Transmedial Artistic Narratives: The Fusion of Interactive Art, Film, Literature, Music, and Painting in the Works of Lynn Hershman and Grahame Weinbren

Abstract

Interactive, processual, multimedia, and modular art—enabling participation and transforming the viewer into an interactor—constitutes a transdisciplinary and, at times, transdomain phenomenon. Its creators extend beyond the realm of fine arts and the humanities, reaching into engineering, technology, architecture, and the sciences. Often, interactive art—which deeply explores the transformations of artistic expression in the age of media convergence—turns toward the past, delving into earlier processes (within seemingly concluded stages of art history) and problematizing them, building upon them new artistic meanings and values. Sometimes, artists incorporate specific earlier works—recognized as masterpieces of painting, literature, or music—into their interactive installations. This article focuses on the phenomenon of interactive art creators incorporating canonical masterpieces into works produced at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, forming components of complex new media installations capable of generating intricate transmedial narratives. Two works are analyzed: Lynn Hershman’s installation Paranoid Mirror and Grahame Weinbren’s audiovisual piece Sonata. These artists utilize intermedial entanglements that go beyond adaptation or reinterpretation (Weinbren is considered a pioneer of interactive cinema). The goals of the analysis are: (1) to reflect on the functions such artistic strategies may serve (e.g., deepening the axiological dimension of narrative works); (2) to reveal the relationships between the contemporary artwork (displaying features of Escarpit’s notion of “creative betrayal” or Eco’s “open work”) and Walter Benjamin’s concept of auratic art; (3) to explore the status of such practices and their significance in enriching and expanding the semantic potential of contemporary interactive artworks.