Intermedia in Italy: From Futurism to Digital Convergence
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 20th and 21st 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.
