Three Interviews with Scholars who Defined the Field

Beginning from the 1990s, intermediality has not only been a highly productive concept that generated a great deal of analyses and theoretical writings that contributed to the understanding of media hybridity and interart connections, but has also proved to be a somewhat nebulous term that semiotics and media studies repeatedly attempted to define and categorize once and for all, or quite the contrary, that was “opened up” through different philosophical approaches. Moreover, our immersive experiences within an environment dominated by digital media, as well as discourses regarding media archaeology, convergence, the interconnectedness of humans and technology, art and life, etc., continually shift our vantage points and challenge us to rethink intermedia or interart relations in the context of the complex new relationships that define our contemporary culture. The aim of this series of in-depth interviews is to perform a kind of informal “archaeology” of researches connected to questions of intermediality through presenting trajectories of thought that lead to the diversity in the state of the art in intermediality studies today. In each of these interviews, I would like to present different methodologies and topical issues that have been addressed by researchers working in various places of the world. I have asked three of the most renowned scholars (Lars Elleström, Lúcia Nagib and Joachim Paech), whose works have had a wide-reaching impact in the field, to explain what drew them to the study of intermedial phenomena in the first place and how they see the relevance of intermediality and its most important questions today. I also wanted to find out how their different cultural or theoretical backgrounds have informed their work.1