Search Results (12)

This article examines the transcultural and transmedial transformation of the kalavinka motif along the Silk Road, situating its development within the interpretive framework of the Indian kinnara/kinnarītradition. It asks how a figure associated with wondrous sound and devotional praise in Buddhist cosmology came to function as a wearable ornament without losing its religious identity. Through close formal analysis of Dunhuang murals from the Tang period (618–907 CE), the study identifies three interrelated visual processes that prepared the motif for mobility across media: the fusion of gendered pairs into an androgynous form, the progressive elongation and ornamental stylization of the tail, and the reorientation of bodily pose into compact, suspension-friendly configurations. These mechanisms are then examined in relation to eleventh-century painted and excavated materials, including donor adornment in Western Thousand Buddha Cave 16, a Khara Khoto scroll, a Liao (916–1125 CE) gold kalavinka earring, and a Western Xia linked-pearl headdress. Comparative visual and material analysis shows that kalavinka imagery circulated in parallel across mural, painted, and metal media, where scale, material, and bodily placement re-coded rather than erased its sacred associations. The study argues that this process is best understood as material translation, and it proposes a model for linking formal change, sensory affordance, and religious function in the arts of the Silk Road. Full article

UNESCO’s 2030 Agenda recognises education as a strategic pillar for sustainability, underlining the fundamental role that educational institutions need to play in equipping students with theoretical and practical skills geared towards developing best practices in today’s media ecosystem. However, recent technological transformations have not only failed to guarantee the responsible use of media but have also highlighted new challenges that need to be addressed from a media literacy perspective. This paper proposes a methodology that, applied in the fourth and final year of a journalism degree course, is based on relating the filmography of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne to news content through transmedia strategies. This methodology, employing a tool called Transmedia Quest, aims to foster students’ application of critical reading of reality that leads to an awareness of threats in terms of inequality and the lack of guarantees for fundamental rights. Several conclusions can be drawn from the results, which not only help to understand the tool’s usefulness in this specific study, but also highlight the opportunities it offers for its use in future projects that incorporate similar content, approaches, and methods, in line with both transmedia strategies and the Sustainable Development Goals. Full article

This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our central argument is that The Longing deploys antimimetic temporal mechanics, interpassive forms of bookish play, and ideas of existentialist resistance to explore themes of time, agency, and existential longing, thereby offering a reflective space for dealing with neo-liberal, post-pandemic, polycrisis-stricken angst. To come to terms with the multidisciplinary complexities of the game, our paper adopts a triadic analytical methodology interweaving insights from postclassical, medium-specific narratology, platform-comparative literary analysis, and existentialist philosophy. This combined approach transcends existing ludoliterary frameworks and accounts for divergent forms of play. Our first focus is the game’s multiscalar temporal layering and the strategies it requires from players to “ludify” antimimetic frictions between those layers. This is followed by an examination of how the game constructs a bookish player by interweaving ludexical processes of reading, unreading, dis-reading, and writing (in) books and other printed documents. Finally, we turn to the game’s complex interpassive relationships between player, player-character, and game world, highlighting in particular the role of walking, collecting, building, and searching as acts of catharsis and rebellion, and examining failure as a valid ludic alternative to survival and happiness. Ultimately, our analysis renders distant play as a form of parasocial resistance, which in The Longing manifests as an affective and philosophically fine-grained combination of more-than-human relationality, care, and relief vis-a-vis the nothingness of lost hope. The game thus offers a new form of e-literary engagement, placing books and their “unnatural,” transmediated affordances front and center while questioning the capitalist undercurrents of contemporary literary media and critiquing a culture of acceleration. Full article

As technology continues to shape how students read and write, digital literacy practices have become increasingly multimodal and complex—posing new challenges for researchers seeking to understand these processes in authentic educational settings. This paper presents three qualitative studies that use multimodal analyses and visual modeling to examine digital reading and writing across age groups, learning contexts, and literacy activities. The first study introduces collaborative composing snapshots, a method that visually maps third graders’ digital collaborative writing processes and highlights how young learners blend spoken, written, and visual modes in real-time online collaboration. The second study uses digital reading timescapes to track the multimodal reading behaviors of fifth graders—such as highlighting, re-reading, and gaze patterns—offering insights into how these actions unfold over time to support comprehension. The third study explores multimodal composing timescapes and transmediation visualizations to analyze how bilingual high school students compose across languages and modes, including text, image, and sounds. Together, these innovative methods illustrate the power of multimodal analysis and visual modeling for capturing the complexity of digital literacy development. They offer valuable tools for designing more inclusive, equitable, and developmentally responsive digital learning environments—particularly for culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Full article

Transmodality—the process of transforming a text or section of a text into another mode or modes—enables readers to engage deeply and imaginatively with literature through interpretation and response. It is a valuable pedagogical approach in initial teacher education, where pre-service teachers are developing dispositions towards reading and cultivating knowledge of literature. In this article, two case studies are presented of undergraduate and post-graduate courses that aimed to engage pre-service teachers with children’s literature by asking them to respond to texts through embodied and multimodal modes. The work is underpinned by theories that highlight the role of semiotic modes in reading and writing, with a focus on the gestural, spatial, and auditory modes. The first case study examines the ways in which gesture and space worked to create multimodal ensembles that communicate and make meaning. The second case study considers pre-service teachers engaged in transferring meaning across linguistic and aural modes as they read a classic literary text and composed a soundscape. In both cases, we consider how mode-switching developed and demonstrated pre-service teachers’ aesthetic, cognitive, and affective engagement as part of their embodied experience with literary texts. This research has implications for the way teachers and teacher educators can inspire engagement with children’s literature through embodied and multimodal ways in English curriculum contexts and initial English teacher education. Full article

This essay aims to examine the transformation of the traditional boundary between actantial roles inside fiction in literature and transmediality, to understand how this shift enables potential encounters between complex characters. This study focuses on contemporary complexity novels, where characters attempt to break free from their author-creators, as they offer a particularly compeling dynamic for investigation. It will examine this type of complex narration while also exploring the fluidity of contemporary storytelling in literature and transmediality, which introduces innovative narrative structures. Novels that reflect on the relationship between authorship and characters provide valuable insights from both a theoretical-literary and transmedia perspective, which deserve to be examined in light of the changes in the structure of contemporary narratives. Full article

This article is an introductory essay to the Special Issue “A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art”. It starts with a short overview of the terminological discussion about intermediality as a concept and its relationship with medialities with other prefixes—such as mixed, intra-, multi-, and transmedialities. So far, intermediality has been discussed less by art historians than by literary scholars. This introductory essay argues that critical analysis of intermediality in contemporary artworks may offer additional insights for investigation of the issues addressed in these artworks. The case studies in this Special Issue underscore this view. As a kind of kick-off, the second part of this essay includes a short case study that focuses on two artworks by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué in order to provide insight into how intermedial relations can act as metaphors for the sociopolitical relations addressed in his artworks. Applying philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory”, philosopher Edward S. Casey’s concept of “absorptive mapping”, and anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view of living beings as consisting of a bundle of lines facilitates the highlighting of the sociopolitical aspects of intermediality in Mroué’s artworks. Full article

From genre to interdisciplinary and trans-medial artistic practice, “autotheory” has attracted great attention for formally distilling a troublesome contradiction of dualistic opposition between theory and practice in arts and attempting to solve it. In this paper, autotheory is understood as the joining of reflective thinking through the “collective self” and the reflective thinking of “theory”. Based on Lauren Fournier’s research, this paper investigates two kinds of art practices in contemporary Chinese art. The first developed from the art movements of the late 1970s to the late 1980s, when there was a rethinking of collective selfhood in Chinese art circles. This “collective self” in Chinese culture expands the parameters of autotheory’s individualized, autobiographical “self”, as described by Fournier. The second example of autotheory discussed in this paper explores contemporary Chinese feminist art. Due to its cultural background and historical trajectory, different dimensions of individualized autotheoretical practices have developed in feminist contemporary art in China in the new era. The case studies presented in this paper show the flexibility of autotheory as a methodology, the complex conditions it applies to, and the potential to generate theory from expanded notions of “self” in art practice. Full article

During the 2010s, there was a “utopian moment” as regards the structure of media, owing to the social space created by digital culture, transmediality, and the different ways of participating in public debate. What is expected from digital information transmitted via the Web and social media is action and interaction with subjects in the public space or square. Accordingly, this paper analyses the descriptive assertions and proposals of the viewers of newscasts of Spanish television between 2014 and 2017, as regards how they perceived and represented the public space, mediatised by information through spatial metaphors. Specifically, it is based on the analysis of the transcriptions of five discussion groups and four interviews, whose aim is to examine two polarised spatial metaphors—the traffic labyrinth and the open square—and a series of demands relating to the role of journalists, media ownership, viewers’ access, and the quality of democratic society. Full article

Self-reflexivity is a significant characteristic of Austro-German cinema during the early sound film period, particular in films that revolve around musical topics. Many examples of self-reflexive cinematic instances are connected to music in one way or another. The various ways in which music is integrated in films can produce instances of intertextuality, inter- and transmediality, and self-referentiality. However, instead of relying solely on the analysis of the films in order to interrogate the conception of such scenes, this article examines several screenplays. They include musical instructions and motivations for diegetic musical performances. However, not only music itself, but also music as a subject matter can be found in these screenplays, as part of the dialogue or instructions for the mis-en-scène. The work of Austrian screenwriter and director Walter Reisch (1903–1983) will serve as a case study to discuss various forms of self-reflexivity in the context of genre studies, screenwriting studies and the early sound film. Different forms and categories of self-referential uses of music in Reisch’s work will be examined and contextualized within early sound cinema in Austria and Germany in the 1930s. The results of this investigation suggest that Reisch’s early screenplays demonstrate that the amount of self-reflexivity in early Austro-German music films is closely connected to music. Self-referential devices were closely connected to generic conventions during the formative years and particularly highlight characteristics of Reisch’s writing style. The relatively early emergence of self-reflexive and “self-conscious” moments of music in film already during the silent period provides a perfect starting point to advance discussions about the musical discourse in film, as well as the role and functions of screenplays and screenwriters in this context. Full article

Thelma Johnson Streat is perhaps best known as the first African American woman to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. However, in the 1940s–1950s she inhabited multiple coinciding roles: painter, performer, choreographer, cultural ethnographer, and folklore collector. As part of this expansive practice, her canvases display a peculiar movement and animacy while her dances transmit the restraint of the two-dimensional figure. Drawing from black feminist theoretical redefinitions of the human, this paper argues that Streat’s exploration of muralism, African American spirituals, Native Northwest Coast cultural production, and Yaqui Mexican-Indigenous folk music established a diasporic mapping forged through the coxtension of gesture and brushstroke. This transmedial work disorients colonial cartographies which were the products of displacement, conquest, and dispossession, aiding notions of a new humanism at mid-century. Full article

In their article ‘Transmedial worlds: Rethinking cyberworld design’, Klastrup and Tosca show that the core elements of a Transmedial World are: Mythos, the lore of the world, the central knowledge necessary to interpret and successfully interact with events in the world; Topos, the setting and detailed geography of the world; and Ethos, the explicit and implicit ethics and (moral) codex of behaviour. Though other terms are used, in essence similar distinctions are made in game worlds and storyworlds. In this article, I will first discuss the game world and the storyworld and show that the storyworld in games is different from that in non-interactive narrative media. I then focus on the Mythos and Ethos elements in the world of the Assassin’s Creed series as both govern the moral choices in the series and, by doing so, subtly direct the behaviour of the player. Full article