Ojamaa, Torop. Transmediality of Cultural Autocommunication. 2015

International Journal of Cultural Studies 2015, Vol. 18(1) 61 –78© The Author(s) 2014Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1367877914528119ics.sagepub.com

Transmediality of cultural autocommunication

Maarja Ojamaa and Peeter ToropUniversity of Tartu, Estonia

AbstractIn his studies of culture, Juri Lotman implicitly expressed several ideas that have been rendered explicit by the contemporary mediasphere. The aim of the current article is to explicate a link between Lotmanian cultural semiotics and transmediality as one of today’s more innovative communicative practices. Transmediality is hereby located in the context of cultural autocommunication as a mechanism serving both creative and mnemonic functions. Thus, the notion is related not only to the questions of textual construction but, even more importantly, to text’s processual existence in culture in diverse media languages and discourses over time. By explaining the roots and developments of Lotman’s concept of autocommunicativity, which is central to his understanding of culture as a whole, the article simultaneously indicates the areas of his cultural semiotic studies that we consider relevant and fruitful for contemporary research into transmediality.

Keywordscultural autocommunication, Juri Lotman, semiotics of culture, transmediality

The object of the semiotics of culture is the hierarchical correlation of sign systems in culture (Lotman et al., 2013: 53), therefore, in order to understand culture, it is important to distinguish between different communicative processes in different sign systems. This means realizing how culture is being conceptualized in verbal, audiovisual and other sign systems, how the same messages in different media reach cultural agents and how those messages and meanings are transformed by the given media. The difficulty of the task

Corresponding author:Maarja Ojamaa, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2, Tartu 51003, Estonia. Email: [email protected]

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lies in the fact that, even though cultural languages can be heuristically described as separate systems, in practice they are always interrelated and exchange mutual influences.

It implicitly follows from the above, that it is possible to describe the inherent trans-mediality of any culture. However, the term of ‘transmediality’ itself entered academic discourse as an intentional and innovative strategy of communication and metacommu-nication. It has mostly been discussed in the framework of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2004, 2008; Scolari, 2013). In this paradigm, a story is constituted by several distinctive narrative segments that are represented in different media, eventually creating a cohesive mental whole, a coherent storyworld. From this viewpoint, transmediality essentially differs from adaptation as: ‘[t]ransmedia elements do not involve the telling of the same events on different platforms; they involve the telling of new events from the same storyworld’ (Evans, 2011: 27). The mental unity of a storyworld balances the het-erogeneity of technical possibilities inside a given mediasphere. Individual medial seg-ments of the narrative enter into a constant interpretative dialogue with each other and with the whole, even though their medium-specific coding principles could be extremely different from each other, placing them simultaneously into a situation of non- translatability (Lotman, 2001 [1990]: 37).

The current article aims to explicate the bridge between Lotmanian cultural semiotic approach to general communicative mechanisms of culture on the one hand, and some of the innovative forms of communication in the contemporary mediasphere – such as transmedia storytelling – on the other. For this, we will first locate the phenomenon of transmediality in the wider context of cultural autocommunication, relating it to both creative and mnemonic functions. Autocommunicativity is a central notion for Lotman’s understanding of culture as a whole and an overview of the roots and developments of this concept will simultaneously indicate the areas of Lotman’s studies that we consider relevant and fruitful for the research into transmediality. The latter part of the paper pro-vides an illustrative analysis of transmedial and autocommunicative aspects of the online educational project ‘Inanimate Alice’.

Transmediality

As indicated by the above quote by Evans (and by other researchers), the focus of dis-cussing transmedial storytelling practices is usually on the aspect of transformation: expansion of narrative onto different media platforms, changes and additions of meaning brought along by this growth. However, we would argue that repetition is simultaneously a key device of any transmedia storyworld. Every new segment of the whole essentially repeats a certain invariant of the whole and – in accordance with the specificity of a given medium – creatively varies the rest. In this process, the implicit multimodality of any written text becomes realized in a material form, inevitably leading the researcher to questions about ‘the relations between narrative and its media’ (Herman, 2004: 49) or, more generally, the influence of the medium on the meaning of the message.

Transmedial principles of communication and metacommunication are not only a part of the narrative entertainment world but have (had) much broader influence, most impor-tantly perhaps in the pedagogical sphere. In the latter, repetition of information with



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variations in different sign systems or media (e.g. oral, written, audiovisual, etc.) is a central technique of acquisition and preservation of knowledge. Also, research evidence supports that combining different media platforms in education enhances the outcome of learning (see for example Harrison and Kerger, 2011; Semali, 2002). In fact, one of the earlier usages of a term sharing the same stem with transmediality was by Charles Suhor in his article on a semiotics-based curriculum where he conceptualized ‘transmediation’ as the translation of content across different sign systems in the pedagogic context (1984: 250). Transmedial repetition thus bears an important mnemonic function, but it is simul-taneously a device of creative expansion. We can trace this mechanism more generally in culture, where stories and symbols that are considered important are repeated in different media in order to keep them active in cultural memory and integrate them with culture’s contemporaneity. Examples of this can be found from times both distant (e.g. adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays) and recent (e.g. Pottermore). Transmediality is hereby approached as an autocommunicative mechanism of culture, also serving both creative and mne-monic functions which in turn are equally essential for the preservation of cultural identity.

In fact, one of the ways Lotman has defined culture is as ‘nonhereditary collective memory’ (Lotman and Uspensky, 1978: 213), positing the space of culture as a ‘space within which texts can be preserved and actualized’ (Lotman, 1985: 5). From there, Lotman continues by explaining that collective memory is ensured by the existence of a number of constant texts and by the continuity of codes or the continuous logic of their transformations (1985: 5). Ann Rigney explains the functioning of remembrance in cul-ture among other principles through recursivity (2005: 20–1), especially transmedial recursivity, whereby ‘the “working memory” of a particular community seems […] the result of various cultural activities that feed into, repeat and reinforce each other’ (2005: 20, originalitalics ). The translation semiotician Dinda Gorlée has written along a com-parable line of thought: ‘[t]he survival of text-signs lies in their being translated and retranslated’ (1997: 156). And from this we could infer that the more diverse media are incorporated into the process of (re)translation, the stronger is the text-sign’s or text’s potential to survive.

Translation in its essence is repetition with variation, and the same can be said about the recursivity of a literary text as a cinematic adaptation. Repetition is a process and an entity that simultaneously underlines sameness and difference between the new text and the previous one. Indeed, texts, text fragments, meanings that are considered important from the point of view of a community’s identity are repeated not only in the natural language, but in different sign systems of the same culture. This is demonstrated by countless examples, from church architecture repeating principles from the Bible, to cinematic adaptations of canonical novels as well as popular cinematic stories that have grown into franchises. Therefore, the principle of repetition or iteration is important both from the point of view of textual construction and of culture as a whole. Repeating a story across different sign systems is culture’s way of remembering and increasing the meaningfulness of a given text.

At the same time, it has to be remembered, that while being an immanent whole on the one hand, every text is at least bilingual or dually coded on the other (Lotman, 1988 [1981]: 4). Therefore, integrating elements and principles of diverse languages into one




textual system does not concern the languages as merely formal systems, but also requires taking into account the cultural position, conventions of representations and functions of a given language in the given culture. In the case of transmedia texts it is especially rel-evant to record Clüver and Watson’s claim that: ‘[t]he greatest difficulties in translating a poem into another verbal language arise not on the linguistic level but in the codes and conventions that constitute the literary system which produced it and determine its recep-tion’ (1989: 61). Analogously, for example a video game is a text organized according to the representational codes of video games, but also according to the rules and conven-tions of the cultural system of video games.

Besides, several traditional textual processes take place in a new cultural situation in which the experience of culture can, in so many ways, be activated by new media. For example, everyone can extremely simply access background information of almost any given movie, as well as juxtapose a given film with other films, for example on YouTube. In such a networked culture the traditional diachronic relations remain irrelevant. While searching YouTube for information about cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one will stumble upon trailers, excerpts of different movies as well as full mov-ies, but also on diverse new media interpretations such as compressed animated versions (Hamlet in 30 seconds, in 3 minutes, as a summary for a crib, etc.), a computer game for kids, a superfast-forward replay of movie excerpts for a quick summary, a school musi-cal, an opera, a ballet, a mass of interviews, etc. All these texts exist simultaneously and constitute an intertextual as well as an intermedial sphere.1 Any text may exist in a series of possible forms and interpretations, none of which is the ultimate or ideal one. Text’s processuality, especially multi- and intermedial processuality, supplements its structural aspects.

The aspect of transmediality in such a general cultural viewpoint is implicitly included already in Lotman’s concept of cultural explosion. A fundamental principle of Lotmanian semiotics of culture is realizing that the most universal of the universals of culture is the ability for self-description. For this purpose, both specialized and integrated languages of description are created in culture, concurrently raising the issue of creolization of the languages of description (Lotman, 2000). The more channels of communication there are, and the more diversified the technological environment, the stronger also are attempts at self-analysis. Cultural autocommunication, the striving for self-understanding and self-description, appears to be especially intense during dynamic situations which Lotman has termed ‘cultural explosions’. The latter are accompanied by a period of unpredictability during which the variability of cultural change is especially high and the teleological interpretation of the changes appears especially difficult. The second phase of cultural explosion is the point where culture aims at self-description and at the expla-nation of the changes at all costs. This is the moment when the cultural self-knowledge is most intense:

The moment in which the explosion is exhausted represents the turning point of the process. In the sphere of history this is not only the originating moment of future development but also the place of self-knowledge: the inclusion of those mechanisms of history which must themselves explain what has occurred. (Lotman, 2009: 15)



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At these moments, the state of the collective memory of texts and the state of the memory of sign systems and media are of the utmost importance.

As twenty years after the publication of Culture and Explosion, transmediality has become an autonomous research object, the innovation of Lotman’s approach is easier to understand. And at the same time, it facilitates the creative development of his approach to cultural autocommunication, while taking into account the technological changes of the cultural environment.

Cultural autocommunication

Cultural autocommunication is a complex notion, the meaning of which is best revealed by taking account of the whole concept of Juri Lotman’s semiotics of culture. The recon-struction of the Lotmanian system of viewpoints should begin with two general possibili-ties of interpreting communication processes: every given communication process between sender and receiver is in principle interpretable as culture’s communication with oneself, as cultural autocommunication. Cultural autocommunicativity is in turn describ-able as metacommunication or intercommunication (see Saldre and Torop, 2012).

The basis of metacommunication is culture’s functioning as the system of primary or proto-texts and of secondary or meta-texts, and culture is describable as a process of interpretation, mediation, deformation, elimination, etc. of texts. The more a text has been interpreted and mediated, and the more active the dialogue between the text and its surrounding culture, the more strongly is the text tied to the culture. A novel and films or plays based on it, illustrations, reviews, advertisements, annotations, interviews and other meta-texts are autonomous texts when taken separately, and as such they presume different tools of analysis. As a textual system, however, they form a communicative environment that reflects both the source text’s (proto-text’s) capability of dialogue with cultural environment as well as culture’s capability of dialogue with the given source text – thus, cultural autocommunication. Intercommunication complements metacommuni-cation with the difference that it signifies implicit rather than explicit relations between texts. On the intercommunicative level, culture is a mental whole in which boundaries between texts are not always specified beyond doubt.

The notion of autocommunication is thus a key term in Lotman’s cultural semiotics because his understanding of culture is based precisely on autocommunicativity. During the 1960s, there was a big wave of interest in typologies in the humanities. However, Lotman’s searches were different from other linguistic and semiotic approaches in rela-tion to his understanding of cultural universals

As referred to above, for him, the most universal feature of any culture is the capabil-ity of self-description because without this it would be impossible to speak about cultural identity. The capability of self-description does not mean the existence of a universal language for Lotman, but refers to the diversity of cultural sign systems or cultural lan-guages. It is precisely the coexistence of diverse types of languages that enriches culture and raises its autocommunicative capability. From this principle arises the concept of cultural polyglotism, the understanding of text as the generator of languages, and cultural memory as analysis of mnemotechnics.




In the pioneering ‘Theses on the semiotic study of cultures’ (Lotman et al., 2013 [1973]), cultural languages are understood semiotically as synonymous with the notion of sign system. At the same time, the logic proceeds from natural language. During the formational period of cultural semiotics in the first half of 1970s, there were two meth-odological keys for conceptualizing cultural languages: (1) all five senses are important in human culture, but most communicative processes are based on verbal (discrete) and visual (continuous) languages. Those languages can be viewed as autonomous (e.g. natu-ral language, film language, language of painting etc.), but also as interwoven in texts or in the processes of human thought; (2) any kind of interpretation in culture is based on the relation between described language (object language) and descriptive language (meta-language). The boundary between object language and descriptive language is shifting, depending on the technological development of cultural environment, and is most directly linked with questions of transmediality.

In 1972, a volume of translations about the usage of exact methods in the analysis of cultural phenomena was published in Moscow (Lotman and Petrov, 1972). By this time, Lotman had claimed several times that not only do the humanities need the experience of the exact sciences, but the exact sciences also need contacts with artistic texts for their development. In 1969, in accordance with the example of bionics, Lotman used the notion of ‘artistics’ (Russian artistika) to signify a future science that would study the patterns of artistic constructions in the interest of the advancement of information tech-nology. Some years later, he signified the future cybernetics of artistic text with the name of ‘artonics’ (Russian artonika). In 1972, Lotman already juxtaposed the languages of art and mathematics:

It is precisely the relatedness of the ‘language of mathematics’ and the ‘language of art’ in the single structure of culture on the one hand, and the conceptual difference of their immanent organization on the other hand, that render the act of mutual translation of texts in these languages meaningful, i.e. facilitate their mutual existence as the basis for the creation of the metalanguage of description. (Lotman and Petrov, 1972: 6)

It is a distinctive feature of Lotmanian cultural semiotics, that the criteria for analysing culture include the typology of cultural languages in which the boundary between object language and meta-language is mobile. This mobility means that, in culture as in the system of learning and teaching for example, literature, theatre and cinema could be reflectors of the everyday environment, interpreters of everyday life, but can also be a natural living environment, a part of everyday life, and are not regarded as something that has a separate existence. Today, new media is one such transition zone, and even school education has to take into account that, for students, the internet is not just a tech-nical device but, in the form of social media, is a natural part of the living environment.

According to the logic of Lotman, the richness of any culture is determined by the multiplicity of its cultural languages and the activeness of the interpretative relations between them. Even though the language of mathematics is not directly translatable into the language of art and vice versa, the attempts to produce such translations enrich cul-ture. Between totally different cultural languages within one culture, but also in



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situations of common translations between different cultures, ‘relations of conditional equivalence’ are established between structures of languages.

In its own time, Lotman’s treatment of culture can be understood via understanding cultural polyglotism. Cultural languages are distributed from everyday languages to arti-ficial languages on the scale of object languages and descriptive languages (meta- languages) (see Table 1). However, Lotman’s typology of cultural languages was clearly ahead of its time and adequately meets today’s needs. His hierarchy of cultural languages is methodologically translatable into discursive as well as into medial treatments of cul-ture. Proto- and metacommunication is describable as a system of object- and meta- languages, but also as an intertextual and interdiscursive complex. In accordance with the evolution of new media, it would be fruitful to understand discursivity as a medial, multi-, inter- and transmedial complex. Such a change in the terminological field does not just take account of theoretical developments, it is also in accordance with cultural dynamics and with the need to find a more flexible descriptive language for the sake of complex analysis. The question of cultural universals is still there and the analysis of autocommunicativity remains important, but the cultural environment has changed, and the notion of cultural languages needs to be expanded upon (Table 2).

At the end of the 1980s, when Lotman introduced the foregoing notion of explosion into cultural analysis, he developed a two-phase treatment of cultural dynamics from the relations of conditional equivalence. The moment of explosion in culture means unpre-dictability, coexistence of several equipotent descriptive languages and absence of a sin-gle uniform description. The moment after explosion is an extremely variable phase (ranging from weeks to decades in duration), when culture step-by-step works out self-descriptive mechanisms, finds an optimal language or hierarchizes the existing lan-guages, and some kind of unified understanding is established in the society.

Table 1. Self-descriptive languages of culture.




Any kind of unity of meaningful processes can take place in a possible world that Lotman has called the semiosphere. As we have no intention of giving a longer treatment of this notion here, let us use one possible way of interpreting it. Namely, John Hartley regards semiosphere in the vein of Lotman as the condition for semiosis:

Like the atmosphere and biosphere, the idea of the semiosphere is not simply that it covers the planet, but more importantly that this global organism is the condition of existence for all the differentiated parts and interactions that go on at local level. (Hartley, 2008: 67, italics original)

This condition brings about a certain environment and, for today’s culture, the medial environment or mediaspehere is the most immediate one:

Like the semiosphere it expresses the various forms, relationships and structural conditions for existence and interaction of a worldwide system of media communication. The mediasphere is ‘multiplatform,’ not confined to one medium […]. It cannot be understood without the global interactive system that has shaped it and allows it to operate in any given local instance. (2008: 67, italics original)

The last turn of the century was indeed a period of refreshing old notions. Digitalization had become a reality and the internet, as the environment of mass culture, ascribed a new meaning to concepts such as repetition in culture or intertextuality. When traditional intertextuality implied, first and foremost, the interpretation of a text through its relations with other texts (both those encoded by the author and arbitrary ones), intertextuality in digital culture on the other hand is rather the variation of a given text in diverse forms and media. The result of this is the institutionalization of intertextuality as an aesthetic norm (Darley, 2000: 139).

A relatively new phenomenon that has occurred with the general availability of tech-nological means and that responds to the universal human enjoyment in telling and hear-ing stories, is the practice of digital storytelling. Hartley and McWilliam have described its fruitful potential for understanding the current cultural context:

Table 2. Cultural environment.

Immediate culture

Object languages, discourses, modalities

Cultural memory Cultural Cultural identityDiscrete and continualimage of past

Experience (learning and teaching as typological features of cultures)

Cultural identity (consumption creation and description of culture)

Meta-languages, interdiscursivity, inter- and transmediality

Mediated culture



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Digital storytelling is a good way to explore how individuals can help each other to navigate complex social networks and organizational systems, which themselves rely on the active agency of everyone in the system to contribute to the growth of knowledge. Digital storytelling uses computational power to attempt human contact. (Hartley and McWilliam, 2009: 15)

At the same time, the authors have also drawn attention to the discrepancy between potentials and practices: ‘the potential for “serious” work is underdeveloped – there is too much attention to self-expression; not enough to the growth of knowledge’ (2009: 15). All of the above is integrated in the problem of education.

Cultural mediation

To understand culture as system of education we need to concretize the aspects of cul-tural mediation (see Table 3). On a very general level it is possible to describe all cultural processes as object- or metalevel processes. On a lower level of description there exists a diverse and dynamic system of cultural languages between these two poles, and all these languages can find manifestations in processes of mediation in the form of texts, media, multimedia, intertextuality, intermediality and interdiscursivity. All of these man-ifestations are describable on two levels. On the first, the motion of messages between media and their transmedial functioning can be regarded as culture’s elemental (unpre-dictable) autocommunication, in which texts inspire the creation of other texts and cul-ture’s creativity is realized in textual diversity. On the other level, we can trace the usage of different media, platforms and text types in pragmatic (target-oriented) marketing communications. Even though there is still no clear distinction between transmediality and cross-mediality, the latter term has been used more often in the context of marketing processes.

Table 3. Cultural mediation.

Levels Languages of culture Processes Directions

Object Oral languages languages Written language Textuality Behaviour Narratives Mediality Performances Texts Multimediality Discourses Trans- Media Metatextuality mediality/ Multimedia Cross- Education Intertextuality mediality Criticism Sciences Intermediality Terminologies Meta- Formal languages Interdiscursivity languages Artificial languages




The conceptual relatedness of autocommunication and transmediality becomes appar-ent in the juxtaposition of the principles of cultural semiotics with cultural dynamics. In every era, there exists a certain language of cultural description that changes along with the culture. At the same time, cultural processes are universal, regardless of technologi-cal improvements, and it can be claimed that, while searching for better analyzability of culture, the cultural semioticians of the Tartu-Moscow school implicitly expressed ideas that today’s culture renders explicit. Culture is based both on inner dialogue as well as on dialogue with the surrounding world. This in turn assumes that culture must be visible both as a whole and as a system of parts. Lotman has described this as a situation, where:

[C]ulture itself can be treated both as the sum of the messages circulated by various addressers (for each of them the adressee is ‘another’, ‘s/he’, and as one message transmitted by collective ‘I’ of humanity to itself. From this point of view human culture is a vast example of autocommunication. (Lotman, 2001 [1990]: 33)

Autocommunication is a polyglot process in culture and methodologically it is possible to regard all the communicative processes in culture as autocommunicative. This implies a clear understanding of the differences between the object level and metalevel of culture.

Therefore, it is methodologically correct to first acknowledge the working of a meta-mechanism in culture:

The metamechanism of culture establishes a unity between the parts that strive for autonomy and becomes a language in which internal intercourse inside that culture is carried on. It contributes to the unification of separate structural nodes. Through it the isomorphism of the culture as a whole and its parts comes into being. (Lotman, 1979: 92–3)

The next methodological step is differentiating between the object- and metalevel of culture, both of which are related to many different languages – object- and meta- languages respectively. Both object- and meta-languages constitute a system of cultural languages and are in principle describable as pure systems (language, discourse, medium, terminological system, artificial language) on the one hand, and as a synthesis of object- and meta-languages (creolization, hybridity, etc.) on the other.

For Lotman, cultural languages are functionally divided into a dynamical system of object- and meta-languages (the more cultural languages there are, the richer is culture’s self-description) and into discrete and continuous languages. Languages evolve in lan-guage usage and the usage is expressed in different types of cultural texts and it is indeed precisely in texts where cultural processes are expressed most clearly. Text has been the key notion in cultural semiotics and, for the present article, it is important to see the multi-layeredness of textual communication. Texts exist autonomously in culture but also form textual systems within one medium as well as integrate diverse sign systems or cultural languages, for instance in the case of a multimedia text (an illustrated book would be an elementary example). On the level of textual processes it is thus important to distinguish between meta-textuality and intertextuality, and the interpretation of the latter through the notions of intermediality or interdiscursivity in the contact zone of media and discourses.



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Every culture functions as a whole and the basis for the parameter of the whole lies in culture’s autocommunicativity, which is a cultural universal, together with the under-standing of culture as a system of education. Methodologically, this is related to the understanding of the orientation of cultural mechanisms. One and the same culture can be understood as a culture of a (nation) state or of smaller interest groups, who control and direct textual processes by controlling politics, ideology, marketing, the school sys-tem and mass media. By generalization, this could be termed as the direction of cross-media, which is based on channelling certain messages into culture by consciously using diverse or even all medial tools. The other direction stems from cultural life that is a less regulated system, in which the basis for textual creation is the creativity of individuals or small groups, which together constitute a uniform culture. This uniformity in multiplicity is especially likely to appear in the conditions of new media and the term ‘transmediality’ seems suitable for signifying it (especially when accompanied by terms from the same field, such as ‘convergence’, ‘divergence’ and ‘participatory culture’).

Cultural mediation as culture’s communication simultaneously with others and one-self is thus founded on cultural literacy that is, in turn, the result of the richness or pov-erty of cultural experience. And cultural experience is in turn directly related to the way cultural languages are cultivated in a given society during a given historical period as the richness of cultural languages is related to the growth in multiplicity and richness of the cultural self-descriptive processes. The state of cultural experience and cultural self-descriptions is in turn influenced by the functioning of the cultural whole as a system of education, which was an important cultural parameter for Lotman as well. In this system, a certain balance can be located between self-education and active teaching (from school system to mass media brainwash) and between exploitation of cultural dynamics and resistance to them (e.g. the case of new media and pedagogics). On the level of culture as a whole, the parameter of education is correlated with the state of cultural memory and cultural identity in a given society. And this mechanism of culture reaches both inner and outer observer through the understanding of the multiplicity and hierarchical system of object languages and meta-languages. Whereas, as stated at the beginning of the present text, the hierarchy of cultural languages is cultural semiotics’ declared object of study.

‘Inanimate Alice’: aspects of transmediality and autocommunicativity

A relatively rare example of a new media project in which the authors have striven to explicate the educative and pedagogic aspects of the story, is ‘Inanimate Alice’.2 It was first conceived as entertainment but soon acquired an overarching educational function. The project was created by Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph (babel), and Ian Harper in 2005 and is introduced on the webpage as a digital novel about ‘a young girl who grows up to become a videogame designer at the biggest games company in the world’. The immer-sive experience of the narrative whole is planned to consist of 10 episodes, 4 of which are internationally available online for free since 2008. Some of the content added later is accessible only in Australia. In addition, there are episodes created by users, mostly as school projects, uploaded to YouTube and several other internet sites. All of the official




episodes tell a story of Alice searching for someone (e.g. one or both of her parents) or something (e.g. her way out of an abandoned house) in different parts of the technology-augmented near-future world. Thus, there is a repeated narrative structure combined with problem solving and gameplaying, but an increase in complexity and interactivity as well as duration with each consecutive episode. The text is inherently inter- and transmedial, combining subtexts of literature, different visual modes (photos, schemas, paintings, drawings), comics (split screen composition and speech bubbles), videos, sound effects and music, gameplaying, interactive hypertexts and also classroom activities in an organic way. In the memory of the reader, however, all these subtexts together form a more or less coherent storyworld. The project is polyglot in a literal sense too as the first the episodes are available not only in English, but also in Italian, French, German and Spanish. ‘Inanimate Alice’ has been widely recognized as a successful device for teach-ing new and digital literacies, foreign languages and social skills, as well as other school subjects. The main text is accompanied by pedagogic materials provided on the webpage.

By combining several modes and languages into telling one coherent story, the text first paves the way for an ability that has sometimes been termed as transliteracy, rein-forcing the ability to read and write across more than one (i.e. verbal) sign system. Henry Jenkins has used the term ‘transmedia navigation’ in the pedagogic context and defined it as ‘the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities’ (Jenkins et al., 2006). Although, for example, the systems of verbal text and visual images can be and have often been conceptualized as binary opposites, and their mutual relationship as one of non-translatability, in the memory of the cultural agent (e.g. the reader), a relation of equivalence between them can be established on the level of textual realizations. At the same time, the elements transposed to a new form preserve the mem-ory of their previous context (see also Lotman, 2001 [1990]: 137), for example in the case where elements of one sign system are organized or encoded according to the rules or conventions of another. The character of Alice is first introduced as the protagonist of a (digital) novel, however, she has rather been encoded according to the conventions of certain video games. Every episode starts off with a short written announcement that includes a reminder of the protagonist’s name and states her age in the given subtext. The only visual representation that we have of Alice is from behind her back, the unfolding story is mediated by point-of-view-type frames and sounds, and the dominant function of her character tends to be puzzle solving (whether searching for her parents, fleeing from ill-willed men or looking for a way out of a labyrinth). All these are devices intrinsic to video games rather than to more traditional narrative texts.

The transmedial communicative strategy underlines the crucial role of the receiver because creation of a whole essentially takes place in the mind of him or her. Furthermore, the concept of convergence culture implies the collision not only between different media but also in the form of ‘produsage’ (Bruns, 2008: 1–7; Carpentier, 2011) between the ‘traditional’ author and audience, who instead of simply produsing or using a text, start interacting in unpredictable ways.3 The receiver’s interpretative activity that has always been there, is now complemented with new levels of cognitive and often physi-cal participation, as the audiences play games, solve puzzles, determine the way the story should proceed, step into social networks with characters, etc. A reward for these



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activities can often be a new piece of information about the storyworld or the continua-tion of the story itself. Each such piece transforms the whole, not just as a mechanical part of the sum but as a meaningful element which also affects the way the other pieces are perceived, understood and remembered. All this inevitably brings along questions about the ontology of text itself.

Lotman has explained the textual frame (i.e. beginning and ending) and textual coherence as the main conditions for the existence of text or for the recognition of something as a text. The latter, coherence, is ‘achieved by the repetition of certain structural elements in sequentially disposed sentences’ (2001 [1990]: 223). In fact, according to Lotman, the whole multiplicity of textual constructions can be reduced to two main principles: the one of repetition and the one of combination. The first is essential for verse, the second for prose, but in actual texts both are of course present in each (1977 [1970]: 79). In accordance with the principle of repetition all the ele-ments of an artistic text become equivalent, even though in the system of natural lan-guage they can be very different or even opposites. In this sense, every artistic text is a self-organizing system that creates a language system of its own with semantics of its own (1977 [1970]: 80). For example, there is no extratextual reason to associate the sound of mobile phone interference with a special and personal rapport with technol-ogy – but in the semantic system of ‘Inanimate Alice’ precisely such equivalence is established. Being a noise and perhaps also a device of immersion at first, it acquires narrative meaning after the reader gets to know Alice’s Ba-xi (that is substituted by Zeron Igrat by episode 3), her self-created digital (imaginary) friend Brad and Brad’s role in Alice’s adventures.

Repetition is inevitable in (artistic) texts as they are combined of a finite number of elements from a given cultural language, but at the same time, precise repetition is impossible as the recurrence of an element simultaneously recalls the context of the pre-vious occurrence. This is made evident for example by rhyme in poetry (Lotman, 2001 [1990]: 212) where the phenomenon does not belong only to the level of phonetics, but also to that of semantics as the rhyming words are not similar only for their sound, but acquire a closeness of meaningful content within the context of that particular poem (2001 [1990]: 217, 230). In the case of a transmedia text, the repetition of an element in different media simultaneously underlines its medium-specific differences – the audi-ence not only understands the coherence of subtexts but the recurrence of a narrative element simultaneously actualizes the medium-specific devices of the previous representation(s). In this sense, the repetition is not mechanical but organic, underlining both compatibility and polarity. This turns the reader’s attention not only to the repeated element itself, but simultaneously to how the element is repeated, ultimately leading to distinguishing between invariants and variations. Often, elements repeated in several subparts of a text become understandable only through familiarity with a subsequent one, which is precisely the case with the aforementioned mobile phone sound effects. These repeated structural elements also facilitate the dialogue of different subtexts in the read-er’s memory, where the subtexts do not exist in sequence but simultaneously as a new whole. In the case of transmedia texts, the elements in question can be visual, auditory, pertain to a colour schema, a particular composition of frame or anything else, both on the narrated plane and the level of formal devices that lead the audience to recognize the




text as part of the given transmedia whole. Any textual element accumulates meaning in the process of repetition, becoming fuller and more complex.

In order to understand these processes in given textual instances, the shared elements of transfer should be distinguished. Thus, in the context of transmedia storytelling as well, we should cease to concentrate only on the differences or on what exactly each medium ‘does best’, but also understand the similarities allowing the transfers and rep-etitions of meaning from one medium to another. Semiotic boundaries do not function only as separators but also as connectors, as ‘the sum of bilingual translatable “filters”’ (Lotman, 2005 [1984]: 208), and as Lotman has stressed, it is in the area near the bound-ary where the processes of creolization prevail. Thus the boundaries of sign systems are always interweaving. Even though every new language first starts by establishing its difference, drawing boundaries that should separate it from previous ones, nevertheless, at a certain point, in order to remain an active mediator in culture, communicative con-nections with other languages of culture have to be established and this is again the activator of creolization or convergence. In actual culture these processes alternate, and at certain periods certain languages dominate in the formation of others etc. (see also Lotman et al., 2013: 77, thesis 9.0.3).

Among the lesson plans provided in Teacher Education Pack (Laccetti, 2008) down-loadable from the Inanimate Alice website, one can first find themes of digital and mul-timedia literacies. For example, the lack of visual specificity of the characters of the story could be seen as a device to accentuate Alice’s loneliness, but at the same time it also supports the reader’s imagination, makes identifying with characters easier and calls for expressing one’s own perspectives on the problems dealt with in the narrative. Self-expression is encouraged both in oral form during classroom dialogues as well as on the digital storytelling platform Snappy. The latter calls on students to explore and acknowl-edge the affordances of each available sign system and multimedia tools in general, as well as to find the most relevant sign systems and ways of combining them to tell one’s own story.

Besides the material oriented towards developing literacy skills, there are also guides for situating ‘Inanimate Alice’ in the context of cultural memory. For example, lesson plan 4 is entitled as ‘Exploring Character Development, Inanimate Alice as Kunstlerroman/Bildungsroman’ (Laccetti, 2008: 22–4). Thus, we can not only locate in-textual repeti-tion of motifs, but also repetition of wider cultural codes such as narrative genres which directly influence the processes of reading and understanding. Besides the genre of Bildungsroman, the character of a curious young girl named Alice is also easily recog-nized in western culture since the second half of the 19th century. Being the receiver of the text, the audience in the autocommunicative system is at the same time the receiver of oneself. Therefore, the text does not contain only new information from outside, but simultaneously also the situation of stepping into dialogue with the culture itself. And the latter is consequently renewed in the process of (re)reading. In this way, the text is not only a mediator of information, but functions rather as the catalyst of the process of acquiring (and creating) information, which actually means reconfiguring, reorganizing, restructuring the information already contained in the memory of the recipient. This process of repetition with variation in different cultural languages is the main way mem-bers of culture with different literacies participate in cultural communication. Repetition



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is consequently the source of both pleasure derived from the recurrence of previously known motives and innovation stemming from text’s ‘reservoir of dynamism’ (Lotman, 2001 [1990]: 18) opened up when the text or its elements come into contact with new contexts. A similar idea is echoed by Umberto Eco, who infers from his overview of vari-ous forms of iteration in mass media arts during the so-called ‘era of repetition’ that these forms are relevant for the entire history of human artistic creativity, which means that: ‘seriality and repetition are not opposed to innovation’ (1997 [1985]: 175). René Girard goes even further in his essay about the history of the concepts of innovation and of rep-etition, stating that: ‘the only short-cut to innovation is imitation’ (1990: 14).

Repetition functions as a catalyst of cultural memory, where everything exists in a present form. More exactly, Lotman (2000) has claimed that cultural memory is not only panchronic, but is opposed to time, preserving the past as the present. In other words, ‘everything contained in the actual memory of culture is directly or indirectly part of that culture’s synchrony’ (2001 [1990]: 127). In the ‘Theses …’, the fact that during any his-torical period of culture new texts exist side by side with old texts and foreign texts is underlined as a trait of cultural polyglotism (Lotman et al., 2013: 63, thesis 4.1.1). What has once been contained in the memory is hardly ever completely forgotten. Instead, the texts move to the periphery of cultural communication, still bearing the potential of returning to actual communication by means of contact with new contexts. In the words of a scholar of cultural memory, Aleida Assmann, concerning the text types most associ-ated with the past: ‘The canon stands for the active working memory of a society that defines and supports the cultural identity of a group’ (2008: 106, italics added).

Besides encouraging technological and multimedia skills and self-expression in stu-dents, there is a social function or mission to the project as the lesson plans also lead to dialogue on issues such as peer pressure, the benefits and perils of global citizenship, environmental problems arising from certain human practices, etc. In sum, we can trace the dialogue of pedagogical, technological and everyday entertainment and other lan-guages and discourses in the communicative processes of this single polyglot yet coher-ent whole.

Conclusion

Characteristically, the developments of new media have been regarded as technological expression of old cultural experience. Examples can be brought from evolutioning inter-pretation of montage principles in the theory of new media (temporal montage, spatial montage, ontological montage, stylistic montage) (Manovich, 2001: 269–73) that stress the need to see temporal movements ever more as spatial and simultaneous. Implicit attributes of 19th-century texts have become explicit parameters of 21st-century cultural texts. Apprehending this relation supports a better understanding of contemporary cul-ture’s mechanisms of balance and consequently also the nature of the formation of cultural experience and cultural memory. Cultural semiotics, with its interest in the cor-relation of different sign systems and the functioning of culture’s self-descriptive lan-guages, is a good mediator between old and new. It contributes to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of cultural autocommunication and the movement between implicit and explicit transmediality. This means, however, that without understanding




new cultural languages and the ontology of texts created in them, it will be difficult to understand the functioning of autocommunication in today’s culture. Semiotics of cul-ture helps to increase culture’s analysability in the situation where the pace of cultural development is faster than the development of tools necessary for understanding culture. And this is why the legacy of Juri Lotman deserves multiple re-readings.

Funding

This research was supported by the University of Tartu (PFLFI 13903) and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence in Cultural Theory – CECT).

Notes

1. An additional complex point in this line is the question of computer and internet. Are they media or metamedia and what would each of these claims mean? The inherent interactivity of a computer with an internet connection and its ability to represent or simulate almost all other media, albeit abstracting them from their materiality, seems to position it as a meta-medium, but at the same time they model the represented texts according to their own logics just like any other medium. For example, an old video uploaded to YouTube looks the same, but can be discussed, shared, be explicitly related to other videos, etc., and thus its textual ontology is entirely different from its previous existence on TV music programmes. A discussion of the complexities of the issue with references is also provided in an online debate on digital aesthetics between Jay Bolter, Lev Manovich and others (Bolter et al., 2007: 153–6).

2. See: www.inanimatealice.com.3. Analogously, also the traditional boundary between teacher and students is blurring with the

help of contemporary pedagogic practices that see students not as passive acquirers of pre-packed knowledge but rather as creators of knowledge and meaning themselves (cf. Lotman, 2001 [1990]: 34–5).

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Author biographies

Maarja Ojamaa is a PhD candidate of the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her thesis discusses transmediality in the framework of the semiotics of culture. She has been teaching semiotics-related subjects in different secondary and higher education institutions in Estonia.

Peeter Torop is a professor of cultural semiotics in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He is a co-editor of Sign Systems Studies and Tartu Semiotics Library. He has published seven books and over 200 articles in cultural semiotics, translation studies, literary and film studies, Russian studies (Dostoevsky) and methodology of humanities.



Documents

Ojamaa, Torop. Transmediality of Cultural Autocommunication. 2015