Intertextuality

Once again I attended the Media Histories and Cultures lecture with my colleagues. Today's lecture was about "Intertextuality". I came to an understanding that Intertextuality means the transposition of the one or many sign systems. So, it is still related to what we learned last week (Signs and Semiotics) in this lecture.

We were shown some fine examples of intertextuality used in the Media world. Such as, the name of the famous boy band "Beatles" relates to the insect "Beetle". The band was originally named "The silver beetle" and later changed to "Beatles" where the word itself relates to the insect "Beetle" and term "beat" in terms of music.

If I have to come up with my own example, then in the movie “Shrek 2”, characters re-enact the scene from the movie “Spiderman” where a half-masked man hanging upside down kisses a woman, with some differences such as the characters are ogres instead of humans and the upside down character has mud half way down his face instead of being half masked. But even so, the relation is very clear and obvious and hence, shows the Intertextuality.

In one of the theories, something interesting caught my attention. It was said that no ideas are unique as every idea goes through the process of intertextuality and in some way relates to something that already exists. And when I thought about it I could not agree more. Even when someone thinks of something all on his/her own and creates something totally new, it will have some relation with something else that already exists and the creator might not even know about it.

This helps me up in my course as we can have countless inspirations from all sorts of things to add up to our creations. For example, when creating a 3D model of an alien creature  for instance, we can merge features of different animals found on Earth to create a new creature.