The Emergence of Multimodal Aesthetics and Art Practice Based on Feminist Philosophy of Language and Reading

In this paper, the author traces the process of the emergence of new branches of aesthetic knowledge – media aesthetics and multimodal aesthetics – in Russian and Western humanities including journalism, literary criticism, pedagogy, and semiotics. She highlights the specificity of the subject field of media aesthetics as the aesthetics of ‘new media’ and the subject field of multimodal aesthetics as the aesthetics of new art forms (hybridized, digital). The author exploits a historical-and aesthetic method to demonstrate the scientific foundations upon which not only new subject areas but also new aesthetic approaches are formed enabling for a more precise identification and conceptualization of hybridized digital art projects. This method allows the researcher to draw a line of historical continuity from the M. M. Bakhtin’ ideas of the polyphonic novel and the dialogue of cultures and Yu. M. Lotman’s plurality of cultural languages, to Julia Kristeva’s multiplicity of languages and polylogue, to G. Kress’s social semiotic and multimodal literacy, and finally, to the transpositional grammar of B. Cope and M. Kalantzis. To illustrate how the methods of the transpositional grammar and the multimodal aesthetics help to conceive hybridised digital art practices the case projects of T. Makhacheva “Dear…” (2019) is presented. The analysis of the case revealed how different modes of information translations (modalities) convey a multitude of meanings, how a variety of connotations emerges from them, and how the interference of meanings generated by different modes of information transmission affects the artistic and aesthetic experience of the reader-viewer-listener of the project.