Media on the Edge of Nothingness: Visual Apostrophes in Lettrism

It is commonly recognized that intermedial works of art may mediate information in ways that individual media are not capable. The intermedial work plays with different modes of signification and produces effects impossible for language alone. Peter Wagner defines intermediality as the practice of describing one medium by means of another. 1 Wagner refers solely to ekphrasis, although intermediality is a complex phenomenon and requires that ‘medium’ is defined. Lars Elleström defines ‘medium’ based on the shared, yet dissimilar, qualities of media as communication. 2 A‘medium’ is a construct born and delimited in the process of definition. Thus intermediality — the engagement of more than one medium — highlights the constructedness of medial borders and establishes a kind of ‘border zone’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.