Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry

In Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler envisioned a digital future of demediation: all traditional differences between media and mediations would be ended in a fusion of digital numbers. Kittler’s vision, I argue in my paper, is premediated by Richard Wagner’s artwork of the future: despite their differences, both stage the dream of a multimedial future in which monomediality or medial compartmentalization is effectively aufgehoben. This idea of premediation is further explored by comparing Wagner’s music drama’s to digital multimedia works and events of the 1990’s and early years of our twenty-first century that try to fuse words, bodily gestures, sounds, and images.