Transmodality in Action: A Manifesto

Kate Artz, Danah Hashem, Anne Mooney

BECAUSE increasingly large and diverse audiences require and benefit from varied perspectives and constructions;

BECAUSE transmodality creates more access points into our work and our ideas in ways that benefit both audiences and composers;

BECAUSE audiences and composers with disabilities have diverse needs, and transmodal composition is necessary to meet those needs;

BECAUSE accessibility shouldn't mean substandard access or lack of richness and complexity;

BECAUSE technology affords us a broad diversity of options and opportunities for composing in new, different, and multiple modes, and transmodality helps us practice and develop these new literacies;

BECAUSE adaptation, interpretation, translation, and retelling have always been powerful discursive acts that can be uniquely invoked by transmodality;

BECAUSE intellectual property and copyright culture have worked to stifle these discursive acts, and transmodality creates the potential to liberate composers from those limitations;

BECAUSE transmodality allows us to reimagine and recreate in ways that transcend traditional concepts of mimesis and reproduction;

BECAUSE teaching transmodality supports multimodal composition pedagogy by developing an understanding of the relationship between modes and the ability to move comfortably between them;

We must teach transmodality; we must compose with transmodality; we must study transmodality; we must respect and value transmodality, and we must explore and experiment with transmodality. We need to emphasize transmodality’s importance in our life and our future.