William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology et Université d'Utrecht.

forme(s)

« This space between two aesthetic domains, these two structures of feeling, constitutes the backdrop for the concepts and fantasy media technologies at hand. To describe these intermedial amalgams as fantasy media is to invoke a loaded term: fantasia. The imagined status of these media certainly gives them a heuristic power permitting us to read them as the era’s desiderata and hoped for future. But if we can squeeze the term fantasia with vigor, we can get more. Fantasia is an old and rich concept. And its earliest formulations referring simultaneously to what can be seen in an object, that is, its appearance and visual qualities as well as how objects appear, that is, the reception of visual experience. This is to say that the term fantasia refers to the image to be received in the mind as well as to what the mind sees and seeks to present again through word and image. This doubleness recalls Simonides’ observation. Simonides is, as you might recall, the father, the grandfather, of the memory palace. It’s a spatial way to hold both knowledge and to construct access to that knowledge. In any event, Simonides is full of wisdom and he paired painting, which he called “silent poetry”, with poetry, which he called “speaking pictures”, a pairing consistent with the structure of fantasia, a bridging of what can be seen and how objects appear. But Simonides’ formulation rather explicitly evokes the late nineteen century’s obsession with synesthesia, a concept that flourished in the transition from the romantic to the modern in such intermedial spaces such as color organs, symphonic paintings and painted music. And it’a always interesting to look at how artists who engaged in these synesthetic forms are difficult to locate. Are they late romantic or early modern? »