Convergence in the Digital Age: Utopia or Dystopia?

The idea of the digital age has to be fundamental to any meaningful discussion of contemporary interartistic and intermedial practice. However, it is not without its problems:

Should we only talk about artistic practices with a clear digital component? If we do, does this not risk overemphasising the technological aspect of interartistic practice at the expense of other factors? When did the digital age begin and how does it relate to postmodernism?

I follow David Forgacs who, in his article “Scenarios for the Digital Age” (2001), pinpointed the start of the 1990s as the beginning of media convergence in Italy. Forgacs talks about a triple convergence. The first, he says, is technological: text, sounds and images are digitally encoded. The second is economic: mergers and synergies begin to take place in the media economy. Finally, there is a revolution in consumption as audiences begin to receive media that were once distinct in the same place. These are, of course, transformations discussed at length by Henry Jenkins in his phenomenally successful book, Convergence Culture (2006).

The digital component is clearly key to any discussion of interartistic practice in contemporary Italy. In Italy, convergence is experienced not simply as a striking feature of mass contemporary culture, but is subject to experimentation by elite or semi-elite artists, such Wu Ming and Scrittura Industriale Collettiva. It is also being theorised both by artists and in the academies. So we have to talk about it as a phenomenon that cuts across many different sectors of society.

In the first phase of our Interdisciplinary Italy project, we spent quite some time in our workshops and panels thinking about how the digital is effecting change across the arts. We explored how traditional forms of media were being extended through narrative interaction, multimodality, and the remediation of genres across media. We talked too about the effects of this on authors, who are often drawn to co-writing, and on audiences who participate in the evolving reality through practices like fan-fiction.

However, I don’t believe that digital technology is the only factor to influence contemporary interartistic practice. I hope that in this project we will learn not just about the effect of digital technologies – however important that is – but will also analyze the way in which contemporary artists of all kinds and writers are exploring artistic mediums beyond their own to create hybrid works and new art forms. Only by doing this will we reach the right kind of balance, one that reflects how art is being created today.

The steady shift across the 20th and 21st centuries towards ever more evident transmedial and interartistic practices must be seen in terms of the embedding within Italian, and Western society more generally, of ideas of pluralisation, fragmentation, democratisation, loosening of hierarchies, experimentation, border crossing, and holistic viewpoints – all of which were all slowly emerging across the arc of the twentieth century. We can see it too as reflecting a certain pessimism about how suitable each of the individual arts are in expressing human feelings and ideas, a concern, which while longstanding, began to emerge particularly strongly under early 20^th century modernism. So, it is both an embracing of an idealistic, even utopian, vision of a holistic, non-hierarchical and democratic society, but also an acknowledgement of an impoverishment of any single artistic tool to reflect meaning.

CLODAGH BROOK (adapted, in part, from “Disciplines, inter-disciplines and multimediality”, in Marco Gargiulo, L’Italia e i media, 2014)