What influences from the plastic arts can we discern through a close reading of poem? How can music influence painting or literature? What do we mean when we speak of ‘cinematic’ novels, or ‘literary’ cinema? We analyze these art forms from inter-, trans-, and multimedia perspectives, and situate their interrelations in a broader cultural framework including themes like the network society, interdisciplinarity, the post-network age, and the death of the individual.

All media are  ‘intermedia.’ After all, ‘medium’ already implies a middle between at least two things. Intermedia, in Dick Higgins’ understanding (1965), reside in-between existing or traditional media, resist fixed aesthetic categories, and therefore cannot (yet) be classified. With Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (2004), we take this one step further and understand all media as essentially intermedia. Monomedialiy, she holds, is impossible without the dynamics between media, and is in fact the effect and not the cause of intermedial ‘infection’. This makes intermediality the original interval that enables the identity of media as we know them. This frame allows us to gain insight in the hybrid character of art forms: their intertwinement with each other, but also the everyday, science, philosophy, and societal engagement.