Transmedia Adaptation

This essay is composed of two parts. The first chapter reflects on the genesis of film language, and in this context, considers the reception of Dickens’ works. Next the text turns to borderline cases of adaptation: genre/media hybrid, deep remixability, and allusion. The notions of genre and media are considered as only quantitatively different, not qualitatively, both instances of discourses and apparatuses considered by the theory of discourse (Bakhtin, Foucault etc.). The second part of the text presents an artistic inquiry—concepts and ideas used in production of artworks by the authors of this essay—that sheds light on the possible methods of studying adaptations. Two aspects are foregrounded: the ideas of the transformation of the source text into an archive of fragments that are subsequently put in new meaningful constellations, and the use of Shakespeare’s works in the role of a mediator in the understanding of the language of new media art