The Intermedial Cluster: Åke Hodell’s Lågsniff

Avant-garde aesthetic movements react on and appropriate new technological media in a process of breaking down the boundaries between different media and different “arts," in an attempt to generate meaning from the sheer materiality of the artwork. Avant-garde artworks will therefore by necessity be marked by media in different ways, at the same time as these art forms are processual, performative and transgressive. One of the prime Swedish examples of this avant-garde strategy is Ake Hodell’s many realizations of his manuscript Lågsniff. The manuscript, written in 1963, was in the form of a text-sound-composition, which means that Lågsniff, already in this form, took many configurations with a plurality of genres and media modalities involved. Later the manuscript was realized as a series of performances, a TV-film, a book, and in 2002 as a DVD. For such a collection of art works, I would like to suggest the term “intermedial cluster.” The point of departure for my discussion is the DVD, a remediation of the TV- film from 1966, and I will focus on two of the juxtaposed discourses in the cluster that this DVD represents: the package tour and warfare, and on two thematic foci in the film: media and memory, and man as automaton.