Relational materiality as a provocation of intermedia studies

Abstract

Against the theoretical strand of materialities of communication, which is based on the concept of presence and on the physicality of the apparatus, this paper intends to rethink materialities by proposing the transition from a logic of presence to a logic of relations. Thus, it is a matter of suggesting a theory of relational materiality. Such possibility implies not only a critique of the concept of presence, but also a re-examination of the very notion of intermediality. For this purpose, the theoretical contributions of Marshall McLuhan, Richard Grusin, Jay Bolter and Gilles Deleuze are used in this paper.

Keywords materialities of communication; relational materiality; intermediality