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The term media mix has been the most widely used word to describe the phenomenon of transmedia communication, specifically, the development of a particular media franchise across multiple media types, over a particular period of time. In a word, it is the Japanese term for what is known in North America as media convergence. Yet, despite its importance for understanding the present and past of Japanese media, this term is undertheorized and suffers from a surprising lack of historicization. This chapter examines the use of the media mix strategy by publisher Kadokawa Shoten (Kadokawa Books). It suggests that Kadokawa’s entrance into film production in the mid-1970s was a landmark in the development of the media mix, drawing on and expanding the anime media mix to a wider, film-and-novel-centered audience, developing a broader media mix practice that other companies were quick to emulate. It also shows that both the anime and Kadokawa media mixes are responsible for, and bound up with, the historical shift from a modern or Fordist social regime to a postmodern or post-Fordist one.

This chapter looks at the transformations in the media mix model undertaken by Kadokawa in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These transformations return the media mix to a kind of anime-centrism but also develop anime consumption further by heightening the relationship between character and narrative world incipient in anime’s earlier manifestations. It also examines the work of one of the agents of these transformations—the media mix writer and theorist Ōtsuka Eiji—for an account of the character and its importance in the generation of the media mix consumption system. It connects Ōtsuka’s work on the concept of the world (sekai) to the work of Italian theorist Maurizio Lazzarato, who suggests that capitalism no longer creates the product but rather creates the world in which the product exists. This relation between character and world thus proves to be a central axis within the anime system and within media capitalism more widely.

This chapter investigates how a further change in Grass's understanding of authorship can be discerned in the ‘mixed-media’ works Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert. The starting point for discussion is the assertion that Grass's tendency to present his creative abilities in various artistic disciplines results in his expanding the remit of the authorial role. The multiple disciplines introduce a new kind of dialogue to the author's text that goes beyond the construction of the ‘encapsulated’ narrative self of his earlier autofictional pieces. At the same time, the insights gained from Grass's exploration of authorial limitations (as developed in Chapter 4) add a qualification to his self-presentation. In the texts discussed in this chapter, a monumental celebration of authorship is accompanied by an ironic deconstruction of the concept. The specific dynamics between author, narrator, and text combine to question the author's textual centrality even as they would appear to confirm it.

This chapter aims at addressing the question that what can be learned about mixed media from the phenomenon of musical meaning. It suggests that musical meaning always exceeds its specification by mixed media, but in a way that vitally supports what it exceeds and helps position mixed media, in the general communicative economy. The question of how music bears on meaning in mixed media is examined. Music added to text or image adds its dynamism and body to their semantic value, but the musical remainder, again through the force of interpretive desire, works against the semantic tendency toward closure and completion. The remainder makes sure that musical meaning overruns the semantic borders set out for it and set out for the mixed-media work as a whole. Mixture is not the same thing as assortment. For there to be mixture, a boundary must be crossed. Assortments gather signs from different media into a kind of general signifying environment that to some degree exceeds and obscures the contribution of its components. Mixed media require a more structured, more potentially problematic interaction. Music is almost always part of a mixture; a something added or blended into another circumstance, the source of a solution, suspension, or precipitate. The percephonic voice is a personification of the remainder in its most active, desire-invested form. It is a figure whose significance lies somewhere between its concrete form as a trope and its symptomatic relation to an underlying process of acculturation and subject formation.

The introduction traces the genesis of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts as a forum to remedy the growing disparity that existed between what musicians learned in the conservatories and the new compositional techniques and ideas being employed by composers including improvisation, chance processes, theater pieces, sound installations, mixed media, and electronic and computer music. It presents an overview of contemporary music groups in existence in the early 1960s and notes the changing nature of experimental art making. Lastly, Buffalo's tradition of embracing challenge and innovation is outlined.

The aim of this chapter is to ask what can be learned about musical meaning from the phenomenon of mixed media. It suggests that mixed media specifies both the general form and the historical basis of musical meaning, and with them the means for music to enter the culture-wide stream of communicative actions and exchanges. Music is the dynamic force in mixed media, the embodiment of agency and energy, and its dynamism is primarily a manifestation of the musical remainder. Music's semantic qualities, its relationship to the sign, and its material character as sound, account for the semantic power of music heard apart from mixed media. Semantic looping is a key means by which music continuously refreshes itself with cultural lore. Musical meaning finds both its source and its structure in the phenomenon of mixed media. The source and the structure are coextensive. It is suggested that the semantic loop is the prototype of freestanding musical interpretation of hermeneutic response. Through some combination of parable and paraphrase and with or without the help of titles, texts, programs, or other designators, the interpreter proposes an imagetext through which the music may loop. Music-imagetext combinations may occur both aesthetically, via mixed-media forms, and via social ritual, festivity, and other “musicalized” events. Music and subjectivity share the same loop; music is virtually subjective because subjectivity is virtually musical.

This chapter takes a detailed look at the specificity of transmedia communication. It argues that media interconnectivity or convergence does not always depend first and foremost on users. In order to grasp the specificity of character merchandising and the media mix system, and to account for why and how subjects consume media and things within the anime system, attention must be paid to the way media and things themselves construct connections. The chapter analyzes media-commodities and character communication through the historical evolution of the mass media character toy and the particular forms of communication between character instances that it invokes. It shows that the connections formed between anime media and other commodity forms convert both into media commodities. Anime did not invent media-commodities, but it did cause their proliferation and their institutionalization as the representative commodity form of late capitalism. Moreover, the media-commodity and its communication within the anime system depend as much on the difference or divergence between character instances—toys, stickers, anime, manga—as on the resemblance the character form invokes.

Talk is the most mixed of media, from social to conflictual identificatory, but the tone and rhythm of culturally perspicacious speech make for an effective token of the possibility of individual agency. Talk, as a form for criticism, would seem sketchier than an essay but the form of the talk contains possibilities that are not explored elsewhere by the ranges of language-writing practice. Talk is made out of speech and its amorphous territory is bounded by poetry readings, performance art, teaching and other academic procedures, interviews, and entertainment. Its form is multiplex, existing as both performance and transcription. It can focus around one speaker, a few, or a group and it can be an act of criticism or an art performance.

The third chapter brings the mixed media of the BAM and the 21^st century together as Crawford shows that black art, after the Black Arts Movement, continues to create an alternative way of approaching art as process, not as object. The first part of this chapter shapes this process-oriented counter-literacy around the Black Arts Movement textual productions of the black book as the open book. She explores the openness of word and image texts and argues that they produce the lack of closure of black post-blackness. Through the text paintings of Glenn Ligon and the word and image books of Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, John Keene, Christopher Stackhouse, and others, this chapter unveils the unbound nature of mixed media as one of the most innovative legacies of the Black Arts Movement.

This chapter charts the rise of video art-music during the 1960s. Using the audiovisual and spatial genealogies of the previous chapters, it situates the rise of video art-music within its socio-cultural context and outlines the ways in which early video artist-composers contributed to the creation of their own histories and myths. After exploring the difficulties of including sound and moving image art within a gallery environment, the alternative performance and exhibition spaces used by early video artist-composers are uncovered. Beginning with the early television exhibitions of Paik, Vostell and the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, the chapter investigates the mixed media performances of Rauschenberg, John Cage, Whitman, USCO and E.A.T. The performances of early video artists Tambellini, Levine, Schneider, Gillette, Nauman and various video collectives are then considered in light of audience activation, improvisation and performativity.

Chapter 4 illustrates how, as an enregistered style, queerqueen talk is co-opted into popular culture. It analyzes the Mori Mori Cooking segment of the animated series The World of GOLDEN EGGS (Plus Heads, Inc.) which is hosted by Rose and Mary—animated characters and mascot-like queen-personalities who traverse into the hyper-connected world of media-mix products. The sonic qualities of the okama (fag)-twins as embodied by twins Osugi and Peeco in the late 1970s, and the transformational powers of the queen-personality emanating from makeover genres of the early 2000s are laminated onto the voice performances of Rose and Mary. The highly stylized ventriloquism of queerqueen talk is emblematic of the chaotic language that permeates the Golden Eggs series. Within its multi-platform incarnations, the queerqueen mascot functions as a conduit of knowledge and culinary skills who looks onto the “real world live action” of cooking yet consistently flaunts the dictates of contemporary television broadcasting.

The prefatory chapter surveys the evolution of Conceptual art, in his first divergence from high modernism and from Pop art alike, into a second phase of experiment concerned not with the hybrid forms usually identified as mixed media but understood as a new version of the “combine” operating at the level of amalgamated and cross-mapped material platforms.

This chapter focuses on art-historical analyses on the urban art machines created at the Grand Rue, concentrating on the mixed-media sculptures of Ronald “Cheby” Bazile. It draws from two interrelated strains of intellectual thought: the idea of the machinic urban, or the city as machine; and the Deleuzian models of machines-désirantes (desiring machines) and agencement machinique (machinic assemblages). In the generative yet sometimes destructive climate of Port-au-Prince, urban machines are the engines and resourceful outcomes of creative production forged in the face of precarious lives daily lived in the city. Artworks too can be or become urban machines—sculptures welded from the mechanical debris and industrial waste of larger, overdeveloped cities that dump their postindustrial excess in and on the underdeveloped cities of the global South. These sculptures are art-urban machines that find remaining, productive “use value,” “exchange value,” and even beauty in the discarded scraps of the world's trash.

Play has often been associated with creativity that generates innovation because it allows an alleged “relaxation of rules.” Chapter five looks at the relationships among creativity, innovation, knowledge and rules in the Japanese contemporary play culture. It explores three common patterns of creativity in youth culture’s games: selection and combination, the production of simulacra and remediation, and intertextuality and parody. In all the games described in this chapter, creativity is negotiated with experience, knowledge, and familiarity with existing play forms; most of the time it is expressed through repetition, alternation, and development of known possibilities, rather than in innovation. The chapter concludes by arguing that the reason play is associated with creativity is not because of a “relaxation of rules,” but because play legitimizes and invites creativity, unlike other cultural spheres that demand conformity. Moreover, although creativity in its rigorous sense of generating innovation is rare in the games described in this chapter, players feel that they are partaking of a creative activity and are thus appreciated. In other words, in evaluating creativity in play and in general, we should also at how the notion of creativity is culturally structured.

This chapter explains how placing Nakagami’s work within the context of the historical and cultural modernization of the early twentieth century, including mixed-media work and subcultural forms of narrative, gives new light to understanding the role of writing in the postwar landscape. The book as a whole demonstrates how Nakagami’s literary endeavors address the relationships between literary and political representation, and aesthetics and social movements. He illustrates the personal responsibility of being different in a cultural marketplace; Nakagami’s roji suggests the discarding of one’s habitual vocabularies of identity and difference, and instead understand the neologisms of experience. The concept of parallax was essential to Nakagami’s writing, his twofold perspective attempted to contradict the myth of Japan’s postwar reality as a homogeneous society.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the Spiral Jetty of Robert Smithson, an iconic earthwork made up of black basalt rock and soil. It discusses several reasons why the artwork is a turning point in the development of earth art, such as the establishment of the possibility of a complex synthesis of art and earth, and showing how textual forms could be affected by and were ultimately receptive to elementals leading to the earth to bear on the discursive malleability of the artwork. It explores the artwork’s form of mixed media, being a sculpture, an essay, and a film. It examines Smithson’s encapsulation of the coexistence of the discursive and material spheres of art as they surge up within one another.

This chapter adds race to the complications of gender politics in Red Rose/White Rose (1994). Writing in a lucid, satirical, yet profoundly humanistic style that one could call “postrealist,” Eileen Chang’s 1942 story illustrates the sexual and ideological confusions of a Western-educated Chinese man, Tong Zhenbao, as he oscillates between two self-images: an exalted manly colonist and an emasculated colonized subject. In his adaptation, Stanley Kwan—one of the most important directors of the Hong Kong New Wave—picks up on Chang’s fine-grained study of the power relationships involved in seeing and being seen. Taken together, Chang’s mixed-media fiction and Kwan’s literary adaptation propose a more diverse and symbiotic future for Chinese culture.

This chapter focuses on Johnny Otis’ visual art endeavors; his drawing, painting, and sculpture emerged from his love of and immersion in the spirit of the Black community. Otis perceived strong affinities between visual art and music. His artwork derived from the everyday life of the Black community; he followed the lead of local black and white artists such as Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell who were engaged in the same mixed-media assemblage form of art. One musician that Otis influenced was Margie Evans, who became a prominent artist-educator dedicated to preserving knowledge about the blues. The latter part of the chapter details Otis’ endeavors after his retirement, notably the establishment of the Johnny Otis Center for the Arts, a project intended to address the needs of children in Sonoma County.