acting” with human and nonhuman actants. Rather than following the strategies involved in translating a source into target media, we stress the embodied “intra-active” process of pro-ducing differences in an act of becoming as a foundational criterion for ekphrasis. Despite the limited attention given to the “durable media products” of photo collage and film as a part of Conical Intersect, we focus on the rhetoric of repetition and variation across the performances in different media formats. Shifting focus away from the dichotomy between live and recorded performances, we argue that the totality creates the effect of making the absent present in different materialized discourses.

The astonishing capacity for interaction between architectural environments and human beings may challenge some communication and media models. As a medium, architecture demands to be considered in terms of its procedural quality. Such process(es) may be transmediated in several ways through different literary devices, one of which is ekphrasis. By (re)introducing architecture as a qualified medium due to its historical discourse in the system of arts and its potential to perform within human communication and culture, the aim of this chapter is to discuss how ekphrasis is able to foreground the subject of architecture by unveiling architectural processes in contemporary fiction.

Self-cutting without suicidal intention is commonly understood as a way of coping with intensive and chaotic inner experiences. This chapter explores how inner experiences of chaos can be represented and communicated. Using a semiotic analytic method, three steps for making meaning of chaos, through mediation and transmediation, is sketched out. In the chapter, Elleström’s work on signs, mediation and transmediation, is used in combination with a sociocultural understanding of mediation as an act that creates meaning. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of why people cut themselves and why they continue to do so. Formulating a logic of why individuals cut themselves is an overarching goal in the study. The reasoning takes Tomkins’s notion of affect as an intense inner experience that needs to be articulated as a point of departure – an articulation that, according sociocultural theory, is achieved through mediation and transmediations. Through these processes, knowledge is gained which makes the affective experience manageable. In the analysis, examples are given of how different modes and media, with their particular capacities, can make knowledge possible. The result of the analysis shows how the qualities of basic media, such as text and imagery, give self-cutting meaning on a rudimentary level. But to achieve meaning on a more complex level, transmediation to a qualified medium is needed. In the example presented in the chapter, this medium is an internet-based forum, which appears in a sociocultural setting, in which the act of cutting yourself is made intelligible. The act is here connected to a general notion of mental ill health, of feeling bad – a socially communicable emotion. Hence self-cutting becomes a sign, a semiotic resource, for expressing overwhelming feelings.

This chapter investigates how mass entertainment venues have been transformed into digital games. Analyzing Walt Disney’s Epic Mickey, the Monkey Island adventure game series, and theme park simulators such as Rollercoaster Tycoon showcases how games can transmediate individual theme parks and rides, the cultural logic of immersion in theme parks and the economic logic of ludic capitalism, respectively. The author identifies the phenomenon of “transmediation by proxy” as an attempt to use transmediation to make the metaleptical premise of digital games more believable, and “transmediation by bootstrapping” to highlight the extranarratival motivation for some storytelling solutions in said games.

Intersemiotic translation can be described as a “cognitive pump”, a cognitive artefact, or a thinking tool that is designed to scaffold and distribute artistic creativity. Thinking tools (physical and virtual tools employed by cognitive systems) are part of the material and cultural niches of human cognition. We describe intersemiotic translation as such a thinking tool. How does it work? As an anticipatory augmented intelligence technique, intersemiotic translation works as an anticipatory and predictive tool; it anticipates new, unexpected events and patterns of semiotic behaviour and keeps the emergence of new patterns under control. From this perspective, intersemiotic translation decreases the cost of choice for an agent (artist) operating in a cognitive niche by increasing the predictability of the emergence of patterns of semiotic behaviour in that niche. At the same time, it works as a generative model, providing new, unexpected, surprising data in the target system and affording competing results that allow the system to generate candidate instances. From this perspective, intersemiotic translation increases the complexity of the cognitive niche. We explore these ideas here, taking advantage of an example of an intersemiotic translation of Gertrude Stein’s experimental prose to theatrical dance.

This chapter discusses temporal aspects of the Anthropocene – a temporal concept often related to doom, distress and lack of future hopes. The chapter is interested in the ways in which the notion of time itself (including the even more problematic notion of deep time) and human-induced changes on large temporal scales can be represented in media forms outside the conventionally scientific channels. The chapter is particularly concerned with how narrativity offers itself as a method for making time comprehensible to human beings, and in an attempt to reflect productively on this theme, Paul Ricoeur’s notions of narrativity and time are combined with classical Aristotelian concepts. Towards the end, the narrativity of computer simulations is discussed, along with four narrative ways of approaching an Anthropocene future. Even in this future, there might be hope to be found.

This chapter investigates the transmediation of Anthropocene issues from scientific and factual media such as scientific journals, news programs and non-fiction books (the source media) to poetry (the target medium). What happens to the truth claims generally associated with factual media when the form and content of that media type are transmediated to poetry? How does such a transmediation affect the poetic form? Two poems by the Swedish poet Jonas Gren are analyzed in order to answer these questions. The poems are quite different from one another; the first one is lyric and elegiac, and it transmediates only the content of the Anthropocene factual discourse. The second one is laconic and matter of factual, and here, both the form of the source media – the stylistics – and the content are transmediated. Lars Elleström’s (2014) theories on media and transmediation form the theoretical basis of the chapter. The chapter also includes a discussion of objective and subjective truth claims, as well as of the differences between poetic and scientific discourse.

Rachel Carson’s popular scientific book Silent Spring (1962) occupies a fascinating place in between the science fiction of the atomic era and the eco-horror of the hippie era and hence epitomizes several stages of complex transmediations. Carson borrowed formal and generic ideas from science fiction that she incorporated into her seminal book, merging discourses of science and popular communication. In addition, the eco-horror, or more specifically nature-on-a-rampage, film genre of the 1970s used Silent Spring as inspiration. This chapter is divided into three sections. “Silent Spring Retrospectively” examines how Silent Spring was influenced by the science fiction films of the decade preceding its publication. In “Silent Spring Prospectively,” the nature of the transmediation of both the media content and the form of Silent Spring into the eco-horror film Kingdom of the Spiders is investigated. Finally, “Silent Spring Introspectively” draws some conclusions on the actual consequences of Anthropocene representation, mediation and transmediation. These different analyses are concerned with the transmediation of the scientific discourse of the Anthropocene as a common “source” to three different qualified media products. However, as the chapter argues, there are also transmediations connected within these three mediations from science fiction to popular science to eco-horror. Therefore, in this particular form of intermedial ecocriticism, this inquiry considers both transmediations from one discourse to different media types and transmediations between different media products.