The Quick- n -Dirty on Bolter and Grusin’s “Immediacy, Hypermediacy ,” and Remediation”

1. The Quick-n-Dirty on Bolter and Grusin’s“Immediacy, Hypermediacy,” and Remediation” Kaitlin Marks-DubbsWAM Spring 2012

2. Back to Basics – Building on the term “media” • “Medium” – a raw material or mode of expression for recording, reproducing, or communicating data, images, or sound. • “Media” – the plural of medium (when we “write across media” in this class, we use more than one medium over the semester) • Think of “remediation” as re-media-tion. • “-tion” shows that our noun is an action (from verb “remediate”). • “mediate” – to signify through a medium • “Re” – we’re re-signifying through a new medium

3. Immediacy • Using a medium so as to erase its presence between the object it signifies and the consumer • Proposed Outcome: “the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium” (24). • Example: Western oil painting that attempts to erase the brush strokes to give a sense of immediacy. • Example: photography thought to be the erasure of the medium through the perfection of linear perspective, transparency through automatic reproduction, and “it apparently removed the artist as an agent who stood between the viewer and the reality of the image” (26).

4. Immediacy Contd. • Realistic Outcome: It is important to note that “at no time or place has the logic of immediacy required that the viewer be completely fooled by the painting or photograph”; we “marvel at the discrepancy between what [we] know and what [our] eyes [tell] us…the marveling could not have happened unless the logic of immediacy [has] a hold on the viewers” (30, 31). • Which takes us to…

5. Hypermediacy • Does not attempt to erase the medium; in hypermediacy, “the user is repeatedly brought back into contact with the interface” (33). • Proposed Outcome: “In every manifestation, hypermedicy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (34). • Example: Medieval manuscript calling your attention to typography through the embellishment of capital letters

6. Hypermediacy Contd. • Outcomes Elaborated: “In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation…the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgment” (41-42). • So what about multiple media?

7. Remediation • “The representation of one medium in another” (45). • Related to “repurposing”: “to take a ‘property’ from one medium and use it in another” (45). • Type 1 - When “an older medium is highlighted and represented in digital form without apparent irony or critique” (45). • Often used to grant access to other media with transparency as the goal. • Example: digitized picture galleries and collections of literary works.

8. Remediation Contd. • Type 2 - Emphasizing the difference rather than erasing it. • Example: Framing the technological affordances of electronic encyclopedias (such as hyperlinking to related articles) as an improvement over the older print versions. • Type 3 - A more aggressive remediation, whereby the new medium [i.e. a digital one] tries to “refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy” (46). • Further Explanation: a mosaic of elements where “we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and their new, inappropriate setting” (47) • Example: News clips with techno music playing in the background

9. Remediation Contd. • Type 4 - When “a new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized” (47). • Example: video games that try to be like “interactive films.” • Type 5 - Refashioning that occurs within a single medium. • Examples: a play within a play, a film borrowing from another film, etc.