Remediation

Remediation


The Double Logic of Strange Days
In the film Strange Days, we watch the characters use an item called the wire, which provides a visual and aural experience. Our culture is contradictory in what it wants: to increase the amount of media we use, but also to remove the sense of mediation, striving for immediacy. This striving leads to a process whereby digital media remediates one another as well as the analog media that came before them.

The Logic of Immediacy
Virtual reality aims to remove its own mediation, so that the users forget the interface they are using and accept the virtual world. This is done through immediacy, whereby the output of the interface matches the movements the user is making, and also through the use of three dimensional imaging. Linear perspective is used to create this effect, by creating the illusion that there is depth to what the user is seeing. This use of perspective can be traced back to the Renaissance art. Computer graphic designers are striving to achieve “photorealism”, so as to make the media as real to life as possible. Most people think that unmediated presentation is the ultimate goal of the designers.

The Logic of Hypermediacy
Hypermediacy is most evident in the visual style of the World Wide Web and the desktop interface. The desktop interface does not remove itself and so the user is constantly in contact with the interface. The windowed computer is both automatic and interactive, and although the programmer is not visible, the user is constantly present, interacting with it by clicking on buttons and dragging icons. However, that can also be seen as getting the way of transparency of the digital image. Newspapers try to emulate the graphical user interface as do news programs as they divide the screen and use text which are placed around the framed video images. The logic of hypermediacy defines the friction between the mediality of visual space and “real” space. But the logic of immediacy has been dominant.

Remediation
Some films don't acknowledge that they are adaptations from books within the film as it would disrupt the continuity and the illusion. In some cases the electronic medium is used as a new means for users to access other media such as paintings or films. Sometimes the electronic medium offers an improvement on the older medium. Other types are more aggressive in remediation, refashioning the older medium. The medium can also be remediated by absorbing the older medium entirely. However, the old medium can never entirely be effaced.

Mediation and Remediation
There are two strategies of remediation. One is to try to become real by denying the fact of mediation, while the other is by multiplying mediation to create a feeling of fullness. There are also two paradoxes. One is that hypermedia could achieve the unmediated, while the other is that just as hypermedia attempts to achieve immediacy, “(…) digital technologies of immediacy always end up being remediations, even as (…) they appear to deny mediation.”(p19)

Remediation as the Mediation of Mediation
Jameson believes that mediatization is a process of remediation in which especially new media become more dependent on each other and on the older media for its cultural significance. Jameson suggests that the popular visual media culture challenges literary theory. Bruno Latour allows us to delve into the relationship between our media obsessed culture and the “linguistic turn of literary theory”.

Remediation as the Inseparability of Reality and Mediation
By removing “the real” from a medium, modernism has emphasized the realism of the painting as well as the act of painting. Also; diminishing the depicting element, immediacy occurs, as signs of mediation have been removed, and this increases its realism as it refuses to be realistic. Remediation is not only the representation of a medium in another medium, but also the reproduction of reality.

Remediation as Reform
Reform is assumed and each new medium is expected to define itself as an improvement on an earlier media. Where the earlier medium is lacking is usually related to the lack of immediacy. Our culture's conviction is that technology reforms itself. The media reforms reality itself, so in that sense, remediation is reform.

Remediation of the Self
Our desire for immediacy has grown in the last centuries. Cavell said that the desire came from the need for personal validity. To increase immediacy either the user enters through Alberti's window in a search for reality, or the objects themselves divide come towards the users. To achieve hypermedia the user moves between many windows. The subject itself will be remediated.

Networks of Remediation
Remediation always occurs with older media, whereby the new medium define themselves in reference to the old medium. The remediation of the social and the material always go together. The goal for repurposing media is often economic, and not to replace the earlier forms of the medium. “The refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture.”(p28)


Key Phrases
Remediation – The depiction of one medium in another. For instance, the television remediated the radio, as it took over many of the characteristics and cannot be considered a wholly new medium.
Mediation – The representation of an object through a medium.
Hypermediacy - The style of visual representation that reminds the user of their act of watching or gazing at a medium.
Immediacy – The removal of the gap between the signifier and the signified, where the user forgets about the materiality of the media.


The modernist myth that many media critics hang on to is that the new digital technologies have to assume new cultural and aesthetic criterion and disassociate themselves from the older, preexisting media. Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter propose a different approach, arguing that the cultural gravity is only achieved by recognizing earlier media such as film, television and photography. This refashioning, or “remediation” has been a common factor in each new medial development, whereby photography refashioned painting, television remediated radio and so on. The authors also point out that “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation”(p2), and this seemingly paradoxical relationship between hypermedia and mediation is often referred to in the text. Also, Bolter and Grusin clearly state “Our genealogical traits will be immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation, and we will examine these traits (…) with particular attention to contemporary digital media.”(p3) They discuss their proposal of a different approach to categorizing media by using these three characteristics (immediacy, hypermediacy and remediation) as a basis for the whole article, but also using immediacy and hypermediacy to open up the discussion of remediation. The examination of remediation is a very important factor in this article, as the whole article seems to lead towards the analysis thereof. The conclusion states that “(...) the refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture.” (p28)


Bolter and Grusin's proposal of a different approach is built up logically in this article. They start with an example of a modern media; virtual reality. Its purpose is discussed: “(…) with its goal of unmediated visual and aural experience (…)”(p2) and eventually we are led to Bolter and Grusin's own overview of the entire article, “We will begin (…) we will show (…) we will then be in a position to explore (…) We will conclude (…)”(p3). This exposes a sense of organization inherent in this article and the authors, suggesting further that the topic is simple to discuss logically, and the conclusion has already been drawn.
“We will begin by showing how the desire for immediacy is pursued in digital graphics (…) as well as photography, film and television.”(p3) This is partially done in the first section as well as the second, where we learn about virtual reality, but these media are then discussed further in relation to styles adopted from linear perspective painting.
“In examining hypermediacy, we will show how digital multimedia adapts strategies from modernist painting and earlier forms.”(p3) We are made aware of the occurrences of hypermediacy in our culture as well as a bit of its history, dating back to modernist paintings and their stylistic approaches now adapted and used by digital media. Hypermediacy is defined both in terms of what it offers as well as in what is represents in the digital media dominated society.
The discussion of hypermediacy as well as immediacy allows the authors to “(…) be in a position to explore more fully the curious reciprocal (…) remediation itself.” (p3) This one sentence suggests multiple things. First of all, by suggesting that the reader is only prepared to understand it after being informed about immediacy and hypermediacy, they are saying that remediation is only comprehensible in context of the other two. Also, it suggests that the topic is not straight forward, and that a lengthy introduction is needed to discuss remediation, because that is after all what the article is about. This then suggests that the simple structure was necessary to allow the reader to grasp this less than comprehensible topic.
“We will conclude with some proposals for remediation as a general theory of media.”(p3) This is where Bolter and Grusin take all the information they have presented in this article and supply their own ideas about an alternative to the common “misconception” that new media divorces itself from preexisting media.


Bolter and Grusin build a strong case for their argument. Their argument being that critics who say that new digital technologies must remove themselves from the preexisting media are not looking closely enough to gain the complete picture. I agree with this idea, as old technology is always used and improved to make new technologies, and this cannot be erased from the defining identity of the new medium.
On the other hand, if a medium is always considered a descendant of, for example, film, then it becomes more and more difficult for it to develop new directions without the critique from critics who feel the importance of its history is correlated to its existence. What good does the memory of the older medium do for the development of the new? I do not disagree completely with Bolter and Grusin, but I don't feel that this glorification of the predecessor is wholly necessary for the new medium.
Bolter and Grusin suggest that “All mediation is remediation because each act of mediation depends upon other acts of mediation.”(p20) and that “Media need each other in order to be media in the first place”(p20) I do not fully agree with this statement. At a given point in history the original form of media would have been alone, without another form. The fact that there are many different forms now and that they have developed from earlier media does not rule out the possibility of a medium existing without a predecessor. The discussion should center itself on the fact that people are not capable enough to present a whole new medium without associating to earlier media. The choices we have made has led to the media we have now, but this suggests that history is one line of inevitable happenings. Bolter and Grusin seem to suggest that it is media that stand alone and rely on other media, apart from the humans who have created it. This is not true. Yes, media does usually only progress and is hardly ever created without some forms of earlier media that used similar technologies, but this does not cancel out the possibility of a new media created without any form of preexisting forms.
The article is, besides these points, critically acceptable and I find little else wrong with it. The arguments have some clear examples from both media as well as other critics that the authors refer to. As an entirety, this article is strong although the information given can be lengthy and overzealous at times.





Literature
Bolter, J.D., & Grusin, R. (1996). Remediation