Was verbindet klassische Musik und Gewalt in Film und Literatur? Warum ist ein Hooligan Beethovenfan, hat eine gescheiterte Pianistin BDSM-Sex oder fliegen US-Soldaten einen Angriff zu Wagners Musik? Musik als Mittel der Gewalt hat eine lange Geschichte. Die intermediale Rolle von Musik und Gewalt in Literatur und Film ist jedoch mehr als eine zivilisationskritische Trope und lässt sich nicht auf Musikkritik oder Gewaltverherrlichung reduzieren. In Elfriede Jelineks Die Klavierspielerin (1982), Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork Orange (1962), Stanley Kubricks A Clockwork Orange (1971) oder Francis Ford Coppolas Apokalypse Now (1979) hat das Motiv ein performatives Potential. In diesen Beispielen verhindern Strategien wie eine somatische Musikdarstellung oder die akustische Überlagerung von Musik und Lärm eine eindeutige Trennung von Musik und Gewalt. Diese Ambiguität stellt dabei auch die Unterscheidbarkeit weiterer Dichotomien wie Ordnung/Chaos, Körper/Geist oder Genuss in Frage. Die Ambiguität von Musik und Gewalt in Literatur und Film macht somit auf das menschliche Kategorisierungsbedürfnis und eine damit verbundene Ambiguitätsintoleranz aufmerksamen. Die diskutierten Beispiele machen deutlich, wie das Motiv die Erfahrung komplexer Zusammenhänge, die sich eindeutiger Kategorisierungen entziehen, ermöglicht. Dies lässt sich abschließend auch daran belegen, wie die Ambiguität von Musik/Gewalt, Klang/Geräusch in Film und Kunst auf ökokritische Weise genutzt wird, um die Verbundenheit von Mensch und Umwelt erfahrbar zu machen. 

Examining musical instrument destruction through an ecological and intermedial lens

Musical instruments are typically seen as objects both used and maintained with ritualistic care. But what happens when they’re tossed from homes in mudslides, burned during ecstatic parties, or waterlogged by pop stars in viral videos—and how do these elemental interactions transform the way we see and play instruments? Piano Decompositions asks what happens when we let go of controlling musical instruments. What kind of meanings start to sound when instruments are moved out of the protected cultural space and engage with their surrounding elements?

Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher trace the history of destroyed and decaying pianos, both sorting them within the realm of artistic violence against instruments and following their return journeys into water, sand, and soil. They parse the artistic vision of Annea Lockwood, whose iconic burning, drowning, and decaying Piano Transplants presented a novel means of drawing attention to the increasing threats of climate change in the 1960s and ’70s. Turning to instruments made from found materials and others played collaboratively with wind and water, they demonstrate how human sound making is entangled in the more-than-human world.

Showing how the piano can transform conversations around the Anthropocene and environmental destruction, Hart and Schirrmacher find the instrument to be a potent creative and ecological force, a medium to connect with environments in an explorative, attentive way. Piano Decompositions unearths new ways to relate our concepts of curiosity, pleasure, and music to the natural world.

In this abstract we present and discuss the central themes of a collaborative research project that examines the role of emotional mobilization in shaping democratic discourse and enhancing societal resilience amidst ongoing digital transformation. In today’s increasingly fragmented and hybrid media landscape, emotionally charged narratives—particularly those propagated by populist actors via alternative media and social platforms (Holt, 2023)—frequently challenge evidence-based communication, thereby contributing to heightened polarization and a decline in public trust. With the continued rise of populist and far-right political movements, it is crucial to understand how to elicit emotional engagement with active citizenship and forms of democratic deliberation. While emotional appeals are often portrayed as antithetical to rational deliberation, they may also serve as catalysts for democratic engagement, social cohesion, and civic participation. Our research questions how emotional narratives in the media may interact with and challenge evidence-based communication in democratic discourse, what role emotional mobilization has in shaping user engagement, polarization and trust in journalistic expertise, and how can an understanding of affective mobilization contribute to building more resilient, inclusive and trustworthy democratic communication practices.The core ideas that guide our research emerge from a collaboration between the A Questioned Democracy and Digital Transformations Knowledge Environments at Linnaeus University. Our research approach adopts an intermedial and cross-disciplinary methodology to analyse the interplay between emotional and factual appeals across diverse media ecologies (for the emotional turn in media studies, see Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). Drawing on digital media content from Sweden—including alternative news sites, mainstream journalism, and social media platforms—the study combines computational methods (e.g., sentiment and network analysis), qualitative approaches (e.g., discourse and frame analysis), and participatory workshops to investigate how emotions and facts co-constitute public discourse (Acheampong et al, 2021).By moving beyond the conventional dichotomy between reason and emotion, the project seeks to advance a more nuanced understanding of affective dynamics in digital communication. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates on democratic resilience by examining how emotional mobilization can both distort and strengthen deliberative processes. The broader objective is to inform the design of inclusive, trustworthy, and emotionally attuned communication strategies—particularly within a European context characterized by epistemic uncertainty, algorithmic amplification, and rising populist influence (Moffitt, 2016).Although the project ideas described above are in currently in their early stages, this presentation will outline its conceptual underpinnings, research design, and collaborative framework. Emphasis will be placed on the methodological challenges and opportunities associated with studying affect, evidence, and trust in an intermedial, data-rich environment. The expected outcomes range from strengthening democratic resilience through improved media practices, informing public communication strategies that balance reason and affect, and developing educational resources and policy recommendations to enhance societal trust in democratic institutions and knowledge systems.

In the twenty-first century, literature is no longer confined to printed books or written text but is mediated by digital technology in multisensory ways. These technological and sensory changes call for a fundamentally intermedial perspective on literature. This article presents intermediality as a crucial framework for unpacking the changing interplay between objects, communicative resources, and literary conventions. Specifically, Lars Elleström’s intermedial framework (2021) enables a more fine-grained exploration of the digital condition of literature. Analysing Johannes Heldén and Håkan Jonson’s digital artwork Evolution (2014) using Elleström’s media modalities allows us to trace how technological changes transform our literary experience, compared to a printed poetry collection or AI-generated poems. Beyond interart relationships and approaches to digital literature, an intermedial perspective highlights the potential of literary language use and offers valuable insights to human-machine creativity.

In 2018, former German star reporter Claas Relotius admitted that he manipulated most of his prize-winning feature stories. Why did no one suspect for a long time that his stories were a bit too good to be true? Instead of trying to differentiate facts from fiction, this article explores how facts and narrative interact in journalism. Drawing on Lars Elleström’s approach to how truthfulness in communication is based on indexicality (Semiotica 225, 423–446, 2018), the analysis looks for indexical traces of journalistic work in two news features published in Der Spiegel, one by Alexander Osang (Der Spiegel 37, 50–54, 2018) and the manipulated feature, “The story of Ahmed and Alin” by Claas Relotius (Der Spiegel 28, 127–34, 2016). The analysis explores how observed and verifiable details interact with elements of internal and external coherence. In Osang’s feature, the different indexical relationships are closely connected yet clearly separated. In Relotius’s manipulated feature, the different indexical relationships are not easily identified, and elements of coherence point towards each other instead of being grounded in observed and verifiable detail. This kind of analysis makes it possible to start to describe in more detail how a factual narrative is truthfully or only insufficiently grounded in actual events.

This article examines the informative and authenticating narrative strategies in journalistic representations of reality, with a particular focus on the case of Claas Relotius. In December 2018, it was revealed that Relotius, an award-winning reporter for the German news magazine Der Spiegel, had fabricated many of his features. This scandal highlights the challenges journalism faces in the digital media landscape, where narratives play a central role. The article analyzes how facts and narrative structures interact in journalistic reports and how this interplay influences the perception of reality. Based on Lars Elleström’s intermedial-semiotic approach, the study investigates how Relotius’ reports deviate from a journalistic “truth claim” and how extracommunicative factuality is replaced by intracommunicative coherence and authenticity signals. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of factuality and authenticity as competing claims to truth in the digital public sphere.

 Dieser Artikel untersucht die informativen und authentifizierenden Erzählstrategien in journalistischen Wirklichkeitserzählungen, mit einem besonderen Fokus auf den Fall Claas Relotius. Im Dezember 2018 wurde bekannt, dass Relotius, ein preisgekrönter Reporter des deutschen Nachrichtenmagazins Der Spiegel, viele seiner Reportagen gefälscht hatte. Dieser Skandal verdeutlicht die Herausforderungen, denen der Journalismus in der digitalen Medienlandschaft gegenübersteht, wo Erzählungen eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Der Artikel analysiert, wie Fakten und Erzählstrukturen in journalistischen Berichten zusammenwirken und wie dieses Zusammenspiel die Wahrnehmung der Wirklichkeit beeinflusst. Basierend auf Lars Elleströms intermedial-semiotischem Ansatz wird untersucht, wie Relotius’ Reportagen von einem journalistischen “truth claim” abweichen und wie extrakommunikative Faktizität durch intrakommunikative Kohärenz und Authentizitätssignale ersetzt wird. Diese Analyse trägt zu einem besseren Verständnis von Faktizität und Authentizität als konkurrierende Wahrheitsansprüche in der digitalen Öffentlichkeit bei.

 In this introduction to “Truth Claims Across Media,” we approach pressing questions related to facts and fakes, authority and authenticity, information and disinformation through an intermedial perspective. As digital technology allows us to blend different media and modes on an unprecedented scale, we need to delve deeper into how our media choices impact our perception of truthfulness. We present the concepts of truthfulness and truth claims, examining what kind of knowledge about the actual world can be derived from specific media products. The intermedial perspective serves as a lens through which we can elucidate how the interplay between facts, coherence, and audience engagement varies in different media contexts. From this perspective, it becomes possible to discuss how media choices influence knowledge production and relate to the evolving demands for authenticity and witnessing in today’s shifting media landscape.

This chapter explores the roles of music in literature and how the representation of musical sounds, forms, and genres transforms literature. The chapter surveys how music transformation is used in different literary contexts. Music transformation does not primarily aspire to transform literature into music. Instead, the intermedial relationship with music transforms literary narration and expression and expands the understanding of what kinds of experiences language and written texts can convey. Elleström’s concept of media transformation highlights how the representation of music and the transmediation of structures and ideas are always interrelated. Intermedial relationships with music appear as a performative tool to reach poetological aims. The transgressive potential of music is used not to explain but to express and perform complex relationships.

This article explores the complementary potential of intermedial and multimodal semiotic analysis. Both multimodal and intermedial research explore the multifaceted nature of communication. However, since research fields have different foci and analytical methods, they are less connected than they could be. We approach intermediality and multimodality as complementary frameworks and argue that there is much to gain in drawing on the analytical strengths of both. To this end, underlying differences in method and theoretical assumptions need to be made explicit. Drawing on John A. Bateman and Lars Elleström’s previous explorations of the common ground between the frameworks, we map an arena where multimodal and intermedial analysis can work together. We demonstrate how a combined multimodal and intermedial perspective can function by zooming in and out between the perspectives as we explore the role of “Ride of the Valkyries” in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (1870), in a Nazi newsreel, and in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now (1979). The multimodal perspective provides us with nuanced language for transcribing and discussing how different semiotic resources work together, and the intermedial perspective allows us to discuss the chain of media transformation, where each instance increases and transforms the meaning potential of the “Ride of the Valkyries”.

This book offers an intermedial approach to truthful communication. Bringing together a wide range of media types and interactions from a transmedial perspective, the volume maps out how truth claims are made in different contexts, and how different media promise to create a truthful perception of the social world.  

The flexible communicative possibilities of digital technology have a significant impact on our perception of truth and truthfulness of communication. Bot accounts, deep fake videos, or AI technology draw attention to how reliable communication is destabilized and questioned. In this unstable climate, binaries such as true/false, authentic/fake and fiction/facts are difficult to apply. Instead, it is crucial to investigate how media products construct truthfulness in different ways. 

The volume brings together various media types and contexts such as press conferences, documentaries and mockumentaries, images in magazines and on social media, horror movies, biopics, and educational games and explores how truth claims, authenticity discourses, and knowledge communication are established and how they collide, merge, or are confused.