[iDC] TRANSMEDIA

[twsherma at mailbox.syr.edu]

TRANSMEDIA

The term transmedia is often used to describe the way a corporation
establishes an idea by implanting similar messages across a range of media
concurrently. An idea (or image or sound) is implanted simultaneously in
video, television, radio, print and through the Web, thoroughly infecting
a media environment. Audiences make connections between multiple
representations of the same idea. Ideas are reinforced as various content
sources resonate and are firmed up through redundancy. The goal is
establishing a presence, and ultimately a saturation of the environment.
Logos, slogans, and simple narratives often emerge as dominate messages in
transmediated media environments. Content with reduced complexity is
easier to recognize.

A transmedia approach to pushing information across and through media can
also be employed as a strategy for artists, whether artists are working as
individuals or in cooperatives. Today many artists choose not to
specialize in a particular medium. In fact, increasing numbers of
contemporary artists choose to work in a range of media that effectively
embody the ideas (or images and sounds) they want to convey. Artists are
free to choose media that will effectively convey particular ideas and
forms. For instance, e-mail and the Web are extremely effective for
conveying messages in written texts (as are books, magazines, and most
recently cell-phones). Radio and telephony are excellent media for the
spoken word. Magazines, websites and billboards are great platforms for
photographic images. Galleries and museums are wonderful places for art
that looks like art.

Artists in the 21st century are information providers. They must
understand media environments, knowing how media function and overlap, and
be able to create information that moves easily from one medium to
another. No medium is pure and discrete. All media overlap and shadow each
other. Digital media technologies shout out this interconnectedness. The
translation and migration of ideas from medium to medium is a generative
process. Ideas moving across media change shape and transform into new
ideas, often flourishing in new contexts. Audiences associated with
particular media, say radio or blog audiences, are assembled through
transmediation. An audience that likes to listen is mixed with an audience
that prefers to read and write, etc., etc.

Many individual artists work in multimedia or engage in intermedial
strategies. Individual artists with limited media knowledge and skills may
cooperate with others with different knowledge and assets to form
transmedia collectives. The goal is to assemble teams of people with a
broad range of expertise and skills. Collaboration across a range of media
makes social and political goals attainable. Whether a single individual
is as psychologically complex as a 'society' of minds, or a dozen people
choose to indulge in a unified, disciplined version of group-think, intent
is permitted to build and sweep into action in an environment ripe with
transmedia activity.

The key is to understand a media environment as an ecological context.
Transmedia artists, whether operating individually or cooperatively, must
recognize opportunities to plant ideas and adopt strategies to orchestrate
the presence and growth and evolution of ideas in local or global media
environments. Whether one works conceptually or perceptually, it is
important to study the way a message moves through and resides in various
media. The amplification, replication, distortion or dampening that occurs
when ideas are placed in various media is the result of content becoming
form.

An aesthetics of transmedia must consider environmental factors. An artist
is not only responsible for the balance of content and form in his or her
messages (how visual and sonic and symbolic languages are formed to
transmit ideas), but for the contextualized impact of these messages in a
media locale and throughout all adjacent media. The actual place where an
audience experiences an artist's work has always been a defining aspect of
the work. Whether one encounters the work in private or public, in an art
gallery, on a personal computer screen, in a book, on the street or
through a network, the context of exposure is part and parcel of the work.

When environments are considered, issues like pollution and waste must be
confronted. Artists can be guilty of excessive packaging, or of
distributing empty messages, an art devoid of content. Corporations barge
into media environments by purchasing space and time and bombarding
audiences with redundant, obnoxious messages, saturating environments with
brute force. Artists seldom have the financial resources to buy their
audiences. Instead artists must craft elegant, efficient messages and
maximize opportunities to place these refined, but generally underfinanced
'objects' of thought and perception within niches in environments that
will foster their growth and replication. There is no guarantee that
artists will take the high road. Seduction and exploitation are synonymous
with seeking and holding attention. Self promotion is an art form in this
era of identity theft and zero privacy.

Artists must think about ways of maximizing the impact of content and
understanding economies of form. When it is advantageous to recycle, do so
with a twist. Create value out of discarded waste. Update or spin the
media all around us. Always be suspicious of copyright legislation. Access
to the media environment is critical. Cannibalize your own
work--multi-version it whenever it makes sense to do so. Survival is
diversity. Diversity is survival. Transmediation is the name of the game.

The environment you inhabit and work in will always determine your media.
Why limit yourself unnecessarily as an artist specializing in a single
medium? If you want to effectively interface with your environment, drive
your form with content, and look for opportunities to connect with
audiences. Make the most of every opportunity to effect the environment as
an author (active literacy in all media involves reading and writing).
Work across and through media. Consider taking a transmedia approach to
creating an effective presence in your local and global media environment.



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Professor Tom Sherman
Syracuse University
Department of Transmedia
102 Shaffer Art
Syracuse, New York 13244-1210
U.S.A.

tel) 315-443-1202
fax) 315-443-1303

e-mail:  twsherma at mailbox.syr.edu


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