Mieke Bal, 'Citational Aesthetics: for Intermediality as Interrelation'
This lecture is part of the IMS lecture series 'Meeting Media Minds – Critical Legacies of Lars Elleström' (MMM). The MMM is a series of open, online lectures intended to commemorate and discuss the work of Lars Elleström.
This lecture is in English
We are happy to invite you to attend the third talk in our open lecture series Meeting Media Minds: Critical legacies of Lars Elleström on Wednesday 11 May. This week we are visited by Mieke Bal, who is a cultural theorist and critic as well as video artist.
You are recommended to watch Bal's essay film, It's About Time! Reflections on Urgency. The film is available here: http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/its-about-time/
Abstract: Citational Aesthetics: for Intermediality as Interrelation
One aspect of intermediality is the spreading out, through time, geography, cultures and modal specification, of the new media product through the incorporation of bits and pieces from others. The kind of intermediality to be examined for this lecture can be called “citational” or “quotational”. It is characterized by recognizable fragments taken elsewhere. It is a recasting or reframing of past words and images, sounds, or even styles in new, later or contemporary media products. This lecture is honouring and remembering Lars Elleström in tune with his modesty, by simply using the terminology that his important theoretical vision has generated. I will take Lars’s conception of intermediality through four short cases. Each case shows specific ways in which this relationship between media products is vital to the new artwork as well as to the source from which it is derived, and for which, due to the mutuality of time (as opposed to chronological linearity) it thereby becomes, in turn, a source. Such quoting media products thus present theoretical issues as they are implied in the representational practice of the past, yet can only be perceived through the detour of the present, which transforms both the issues and the preceding works. The concept of quotation specifies a kind of intermediality, which will lead us beyond the common understanding of quotation. I will explore how this practice redefines and complicates the notion of quotation itself, as a crucial aspect of media products as well as transfers, and transformations, from one media product to another, through inflections imported by their respective media.
How to attend
You are welcome to attend the talk via zoom. Please sign up for our email list to receive the link here: https://lists.sunet.se/listinfo/publik.ims
The link is sent out one hour before the talk. If you do not receive the link automatically, or if you do not wish to register for our email list, you are welcome to email us at ims@lnu.se.
Profile picture photo credit: Lena Verhoeff