#maraike m. marxsen

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 Thinking of adaptation as intertextual dialogism aims at eliminating hierarchies between art forms by proposing that every work is bound in an infinite web of relations (in several media artworks, pop songs, for instance, play a key role). The idea of a network also questions the concept of authorship and characterizes each adaptation as a (re)writing that is as valuable as the hypertext.  Referring to the relationship between film and literature, Eikhenbaum emphasizes that although both are specific in their modes of expression, they are not isolated: “None of the arts are fully bound entities, since syncretic tendencies are inherent in each of them; the whole point is in their interrelationship, in the grouping of elements under one sign or another” (Eikhenbaum 1973 [1926], 124f). The context of intertextuality frames the process of adaptation as an interart mechanism triggered by cues in the literary text.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 According to Eikhenbaum, then, the difference between the language of film and that of literature is that literature moves from speech to visualization and film from visualization to internal speech. Yet instead of limiting film to a pure visual art form, Eikhenbaum values the subtitle, the word, as being “buried so deeply that it must be divined” (ibid., 125). Considering both ‘languages’ with regard to the cognitive responses of the recipient can become the bridge between them. These ideas resonate with Kamilla Elliott, who further develops Bluestone’s theory by looking for structures of analogies between literary tropes and the filmic images concerning the reader’s or viewer’s respective cognitive response (cf. Elliott 2003, 209–222). Elliott does so in order to “navigate between the visual and the verbal within as well as between signs and arts,” suggesting that “if a verbal metaphor raises mental imaging, then conversely and inversely, a pictorial metaphor raises mental verbalizing” (ibid., 221). Media artworks may not simply translate the literary devices of their precursors or borrow lines, characters, or plot elements; equivalences may also be found in the effect they have on the readers, and respectively the viewer’s, experience of perception.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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Literariness is not only an excessive complication of language; it also is the experience of an aesthetic surplus.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 “When I speak of poetry,” he remarks, “I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality” (Tarkovsky 1989, 21). His theory is reminiscent of Shklovsky’s differentiation between a ‘film of prose’ and a ‘film of poetry,’ in other words, “the necessity […] to work not in the prosaic, plot-centered form, but in the ‘compositional’, poetic form” (ibid., 101). Tarkovsky links an understanding of poetic structuring not only to the subjectivity of the filmmaker but also to the effects of the poetic film on the viewer: “Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active,” and it is this “associative linking, which allows for an affective as well as rational appraisal” (ibid., 20).

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 The defamiliarization of written text in media art does not initially interfere with the supposed telos of script—legibility—but must be regarded as the performance of its inherent auto-aisthetic potential. The literariness of script could then also be understood as ‘literality’ (cf. ibid., 11). Despite almost compulsive efforts “to define, compare, and distinguish pictorial and textual representation” (Gross 2010, 277), strict borders between them remain undefended. They “are challenged by artists; by theories of literature, art, and culture; and not least by subversive acts of reading” (ibid.). The fraying of the arts is not an exception; the call for purism is.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 Script is usually regarded as a medium that neutralizes itself into transparency rather than one that acknowledges the implications of its material presence. However, it is precisely the visibility of script that constitutes its “central paradox”:  “A theory of the mediality of script has to be based on this double dynamic of visibility and legibility. The visibility of script becomes manifest through the body of the graphia. Whether it veils itself or, as in the avant-garde aesthetics of laying bare, displays its nudity, the script-body will always intrusively protrude into the act of reading. As the irreducible other of the sign, this visible, palpable body—that puts itself on display, presents itself to the gaze, threatens to divest itself of its referential function—provokes an aesthesis of the script. (Strätling and Witte 2006, 7)”

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 In contrast to Baldessari’s emotionally detached alphabet performance that foregrounds the sound of words and the arbitrariness of meaning, Rosler performs a feminist kitchen alphabet by displaying exaggerated emotions that shift between boredom and aggression, “hack[ing] out the inventory of women’s repetitive domestic slavery” (Elwes 2005, 42). The artist-performer uncovers the violent potential inherent in these kitchen tools as well as the sexism of television programming and thus forcefully decodes their semiotics. The performative correlation of ‘alphabet’ and ‘semiotics’ makes clear that the production of meaning, sign processes, and communication are not neutral. The presentation uses the alphabet as a “pseudo-scientific ordering” (Westgeest 2016, 39), and thus emphasizes that the alphabet is not a natural given but a taxonomy based on habitualized and therefore unnoticed conventions.  Similarly, genres rely on the reiteration of specific formulas. The ‘cookery show’ genre is based on a set of rules that enforce and therefore produce gender norms; it is a site of gender performativity. “Performativity is a matter of reiterating or repeating the norms by which one is constituted: it is not a radical fabrication of a gendered self,” Judith Butler noted: “It is a compulsory repetition of prior and subjectivating norms […]. The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodiment of norms, is a compulsory practice, a forcible production” (Butler 1993, 22). In this context, (re-)iteration is not simply an aesthetic device. Rosler is bound to perform gender according to a discourse that precedes her, yet her performance attempts to expose that discourse by rebelling within it.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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Media art not only challenges our assumptions about art and culture, but also about the scope of academic disciplines. It invites exploration, testing, and pushing beyond disciplinary boundaries. In other words, media art itself calls for the revitalization of academic perception. It is not only the arts that may mutually elucidate each other; an opening up of the disciplines may also bring undiscovered knowledge to light. The exploration of the literariness of media art has demonstrated the general need for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Such an approach to research does not haphazardly fuse a mix of concepts into an undefined pulp. Rather, it brings to the table specific knowledge to help recognize complex structures—in other words, it helps to point to similarities in difference.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 [...] immersion must be understood as a two-way process between an artwork and the viewer. On one hand, the aesthetic object demands that the viewer combines the signals that address multiple perceptual channels. On the other hand, the viewer needs to direct his or her perceptual and empathetic capacity towards the object (cf. Curtis 2008, 97). This echoes Eikhenbaum’s concept of inner speech as well as film theorist Vivian Sobchack, who insists on the activity of the viewer. Along with her observation on the perception of film, the media art experience can be considered a dialog and dialectic between viewer and artwork (cf. Sobchack 1992, 23).

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 Because some of the footage matches the content of the poems, nebel could be seen as as a mere illustration. Yet this interpretation overlooks the subtler layer of self-referentiality offered by Müller’s film. This reflection is foregrounded in the sequences showing the disintegration of a book, and by the marks of damage and decay of the analog film material. Books and analog film are storage media that can record thoughts and moments, and although they are prone to decomposition, they could be preserved indefinitely. In the digital age, paper and celluloid are often regarded as obsolete in terms of production and distribution, yet for long-term preservation, analog film stock is (still) regarded as superior to digital data (cf. Fossati 2009, 64f). In contrast, digital texts and images seem to be ‘forever new’ until they suddenly break down and disappear, while analog books and films show their age through signs of wear. By using archival footage and excerpts from his own home movies—meant to preserve the memories of his childhood—Müller’s nebel takes on the inverted temporality of Jandl’s gedichte an die kindheit and highlights the complex life cycle of printed books and celluloid film.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 Robert Stam adapts the established Poststructuralist concept of intertextuality to theorize the ‘palimpsestous’ relationship between an audiovisual adaptation and a literary text. Transferring the concepts to adaptation and amalgamating them, Stam points out:  “Adaptations […] can take an activist stance toward their source novels, inserting them into a much broader intertextual dialogism. An adaptation, in this sense, is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process. The concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces. All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions of other texts. (Stam 2000, 64)”

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 ‘Appropriation’ is my translation of the German term Aneignung. Aneignen means ‘to make one’s own’ what was initially ‘alien.’ According to the intention of the word, the aim of all hermeneutics is to struggle against cultural distance and historical alienation. Interpretation brings together, equalizes, renders contemporary and similar. […] Appropriation is the concept which is suitable for the actualisation of meaning as addressed to someone. It takes the place of the answer in the dialogical situation, in the same way that ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ takes the place of ostensive reference in the dialogical situation. The interpretation is complete when the reading releases something like an event, an event of discourse, an event in the present time. As appropriation, the interpretation becomes an event. (Ricœur 2016, 147)

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 Media art’s deviations are reminders that genre conventions are not only in constant flux but are themselves material for artistic explorations. Allusions to experimental literary genres, such as visual poetry, as in Cia Rinne’s archives zaroum, particularly attest to an emphasis on formal playfulness and interaction with an alert spectator. In general, the allusions to genre conventions and disruptions are not means in themselves, as some artworks suggest cultural critique, others even express a clear political agenda. Rather, they reveal the underlying structures of culture, and lay bare ideas and situations that may have become invisible and automatized with regard to class, race, gender, or sexism. As the discussion of poetic subjectivity has shown, genre is used to diminish boundaries by integrating the spectator as an active part of the artwork, addressing his or her senses to encourage critical examination of that which is mediated. Viewers are made aware of the habitualized ways of engaging with art; they are sensitized towards techniques that construct everyday surroundings as well as the technology that helps to shape them.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 The avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren bases her understanding of poetic film on a media-transcending concept of poetry or, rather, poeticness (cf. Orphal 2014, 48). Poetry, also understood by Deren as a specific “way of structuring” (Deren in Maas and Vogel 2000 [1953], 185), creates a ‘vertical structure’ in literary texts as well as in films that confronts the horizontal, linear order typical of drama or prose:  “The distinction of poetry is its construction (what I mean by ‘a poetic structure’), and the poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in what probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means. (ibid., 174)”

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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  “The specific technique of poetry is, in particular, activating primary and secondary linguistic forms (phonetic and rhythmic prosodic forms, grammar—that is, morphological and lexical semantic forms—as well as phraseology, tropes and figures of speech), uncovering them, making them productive, densifying them, reshaping and to exhibiting them. […] The specific characteristic of a poetic text is that it significantly increases the number of structural levels of speech, which make it possible to establish complex relationships between those structural elements. (Helmstetter 1995, 30)”  Both literariness and poeticity in the narrow sense are created through the intensified and concentrated use of the linguistic material. The shaping of primary and secondary linguistic forms results in an increased density and complexity of their ‘interrelationships.’

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art

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 [...] Bolter and Grusin’s notion of media operating according to a “double logic” of remediation is especially useful. It implies that media oscillate between ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’—or transparency and opacity. Immediacy describes the state of a medium representing ‘as if through a window,’ thus evoking the impression of a “transparent, perceptual immediacy, experience without mediation” (ibid., 22f), a simulacrum of “unmediated presentation” (ibid., 30). The contrasting strategy results in a state of ‘hypermediacy,’ which the authors consider to be the counter-pole of immediacy (cf. ibid., 34 and 37), when the material medium-as-technology is perceived: “In the logic of hypermediacy, the artist […] strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgement” (ibid., 41f). The viewer becomes aware of the medium itself, which consequently interrupts the seamless transparency of the representation. The terms of immediacy/transparency and hypermediacy/opacity align with some of the fundamental concepts of literariness and defamiliarization. As the perception of media constantly shifts between the two poles, media artworks oscillate between a state of foregrounded materiality and short impressions of transparency. Moreover, transparency may be linked to Eikhenbaum’s concept of inner speech: The effect occurs when the viewer connects the impressions of the screen in his or her mind, unaware of being mediated. The moment of disruption occurs when an element is foregrounded and the formation of inner speech is hindered, when a device is laid bare and renders the medium opaque.

Claudia Benthien, Jordis Lau, Maraike M. Marxsen, from The Literariness of Media Art