The metamedium reframes intermedia for the digital era as an active mix of media, not a mere addition

The metamedium is a digital-era successor to Higgins’ intermedium. Where intermedium was firmly rooted in the 1960s discourse of merging two art forms, the metamedium (drawing on Manovich and Alan Kay) addresses media relations under the sign of the digital: it is the result of an active mix of media, as opposed to multimedia understood as a mere addition of media. The distinction that carries the weight is active mix versus addition — a metamedium fuses media so they mutually transform, whereas multimedia merely juxtaposes independent layers. For live AV and live-coded work, this is the sharper contemporary term for what an audio-reactive or co-generative system does when sound and image are produced from shared digital material rather than run in parallel. It does not, however, capture the specific audiovisual-combination quality that defines visual music, which is why genre-based description is still needed alongside it.

Examples

A Hydra sketch whose parameters are driven by the same audio-analysis stream that shapes the sound = active mix (metamedium). A rendered video file played back over an unrelated DJ set = mere addition (multimedia).

Assessment

Contrast metamedium with multimedia using the active-mix-versus-addition criterion, and classify a given digital AV setup as one or the other.