In this enlightening conversation, our PIs discuss key concepts and findings from their collaborative research. They explore the meaning and significance of ‘intermediality’ in the Italian artistic context, shedding light on how this concept has evolved from the early 20th century to the present day. The interview highlights the book’s innovative structure, which focuses on seven pivotal years from 1900 to 2020, each representing a significant moment in the development of intermedial practices in Italy.

Our PIs delve into the role of technology in developing new media and intermediality, while emphasising that technological progress is not the sole driver of intermedial evolution. Moreover, the conversation addresses the implications of intermedial art forms for teaching Italian Studies, prompting a reflection on how these new approaches might reshape traditional curricula and pedagogical methods.

This interview not only provides valuable insights into the book’s content but also offers a glimpse into the collaborative process behind this groundbreaking research. Indeed, the three PIs share their experience of collaborative authorship, discussing both the challenges and rewards of this approach to academic writing.

The full text of the interview is available here.

L'articolo Intermedia in Italy: Barbara Burns talks to C. Brook, F. Mussgnug, and G. Pieri about Their New Book sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Co-authors: Clodagh Brook, Florian Mussgnug and Giuliana Pieri

We draw your attention to the publication of our new book, which explores the development of intermedial practices in Italy across the 20^th and 21^st century.

The book is published by Legenda and available on open access (i.e. free to download) at the following link: https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/vc-6

Abstract: In Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, the arts drew suddenly closer: a curtain was raised on a magical new hybrid art, cinema. There followed an escalation in the birth of new hybrid genres like sound art, video art, graphic art and performance art and new sites and technologies for hybridity were developed: television, video projection, museums as white boxes, computers, the Internet. Some of Italy’s best- known artists and groups got involved in various ways, from the Futurists, to Bruno Munari, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Gruppo 63, Gianni Toti, Niccolò Ammaniti, and Wu Ming. Many artists we know less well often charted this in-between creative world. This book is rooted in the hypothesis that the ever-closer relations between artistic practices have been a key cultural force driving creativity since the start of the twentieth century. It attempts the first large-scale mapping of this force, providing a new framing, and along the way attempts to uncover some of the reasons behind this change.

Authors: Clodagh Brook is Professor in Italian at Trinity College, Dublin; Giuliana Pieri is Professor of Italian and the Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, London; Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative literature and Italian Studies at University College London.

L'articolo New Book: Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Venue: Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) 1-3 September, 2022

Organising committee: Prof Clodagh Brook (TCD), Dr Cecilia Brioni (TCD)

Scientific Council: Dr Adele Bardazzi (TCD), Dr Marco Bellardi (TCD), Prof Clodagh Brook (TCD), Dr Cecilia Brioni (TCD), Dr Eleonora Lima (TCD), Prof Florian Mussgnug (UCL), Dr Emanuela Patti (University of Edinburgh), Prof Giuliana Pieri (RHUL)

The 6th conference of the International Society for Intermedial Studies focused on concepts of ‘inbetweenness’ and ‘moving across’. These two spatial metaphors capture the tension between stasis and fluidity that underlies all intermediality. The need to map these shifting spaces, to chart directions, and to see where, and how, these in-between zones connect to other neighbouring spaces was addressed by many of our delegates.

As intermedial ‘in-betweenness’ becomes a mainstream, rather than marginal, phenomenon, and as academic disciplines themselves have become more fluid, this was an exciting opportunity for international researchers to explore and re-explore this territory together. The conference was structured by 4 main themes which enabled us to return to some very familiar ground, as well as to bring intermedial questioning to less familiar areas of inquiry:

• In-between and across disciplines
• In-between and across geographies, ecologies and cultures
• In-between and across arts
• In-between and across technologies

The conference, with its attention to the geographical and postcolonial terms ‘Mappings and contact zones’, also enabled us to spotlight intermedial theories and practices arising from Modern Languages, drawing on the political, and national, aspects of border crossings.

The conference was attended by over 100 international delegates, with representation from universities in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the US.

The first keynote was given by Ravi Sundaram, Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSCS), Delhi (India). Entitled ‘Paper, Intermedia and the Political’, it proved to be a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of the place of paper in the era of social media platforms: what happens when millions of paper documents circulate as digital screen shots? The lecture explored the place of paper in populist and right-wing nationalist reconfigurations of the political aesthetic.

The second keynote was provided by Nicola Camerlenghi, Associate Professor at Dartmouth College (US). ‘Virtual Presence: Between and Beyond Medieval Artistic Media,’ gave us a marvellous insight into an immersive and navigable diachronic virtual reality model of the Basilica of St Paul in Rome. He stressed the potential of this technology for more robust understanding of cultural artefacts, greater kaleidoscopic thinking, and increased cross-disciplinary fluidity.

The conference was marked by the sudden, tragic loss of Lars Elleström – founder and leader of ISIS and Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnaeus University – who passed in December 2021. Many delegates paid tribute to the intellectual and personal affect that Lars had had on them, and a plenary roundtable and a panel were dedicated to commemorating his life and work. Paying tribute to Lars Elleström in her closing remarks Anne Gjelsvik drew attention to the words ‘new directions’ in the conference title. Anne said that the conference had been a fitting tribute to Lars, and that that the Intermedial Society would not halt, but would proceed after his passing towards new directions. Research internationally would continue to be influenced by his seminal theoretical work.

Our warm thanks go to Bord Fáilte Éireann, who generously sponsored this conference, to Trinity College, and especially SLLCS, for supports, and to Trinity catering for providing excellent sustainable options. We especially thank the Interdisciplinary Italy research group for their very concrete work in shaping the conference, the ISIS board, and all our wonderful attendees and speakers.

L'articolo Report on 6th Conference of The International Society for Intermedial Studies (ISIS) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Through sessions combining short talks with interactive activities, we aimed to tackle three questions:

• How does co-creating research work in practice?
• How can we as researchers think creatively about opportunities for collaboration in, and emerging from, our own research?
• How can co-creation be leveraged to support us in winning research funding grants?

Clodagh Brook’s talk, which opened the Summer School, discussed different models of co-creation that could be applied to our research, by underlining the non-linearity of the process of co-creation and the advantages of bringing collaborators on board right at the start of a research project.

The subsequent sessions were divided onto three main areas, namely relations with education, industry and the arts. The sessions on education, led by Cecilia Brioni and Giuliana Pieri, discussed experiences of collaboration with undergraduates and secondary-school students, namely Giuliana’s ‘Interart in Schools’ project and Cecilia’s project to bring her research on YouTube into a collaborative university classroom. The session on industry was led by Martina Mendola, a recent graduate of Trinity with a PhD in Italian who now works for Accenture. She discussed her experience as a researcher in the industry and how relevant our work on identity can be in an industry setting. The two sessions led by Derek Duncan and Simone Brioni respectively dealt with co-creation of outputs with artists. Derek shared with us his experience of collaborating with photographer Mario Badagliacca for their book, Italy is Out. Simone talked about his documentary, Oltre I bordi, which uncovered Italy’s fascist-era colonialisation through a box of family photographs.

The second part of each session was designed to encourage participants to experiment with different kinds of creative collaborative activities, including designing a module with co-creative elements, making a pop-up exhibition, brainstorming research questions using post-its, discussing how to collaborate with artists as early career researchers, and creating the storyline for a documentary.

The final activity of the Summer School was a research sandpit, where participants were asked to work in groups to write the rationale for a research grant and identify the intended outputs for a collaborative research project that would fit each participant’s research interests and involve a co-creation element. The three groups produced three projects: ‘Before Ferrante. Women Writers between Visibility and Invisibility’, ‘The Aest(h)etics of memory in Urban Spaces’ and ‘Minority Engagement in the Metaverse: Voice and Visibility’. Results of the sandpit were then presented to a panel of judges, from Trinity’s Research Office and Trinity’s Tangent: Ideas Work Space, who decided the winning project. The prize was supported by the SIS.

Overall, the Summer School was very well received. Participants particularly appreciated its learning-through-doing approach that enabled them to experiment with different techniques of, and approaches to, co-creation. Our speakers actively participated in all activities, providing useful feedback on the ideas that were shared in the small group activities.

The Summer School enabled us all to carve out two days to reimagine our research and teaching in a more collaborative and impactful way.

L'articolo Report of the 3rd Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School: Collaboration and Co-Creation in Italian Studies sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Convergence Culture in the Age of Covid-19: A Fever Dream

by Professor HENRY JENKINS

(July 2, 17:30-18:30 GMT+1)

AND

Simulating the Past: From Analog to Digital (and Vice Versa)

by Professor MASSIMO RIVA

(July 3, 17:30-18:30 GMT+1)

The events are hosted by the Interdisciplinary Italy research team as part of the Second Summer School The digital turn: When, why, and how to embrace it (1-3 July 2021), organised by Prof Clodagh Brook (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Eleonora Lima (Trinity College Dublin).

To attend the lectures, please register via Eventbrite at these links:

Prof Henry Jenkins’s public lecture: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-henry-jenkins-public-lecture-interdisciplinary-italy-summer-school-registration-158891642179?keep_tld=1

Prof Massimo Riva’s public lecture:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/prof-massimo-riva-public-lecture-interdisciplinary-italy-summer-school-registration-159551682377

L'articolo Henry Jenkins + Massimo Riva Online Public Lectures (Interdisciplinary Italy Summer School) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

YouTube logo

Thanks to this project, I will continue my research on Italian youth cultures across time, which began with my PhD. My thesis investigated representations of Italian young people in youth-oriented magazines, films and television programmes in 1965-75, the period that is commonly regarded as marking the birth of a distinctly Italian youth culture. By focusing on visual and written descriptions of young people’s style trends and bodily practices, I outlined the expectations and anxieties that were projected onto this emerging social category. I subsequently concentrated on representations of youth in novels set in Bologna in the early 1990s, focusing on the role of spatial elements, like the city, in the construction of generational identities.

For a cultural historian like myself, to shift the focus from the past to the present is challenging. However, I believe that several assumptions emerging from my previous research can be applied to contemporary youth. First, just like gender, ‘youth’ is a performatively constructed category: it is the reiteration (in the media and elsewhere) of similar practices, acts, gestures, and language that defines what ‘youth’ is, rather than reference to biological age. To analyse popular media discourse around such practices, acts, gestures and language helps us understand what the meaning of ‘youth’ is in different time periods, both as an ideal and as a social subject.

Second, popular media representations contribute to homogenising young people’s practices, values, and desires. Both in the past and in the present, youth has been constructed as a homogenous group, an ‘imagined community’ with common interests as well as common struggles. My current research investigates whether young people’s supposedly greater control over representation in social media allows for a disruption of the fictional homogeneity of ‘youth’ in contemporary societies.

Third, style and the body are fundamental elements through which young people convey their subjectivity and collective identity. Commercial trends can visually express political and social claims, are mostly based on transnational influences, and may question naturalised ideas of sex and gender. In my current project, I investigate whether representations of young people’s style and bodily practices on YouTube mirror a change in ideas about nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Italian contemporary society.

Italian youth and style: Beat band Equipe 84 in the 1960s (left), and pop rock band Måneskin in 2019 (right).

Fourth, ‘the design, definition and control of spatiality is an active ingredient in the often contested social processes of construction [of youth cultures]’, as Doreen Massey has argued (‘The spatial construction of youth cultures’ in T. Skelton and J. Valentine (eds) Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, 1998). My current research explores what happens when the space where youth is socially constructed shifts from a physical – the city, the nation – to an online location. What are the consequences of virtual encounters within Italian youth? How does localised content produced in Italian interact with material created in English? How is content in Italian received by Italian and foreign Italian-speaking audiences? These are some of the questions that I will address in my project.

Yet, analysing contemporary youth requires the use of theories (such as Postfeminist Theory and Social Media Studies) and methodologies that I have not yet employed. For example, while my previous studies were based on archival research, I will now make use of interviews to analyse Italian YouTubers’ self-representation strategies and student surveys to examine young people’s reception of YouTube Italia content. By matching my previous expertise with the employment of new theoretical and methodological approaches, my research hopes to enrich our understanding of contemporary representations of Italian identities in popular culture. The examination of social media content as a cultural text aims to help overcome stereotypes, by giving new media the cultural relevance they deserve.

L'articolo Researching Italian Youth Across Time: An Interdisciplinary Approach sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Designed by pch.vector / Freepik

Of course, this critique is justified, necessary and productive. Nevertheless, it will never be possible to abandon these criticised concepts. I don’t think that their extraordinary longevity is primarily a sign of people’s inability to face a complex reality and an inclination to fall back on easy solutions – that is, simplistic concepts – even though the concepts are indeed sometimes used in simpleminded ways. Instead, concepts insist on forming our thoughts because they correspond to certain basic perceptual inclinations and fulfil vital cognitive needs. Because of our embodied minds, deeply formed by our experiences of a material world where things are definitely inside and outside of each other, where objects and bodies are clearly constantly transferred in space, and where we perceive palpable borders between various areas and materials, we simply cannot avoid thinking in terms of form/content, transfer and borders. Perceiving our own body in the world, we perceive it as a form containing internal substance and sensations, moving around in space and encountering borders of all sorts. And cognition does not appear out of nothing, but it is built on, and evolves from, such perceptions.

Therefore, spatial thinking is vital for cognition in general, including the conceptualization of media and media interrelations. Although sometimes misleading, there is no way of getting rid of ideas about form and content in media, transfer of meaning among minds or among different media, or borders between media. I’d rather argue that these concepts are indispensable for any effort to describe and interpret media and their interrelations. Used in considered ways, they help us to conceptualize complex phenomena. A concept such as media borders is not ‘only metaphoric’, understood as a substitute for something more real; it is ‘necessarily metaphoric’, because we cannot escape the deep and inherent similarity between the outer world and our cognitive spaces.

L'articolo Media Borders in Our Minds sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The presence of creative practitioners was key in injecting a different perspective and approach to the objects of study. Conference papers often focus on the outcomes of research, presenting them as a (more or less) stable set of results. Creative artists were both more openly focussed on the process of making/doing, and more at ease with using the conference as a place to experiment and try things out: if the process is as important as the outcome (or indeed it is the outcome itself) a space opens up in which one is more willing to take greater creative and intellectual risks.

This is why, rather than presenting a traditional paper, I ran a creative thinking lab: ‘Beyond Logos and Techne: Creative Responses to Italian Feminist Art’. The focus was a series of works by the Italian visual poet and pioneer video artist Ketty La Rocca (1938-76) titled Riduzioni in which she transformed an initial photographic image, until only the memory traces of the image were left.

The workshop participants were both academics and artists. We used a selection of photographs from the BSR Photographic Archive: iconic Roman monuments and sculptures, and equally iconic artists who resided at the BSR—Winifred Knights and Barbara Hepworth. The selection of the images was in itself a moment of dialogue and co-production with archivist Alessandra Giovenco. During the creative lab we did our own Riduzioni (using paper, pen and ink) and displayed them at the end of the day in the conference exhibition. The outputs were thus both individual and collective. The intention was to reflect on the role of practice as critical thinking by responding to La Rocca’s work and shifting our default position of critical thinking through words. It was a modest attempt to place techne rather than logos first, in line with La Rocca’s creative and theoretical preoccupations, nudging our work towards collaborative creative critical thinking.

L'articolo Creative Thinking Labs: Logos, Techne, and Critical Thinking sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Where is Modern Languages in digital culture and digital arts? And where in digital culture in Modern Languages?

SYMPOSIUM REPORT

The ‘digital turn in the humanities’ has inevitably raised a number of questions about how digital technologies have transformed research, teaching and dissemination in Modern Languages. While hybridity still tends to dominate our teaching, research methods and objects of study – we mix traditional/analogue and new/digital practices to acquire and disseminate knowledge, as well as develop skills – digital technologies are significantly changing the way we understand literacies and pedagogy; publishing, research materials, our objects of study, and the notion of ‘culture’. The one-day international symposium, Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages, co-organised by Giuliana Pieri and Emanuela Patti as part of the ‘Digital culture & digital creativity’ programme funded by HARI (Royal Holloway), explored theories, methodologies and future perspectives in the field of ‘digital culture studies’ in Modern Languages. It brought together scholars in Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, as well as artists, media arts historians and curators, in order to discuss new informed ways and methods for approaching the study of digital culture and creativity in Modern Languages.

Emanuela Patti kicked off the symposium, by introducing the main topics of the day. As emerged in the report recently published by Paul Spence and Renata Brendao, Survey of Attitudes towards Digital Culture & Technology in the Modern Languages, digital tools, including apps and social media, such as Duolingo, Memrise, Wordreference, Skype, Youtube, Twitter, have become an integral part of teaching languages; digital tools have facilitated multilingual and multicultural learning; they make authentic content such as TV and radio programmes, interviews, more accessible; they allow more independent forms of self-study; they encourage students and teachers to develop new forms of academic writing and presentation through intermedia genres such as blogs and video-essays; they provide new immersive experiences in the language and culture through virtual and augmented reality apps. Digital methods have also been integrated in our research practices in many ways, including enhanced critical curation, augmented editions, cultural analytics, aggregation and data-mining, visualisation and data design, large use of digital audiovisual texts and imaging, and so on. In 2017, Claire Taylor and Niahm Thornton published a collaboratively written article, together with other colleagues in Modern Languages, titled Modern Languages and the Digital: The Shape of the Discipline, which identified some of the key areas in our research and teaching practice where the “digital” had a remarkable impact. These included data-driven projects, digital archives, digital ethnography, users and interfaces, the research process, and the digital as object of study.

As scholars and teachers of modern languages, cultures and societies, we are in fact increasingly exposed to texts and ‘signifying practices’ which are digitally-born or mix media, as it typically happens in the era of convergence culture. The ‘digital as object of study’ thus includes a variety of new forms of digital creativity and cultural phenomena which inform contemporary culture: for example, the broad range of new digital genres which have developed across different arts, media and communication practices, such as lit-blogs, electronic literature, visual novels, interactive films, web series, animation, digital arts, whose aesthetics, textuality, dynamics between authors and audiences require new critical tools. At the same time, these genres construct meanings, identities, and claim forms of otherness in dialogue with the imaginary of national and international high cultures, mass cultures, folk cultures, and avant-garde cultures. On the one hand, we are thus dealing with new intermedia genres which intersect multiple semiotic systems; on the other, with a variety of forms of remediations and transmedia storytelling.

Not unexpectedly, the definition of ‘digital humanities’ is constantly expanding, in order to reflect this evolution. One of the questions discussed at the symposium, following up on an article written by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman, Where’s the ML in DH? And Where’s the DH in ML? The Relationship between Modern Languages and Digital Humanities, and an Argument for a Critical DHML, published in the Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2017, was in fact how Modern Languages and Digital Humanities intersect and can collaborate. Another question raised at the symposium was what digital culture and Modern Languages have in common and how ML-ers can contribute to the analysis of contemporary digital culture and creativity. This built upon a 2018 forum discussion published in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, titled Digital Culture Studies: National and Transnational Perspectives in Modern Languages, in which Emanuela Patti, Claire Taylor, Massimo Riva and Erika Fülöp explored what ‘digital culture’ means for Modern Languages, how Modern Languages scholars (ML-ers) can contribute to ‘digital culture studies’, and, ultimately, how this contribution could reshape the discipline. A third question of the symposium was how digital arts, media art history and modern languages intersect and could collaborate. The boundaries between electronic literature, digital arts and post-cinematic genres, are increasingly blurred. The original definition of ‘electronic literature’ as ‘works with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer’ includes forms of kinetic poetry and computer art installations which could easily fall in the categories of digital arts, post-cinematic genres and digital performance. For scholars and teachers of modern languages, it is interesting to explore how these genres reflect local, regional and national cultures and how they relate to the historical avant-gardes at a national and international level. At the same time, in some cases, they reach exactly the opposite effect, by overcoming local, regional, national boundaries. The new media scenario encourages us to re-assess how the imaginary is formed as intermedia and transmedia practices and how modern languages and cultures contribute to this process. At the same time, interesting perspective emerge in how languages are used in media arts and digital literature.

In her keynote speech (chaired by Sarah Wright, RHUL), Digital Humanities, digital culture, and Modern Languages, Claire Taylor (Liverpool) explored the points of interconnection between the three interdisciplinary fields of Modern Languages, Digital Humanities, and Digital Culture Studies. Starting from an overview of recent developments in Modern Languages research that have engaged with the digital, including the question of nation-state as a (relatively) fixed category, of unity between language and territory, of the national canon, and the critique of area studies, the talk explored how theories of digital culture have raised important questions also about Modern Languages as a field. Subsequently, the talk examined the crucial contributions that Modern Linguists can make to debates in Digital Humanities and Digital Culture Studies, in particular as regards the insights that Modern Linguists can offer regarding co-creation; a commitment to community engagement; a contestation of Anglophone models; and a linguistically- and culturally-specific cultural studies approach to digital materials. To what extent we can still adopt a cultural studies perspective to digital culture and creativity today was another aspect considered in Taylor’s talk. A productive dialogue between humanities-based approaches and cultural studies-based approaches that currently characterises debates in Digital Humanities and Digital Culture studies alike, emerges especially, as Taylor argued, in the area of aesthetics, technologies and ethics.

The following two papers were chaired by Guyda Armstrong (Manchester). In his talk, Key elements of a critical Digital Humanities-Modern Languages (DHML) research agenda, Paul Spence (King’s College) explored how DH would benefit from greater sensitivity to ML epistemologies, within a ‘critical DHML’ approach, and he examined the challenges we face in realising such a vision. Spence emphasised how digital methods are not culturally/linguistically neutral; it is thus crucial to investigate how they operate in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The route to digital diversity would not only imply the development of multilingual digital methods, but also closer collaboration between DH and ML in terms of developing critical digital literacies for staff and students. Spence showed some of the results of the recent survey, published with Renata Brendao, Survey of Attitudes towards Digital Culture & Technology in the Modern Languages, which address a variety of areas such as teaching, research, dissemination, and he then presented some ongoing and future projects. 

 In her talk Digital culture in French Studies in the UK, Erika Fülöp (Lancaster) first analysed what ML research and teaching can do for digital culture: for example, recognising the possibility of cultural specificity in the digital space; countering the stereotype of a homogeneous global culture in the digital age; and facilitating the development of a comparative perspective on digital cultural studies and on digital arts and literature specifically. Viceversa, digital culture studies can contribute to Modern Languages by offering insights into the ways in which the digital media impacts the societies and cultures we study both through the culture-specific modes of presence of dominant multinational platforms and through national or language-specific services; as well as refining the concept and approaches to cultural identity in the Digital Age. Fülöp moved on to present current teaching and research projects related to digital culture and creativity in French Studies and beyond, highlighting the main methodological approaches used, as well as the benefits and challenges of some of these experiences. 

The second part of the day was devoted to digital arts, digital literatures and media art history, looking at how they raise relevant questions for Modern Languages. In his keynote speech (chaired by James Williams, RHUL), Telegraph, Airmail, Satellite: The Visual Imaginary of Global Media, Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), gave us a fascinating talk about the visual imaginaries employed to mythologise and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, tracing an archeology of internet cartography and informatics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures in their traverses of global space and local place. Cubitt’s talk started from a 1930 30 franc airmail stamp from the Belgian Congo, showing a biplane flying over a line of porters. As Cubitt highlighted, since the explosion of cartography in the European expansion of the 15th century, globalisation in its many variants has always depended on media, but it has also pictured and otherwise visualised the media of its planetary reach, and very often done so in imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of local and the deracination of the global enterprise. Cubitt presented an extraordinary variety of images, including painting, poetry, films, coins, stamps, photographs. How imaginary is constructed, validated and disseminated has been a central question in modern languages scholarship. In this respect, Cubitt cast light on a variety of interesting intersections between media and the arts – some of them concerned more specifically the impact of the medium in the lyrical perception of space; others revolved around issues of cultural representations in stamps, coins, paintings or they examined the formal impact of media in the texture and composition of artistic works.

In the following talk, Rethinking the medium through media art. The Italian case, Valentino Catricalà  (Media Arts Festival) focused on the contribution that media artists have given to the development of new technologies. By challenging the idea of technological determinism, Catricalà  underlined the crucial role played by artists in experimenting with technologies, thus inspiring innovation, as well as informing the design of media devices for the general public. As Catricalà  emphasised, quoting Oliver Grau, ‘media art has combined the latest technologies with the big questions of our time: artists critically addressed the visions of life sciences and projections on artificial life, utopias of neuroscience, robotics and cyborgs. Media art reflects and researches the media and image revolution and takes up the subject of the processes of globalisation and growing worldwide surveillance’. Again, this field of enquiry has proven to be very relevant for scholars of ML who address modern and contemporary languages, cultures and societies.

In the final paper of the day, The Winnipeg: the poem that crossed the Atlantic, María Mencía (Kingston) shared her experience as a media artist, lecturer and researcher to address the question of methodologies. How can we research and teach forms of digital creativity with a focus on linguistic and cultural aspects? By presenting her own artistic work, The Winnipeg, namely a multi-linguistic sea of networked, interactive poetic narratives fed by the stories from the posts uploaded to the website, Mencía discussed how she uses The Winnipeg as both cultural material and a way to instigate new poetic forms and online communication – through practice-based research, translation methodologies, archiving historical research, visual research and oral histories. The stories uploaded have been translated into different languages (from Spanish into French and English). The Winnipeg lends itself to examine social and political issues and raise awareness of historical events through hybrid forms of visual art, language and technology. Concurrently, this work reflects pertinent critical issues of migration, displacement and the search for survival so apparent in current worldwide events.

The final discussion offered some extra time and space to address questions related to the papers and reflect on the many points which were raised during the day. What emerged, on the one hand, is the necessary collaboration which DH and ML need to develop not only by applying new tools to address old questions in the humanities, but by adopting a more critical and linguistically/culturally situated approach to both the new tools and the old questions. In order to make modern languages, literatures and cultures truly contemporary, it will also be crucial to re-assess its key definitions – language, literature, culture – in the light of the technological advances of the digital age. In this perspective, we would require a broader understanding of ‘language’ and ‘translation’, for example; one which takes into consideration the language of code, interfaces, and users, as well as the phenomena of trans-coding and trans-mediality. In the way media art reflects on technologies and imaginaries, media arts historians and ML can develop a productive dialogue on how , for example, aesthetics, technologies and ethics reflect local and global cultures and languages.

This symposium was just a first step on a series of discussions which will be taken further. Please get in touch, if you are interested in getting involved [emanuela.patti@rhul.ac.uk].

L'articolo Digital Culture Studies in Modern Languages (symposium report) sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

So, what scope is there for an interdisciplinary approach in the teaching of modern languages in the sixth form today? And what indeed might ‘interdisciplinary’ mean in the context of the study of a language in school? This is a question I and others have explored with Prof. Giuliana Pieri in recent months, particularly how the photographic image or the illustration can help students to both gain a deeper understanding of the topic being studied but also learn the language required to describe and comment upon the image and articulate the relationship between text, image and history. We decided to focus on the A Level topic ‘From Fascism to today’ which is intended to cover broadly the period from 1919 to 1957 and experiment with some exemplar resources. I will mention two such resources, which can be found alongside others at the following link.

The first example is a programme of work designed to complement the study of the rise of fascism. Having identified an article by Calvino published in La repubblica in 1983 called ‘Cominciò con un cilindro’, where he talks of his memories of images of Mussolini, the task was to use the material in the article to evince spoken and written responses in Italian from students and guide them towards what photographs of Mussolini tell us about his methods and the importance of the visual image in propaganda and the rise of Fascism.

The second is derived from a chance discovery of a school exercise book from the fascist period which had on the front a drawing of an idyllic house in the country which could have been an illustration in any children’s book. On the back there is a text written by Margherita Sarfatti under the title Un uomo e un impero: La casa paterna which turns out to be an account of the birth of Mussolini in terms which recall the fairy tale C’era una volta un paesino piccolo, piccolo. What do we learn from the interaction of image and text? What does study of text and image together do to advance and enhance a student’s understanding of fascist propaganda that cannot be learned or expressed through an analytical or factual text?

We have also looked at how the Futurist Manifesto can be suitably exploited and how the study of images of young people under fascism can be a way in to enriching the students’ experience while further plans include seeing how music of the period or clips from films such as Una giornata particolare can be incorporated into the study of a topic.

Yet the challenge will always remain in the secondary school world that all this has to be presented to students in units of work which fit into the pattern of lessons and homework, remembering that students are learning at the same time (and in the same lessons) how to express their knowledge and understanding in the ‘target language’ accurately in both speaking and writing.

L'articolo Interdisciplinary Materials for the Secondary School Classroom sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.