Our research questions for Interart/Intermedia

These are the key questions which we are trying to answer on this website and in our research project

PRACTICE

  • What effect does interartistic and intermedial practice have on artistic creativity? What does it enable? What does it obstacle?
  • What has influenced the development of interart and intermedia in modern Italy? What is the role of, for example, journals, education policy, cafes, ideologies, institutions, websites, personalities, Italy’s particular artistic heritage?
  • Why, and how, have artists, writers, performers (and so on) critiqued and pushed the boundaries between the arts in 20th and 21st century Italy?
  • What is the relationship between experimentalism and border crossing?
  • Is there a link between historical avanguardism,  activist practice and border-crossing between the arts?
  • Who were, and are, the interartistic and intermedial individuals and groups in Italy? What do they do? Why is it important?

THEORY

  • How can we talk about interartistic and intermedial works of art? What theories do we need to develop in order to discuss often transgressive hybrid cultural objects and avant-garde interartistic practice?
  • How do metaphors of borders enable us to understand interdisciplinarity better?
  • What does interdisciplinarity tell us about concepts of facilitating, policing, transgressing?
  • How does the border crossing relate to fragmentation? How do ideas of emancipation and freedom fit in?

Our research goes beyond the narrow focus of monodisciplinary research to reveal a more comprehensive picture of interartistic encounters and new kinds of experimentation. Our aim is to challenge and amend established ideas of cultural centres and peripheries and to focus attention on individuals and groups who are actively engaged in creative boundary-crossing. We will also be exploring institutions that fostered or hindered interartistic exchange. We examine how a multidisciplinary approach subverts widely accepted canons; what looks central under the lens of the monodisciplinary microscope may not be so from an interartistic one.