Intermediality: Middling and Meddling in English

A project for poetry and text-based art has emerged over the past two years that tests the limits of what we broadly term as intermedia. The work is Caroline Bergvall’s combined ‘Middling English’, an exhibition at the John Hasard gallery in Southampton in 2010, and Meddle English, a book of poetry and critical writing published 2011. Both negotiate intermedialities through properties of connectedness and extension and the combined project sites the concept of intermedia as a middling process. This signifies a contemporary definition of merged media, as influenced by theorist Michel Serres, that priviliedges the frictions, topographies and the noise of relationality. This is opposed to the twentieth -century handling of Intermedia, as coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in the 1960s, that favours the overlapped divisions of cross-disciplinarity. This middling process of art and poetry is also what marks Bergvall’s practice as crucial to our current theorisations of art practices of writing, as stated by Bergvall: ‘Material noise in relation to verbal articulacy has defined my modes of thinking about writing at its junctures or sutures with media and non-textual environments’ (Bergvall, 2009: 21).