From the Director’s Desk:

Prologue

Dear Subscribers, everyone at CIMIG hopes that you had an enjoyable holiday season and that 2024 has been off to a good start for all of you. Much has happened since the second Intermediality Messenger landed in your inboxes last fall.

October: At the beginning of the month, Prof. Werner Wolf, one of the founders of CIMIG, retired after a long and distinguished career. You can read about the reception organized by the English Studies Department here. Prof. Irina Rajewsky was the featured speaker who thrilled the
audience with a thorough discussion of recent developments in
intermediality studies, and the entire evening was a multi-faceted tribute to the newly minted emeritus. Those who know him will not be surprised to hear that he has already been invited to speak and share his expertise in intermediality. He will give an online lecture at the University of Lublin (Poland) in late February and will be hosted as a guest professor at the University of Brno (Czech Republic) for a three-day seminar in October.

On October 19, CIMIG hosted a highly successful Climate Change
Theatre Action event at the Literaturhaus. All 120 seats in the house
were filled. The Pennyless Players performed three short plays. A fourth play was read by Teodora Markovic and Scott Zukowski with aplomb. Audience members responded enthusiastically to both variants of
presenting climate change dramas, as did the panelists for the two-part discussion of how science and theater can collaborate in the effort to foster climate change awareness. The city of Graz generously sponsored the event and sent a representative who not only thanked the organizers and participants for their work, but who was well-informed about CIMIG and CCTA. After the two-hour program, scores of guests and
participants enjoyed food and conversations until everybody was kindly asked to vacate the premises.
You can find a video recording of the Pennyless Players’ performance by clicking on the YouTube link at the end of the CCTA announcement of the event: https://www.climatechangetheatreaction.com/si_event/ccta-event-by-the-centre-for-intermediality-studies-in-graz-cimig-labor-und-rampenlicht/
Now we can begin to think about what CCTA might look like at CIMIG in 2025.

November: Unfortunately, we had to cancel the Forum Stadtpark event on Annette Kisling’s photographic work. The talk and panel discussion were postponed to 14 November 2024. We look forward to this event.

In early November, Professor Kurt Hahn (Department of Romance
Languages) represented CIMIG at the Jornada Intermedialitat I
Transmodalització en la Literatura Contemporània (Conference for
Intermediality and Transmodalization in Contemporary Literature) in
Valencia, Spain. In his talk “Refleción mediática, cuestionamiento
ontológico e historicidad en algunos casos de adaptación y
transposición,” he spoke about media reflexivity, questions of ontology, and historicity in intermedial fiction. The photo shows Prof. Kurt Hahn and PhD student Xavier Hernàndez i Garcia who spent four months at CIMIG on a research grant in 2023.

December: The president of the University of Graz agreed to appointing Prof. Kurt Hahn as the new Deputy Director of CIMIG. Welcome, dear colleague! Also, the refurbished CIMIG homepage went live in mid-December. Many thanks to office manager Sandra Posch who invested many hours into understanding and working with the nooks and crannies of our university’s new design options, and to Juliann Knaus and
Michael Meister for their assistance regarding the transformation of the old homepage contents into their respective new versions.

And now it’s time to let you know about what to expect in the upcoming months.

Bookshelf Offerings

Chua, Brandon, and Elizabeth Ho, editors. The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation. Routledge, 2023. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781003038368.

This collection of essays is dedicated to exploring the possibilities and objectives of “Adaptation 3.0”—the most recent phase of Adaptation Studies that places increased emphasis on digital technologies and the culture of media convergence characteristic of the internet age—in an
international context. Chua and Ho’s volume is firmly rooted in the belief that the refashioning of texts or genres in another medium inevitably entails further transgressions. The companion focuses on adaptation as a global phenomenon which, at the same time, represents a locally
situated cultural practice and commodity. According to the editors, the volume thus offers a promising interdisciplinary research framework whose relevance reaches beyond the confines of the humanities. Chua and Ho also emphasize that the collection outlines the vast possibilities and contexts for studying 21st-century adaptation.

Krampe, Theresa, et al. “Playful Poetics: Metareferential Interfaces in Recent Indie Games.” Poetics Today, vol. 43, no. 4, 2022, pp. 729–771. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10017737.

Krampe et al. investigate video games by closely examining the interface—that is, extradiegetic elements that provide information on the gameworld and let the user navigate through it—as an inherent medium-specific characteristic. They probe into strategies of engagement and
interaction in indie games that result from a metareferential interface
design which deliberately foregrounds the presence of usually
inconspicuous elements such as overlays, menus, or even hardware
needed to interact with the game. Borrowing terminology from the realm of literary theory, Krampe et al. provide case studies of the indie games Pony Island (2016) and OneShot (2016) to demonstrate that
metareference, for example in the form of mise-en-abyme or metalepsis, can also be realized in video games through the transgression and foregrounding of levels that are conventionally perceived as distinct by users. Their article outlines a playful poetics that challenges the users' understanding of video games as a medium by resorting to the hypermediacy rather than the immediacy of game mechanics.

From the Director’s Desk:

Epilogue

2024 will be a busy year for CIMIG. This month, I had the opportunity to plan the launching of an Erasmus+ exchange with the University Roma III. This will happen in October during a visit focused on intermediality studies in their PhD and MA programs. In the next two issues, I will
report on upcoming keynote lectures and conference presentations with intermedial themes as well as updates on international collaboration. At the University of Graz, CIMIG will continue to serve as a partner of the evolving Core Topic of the Faculty of Humanities entitled “Perception: Epistemes, Aesthetics, Politics.” Please check out our homepage for news and events related to intermediality. And feel free to contact us at cimig@uni-graz.at.

Best wishes,
Nassim W. Balestrini