From intermedia and from transmedia: the Travelogue genre
– Communication on “The intermediality of the” Travelogue diary ” genre: a “work in progress” in visual arts” at the 3rd International Conference of Intermediality Studies at the ISMAI, 6 and 7 June 2013 at the Instituto Superior da Maia (ISMAI, Porto), under the responsibility of the Centro de Estudos em Letras (CEL) and the Centro de Estudos Lingua, Comunicação e Cultura of ISMAI (CELCC).
– Communication on “The interarts travelogue, crossmedia and transmedia: story of a transmedia genre inherited from Intermediality and artialité” at the Day on the history of transmedia organized by the Laboratory Astram (EA 4673) of University of Aix-Marseille Aubagne, May 31, 2013.
From artistic works of travellers-painters as yet unreleased, the travelogue diary became a kind of an edited album, thus a sub-genre of paraliteratures [1] and then a mediatique genre of of mass media, nearly a kind of intermedia. Born in the Romantic era [2], it has come from an aesthetic interaction between the arts and the media, the result of a history of interferences and interactions between different media. The circulation in the complementarity of the media could generate a transmedial and crossed travelogue. It seems that the notion of travel, which is characteristic of this genre could be quite suitable for a journey between different media. Indeed, Nicolas Bry defines transmedia on the site called “transmedialab” from the thesis “Transmedia Storytelling” G A. Long (2007) based on the innovation of the narrative [3] that was developed by Henry Jenkins during his lectures in Europe during the month of May 2012. [4] This is the project of the digital artist Karen Guillorel [5] who received the prize for the digital travelogue Vidéoformes [6] in November 2011 at the Rendez-vous du carnet de voyage de Clermont-Ferrand for her creation Je sakura , Japan in the form of an auto-fictional cartoon that she would like to extend to transmedia which she defines as “the ability to create a huge narrative puzzle in which the various elements are narrated on several media outlets that converge and are not only stories by themselves but also participate as a larger narrative scaffolding. We can thus tell great stories, epics and express themselves through very different media. We return to the era of story-tellers thanks to transmedia “[7]. Her work in collaboration with Yann Minh wishes to exploit the creative potential for the project “E-Migration” [8]. But before this recent transmedial creation how did the “Travelogue” genre innovate and found its tranmédial way?
With the existence of transmedial travelogue diary, how do we trace its recent history since 2006? What is its mediatique origin? Did the works in the Travelogue diary announce its beginnings before 2006? What were the stages of its emergence? Were the installation-exhibition of graphical literature the trigger (please see Enki Bilal and Goscinny, François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters)? In what manner can we distinguish the process of innovation by analysing the production of travelogues over the past six years? Are the intermedial and interarts travelogue inclined to transmedia storytelling? How did artialité in the visual arts initiate this change? Is Transmedia the ultimate stage of “work in progress” of Intermediality? From a corpus of a dozen travelogues, we have distinguished two stages in this chronological essay on the emergence of transmedia for the travelogue: on the one hand, recognition of the “Travelogue” genre between intermediality andartiality based on the diary-works and on the other hand the development of transmedial travelogue from its mediatique circulation of the installation kind. Also after the editorial explosion of published works from 2000 to 2004, paper publishing is declining and opening up an era of media movement of a genre towards audio-visual and digital. Since 2006 transmedia is being thought about thanks to a mediatical convergence brought about by digital media.
