TRANSMEDIA

TOM SHERMAN, 2006

The term transmedia is often used to describe the way a corporation establishes an idea
by implanting similar messages across a range of media concurrently. An idea (or image
or sound) is implanted simultaneously in video, television, radio, print and through the
Web, thoroughly infecting a media environment. Audiences make connections between
multiple representations of the same idea. Ideas are reinforced as various content sources
resonate and are firmed up through redundancy. The goal is establishing a presence, and
ultimately a saturation of the environment. Logos, slogans, and simple narratives often
emerge as dominate messages in transmediated media environments. Content with
reduced complexity is easier to recognize.

A transmedia approach to pushing information across and through media can also be
employed as a strategy for artists, whether artists are working as individuals or in
cooperatives. Today many artists choose not to specialize in a particular medium. In fact,
increasing numbers of contemporary artists choose to work in a range of media that
effectively embody the ideas (or images and sounds) they want to convey. Artists are free
to choose media that will effectively convey particular ideas and forms. For instance, e-
mail and the Web are extremely effective for conveying messages in written texts (as are
books, magazines, and most recently cell-phones). Radio and telephony are excellent
media for the spoken word. Magazines, websites and billboards are great platforms for
photographic images. Galleries and museums are wonderful places for art that looks like
art.

Artists in the 21st century are information providers. They must understand media
environments, knowing how media function and overlap, and be able to create
information that moves easily from one medium to another. No medium is pure and
discrete. All media overlap and shadow each other. Digital media technologies shout out
this interconnectedness. The translation and migration of ideas from medium to medium
is a generative process. Ideas moving across media change shape and transform into new
ideas, often flourishing in new contexts. Audiences associated with particular media, say
radio or blog audiences, are assembled through transmediation. An audience that likes to
listen is mixed with an audience that prefers to read and write, etc., etc.

Many individual artists work in multimedia or engage in intermedial strategies.

Individual artists with limited media knowledge and skills may cooperate with others
with different knowledge and assets to form transmedia collectives. The goal is to
assemble teams of people with a broad range of expertise and skills. Collaboration across
a range of media makes social and political goals attainable. Whether a single individual
is as psychologically complex as a 'society' of minds, or a dozen people choose to indulge
in a unified, disciplined version of group-think, intent is permitted to build and sweep
into action in an environment ripe with transmedia activity.

The key is to understand a media environment as an ecological context. Transmedia

artists, whether operating individually or cooperatively, must recognize opportunities to
plant ideas and adopt strategies to orchestrate the presence and growth and evolution of
ideas in local or global media environments. Whether one works conceptually or
perceptually, it is important to study the way a message moves through and resides in
various media. The amplification, replication, distortion or dampening that occurs when
ideas are placed in various media is the result of content becoming form.
An aesthetics of transmedia must consider environmental factors. An artist is not only
responsible for the balance of content and form in his or her messages (how visual and
sonic and symbolic languages are formed to transmit ideas), but for the contextualized
impact of these messages in a media locale and throughout all adjacent media. The
actual place where an audience experiences an artist's work has always been a defining
aspect of the work. Whether one encounters the work in private or public, in an art
gallery, on a personal computer screen, in a book, on the street or through a network, the
context of exposure is part and parcel of the work.

When environments are considered, issues like pollution and waste must be confronted.
Artists can be guilty of excessive packaging, or of distributing empty messages, an art
devoid of content. Corporations barge into media environments by purchasing space and
time and bombarding audiences with redundant, obnoxious messages, saturating
environments with brute force. Artists seldom have the financial resources to buy their
audiences. Instead artists must craft elegant, efficient messages and maximize
opportunities to place these refined, but generally underfinanced 'objects' of thought and
perception within niches in environments that will foster their growth and replication.
There is no guarantee that artists will take the high road. Seduction and exploitation are
synonymous with seeking and holding attention. Self promotion is an art form in this era
of identity theft and zero privacy.

Artists must think about ways of maximizing the impact of content and understanding
economies of form. When it is advantageous to recycle, do so with a twist. Create value
out of discarded waste. Update or spin the media all around us. Always be suspicious of
copyright legislation. Access to the media environment is critical. Cannibalize your own
work--multi-version it whenever it makes sense to do so. Survival is diversity. Diversity is
survival. Transmediation is the name of the game.

The environment you inhabit and work in will always determine your media. Why limit
yourself unnecessarily as an artist specializing in a single medium? If you want to
effectively interface with your environment, drive your form with content, and look for
opportunities to connect with audiences. Make the most of every opportunity to effect the
environment as an author (active literacy in all media involves reading and writing).
Work across and through media. Consider taking a transmedia approach to creating an
effective presence in your local and global media environment.

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