Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation

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Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation

• Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin

Aaron LevisohnPHD CandidateSchool of
Interactive Arts and TechnologySimon Fraser
University
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Framing the argument
the twin preoccupations of contemporary
media the transparent representation of the
real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media
themselves. (P.21)
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Immediacy
Experience without mediation
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Immediacy The Goal

• The Invisible Interface
• Designers often say that they want an
  interfaceless interface. P.23
• A transparent interface would be one that erases
  itself, so that the user is no longer aware of
  confronting a medium but instead stands in an
  immediate relationship to the content of that
  medium. P.24

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Immediacy

• Why do we think digital media is so special?
• The transparent interface is one more
  manifestation of the need to deny the mediated
  character of digital technology altogether. To
  believe that with digital technology we have
  passed beyond mediation is also to assert the
  uniqueness of our present technological moment.
  For many virtual reality enthusiasts, the
  computer so far surpasses other technologies in
  its power to make the world present that the
  history of other media has little relevance. P24

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Immediacy A Brief History
Historical components of immediacy Linear
Perspective Erasure Automaticity These
earlier media sought immediacy through the
interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency
with the techniques of linear perspective,
erasure and automaticity. All of which are
strategies at work in digital technology. P.24
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Immediacy Linear Perspective

• Perspective seeing through (Albrecht
  Durer and Panofsky)
• Puts the viewer into the picture
• Linear perspective could be regarded as the
  technique that effaced itself as technique p.24
• Albertis Window
• On the surface on which I am going to paint, I
  draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I
  regard as an open window through which the
  subject to be painted is seen. P.24-25

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Immediacy Erasure

• Hiding the surface (and the artist)
• A technique for making the picture space
  continuous with the viewers space.
• Painters would smooth the surface of their
  paintings to hide the brushstrokes
• Erasing the surface in this way concealed
  and denied the process of painting in favor of
  the perfect product. P.25

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Immediacy Automaticity

• Automate the technique of linear perspective
• Photography
• In the most familiar story of the development of
  Western representation, the invention of
  photography represented the perfection of linear
  perspective. P.25
• Photography was a mechanical and technical
  process, whose automatic character seemed to many
  to complete the earlier trend to conceal both the
  process and the artist. In fact, photography was
  often regarded as going too far in the direction
  of concealing the artists by eliminating him
  altogether. P.25

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Immediacy Bringing it all together

• Photography isnt just automatic
• It combines all three logics of immediacy
• The photograph was transparent and followed the
  rules of linear perpective it achieved
  transparency through automatic reproduction and
  it apparently removed the artist as an agent who
  stood between the viewer and the reality of the
  image. P.26

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Immediacy The Digital Age

• Computer generated images
• Borrows techniques for immediacy from
  photography and painting.  
• Digital graphics extends the tradition of the
  Albertian window. It creates images in
  perspective, but it applies to perspective the
  rigor of contemporary linear algebra and
  projective geometry. Computer generated images
  are mathematically perfect p.26
• Underlying supposition Mathematics is
  appropriate for describing nature. P.27

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Immediacy The Digital Age

• Programming as Erasure
• Programming allows the creator to disappear
• Programming, then, employs erasure or
  effacement, much as Norman Bryson defines erasure
  for Western painting or as Cavell and others
  describe the erasure of human agency from the
  production of photographs. P.27

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Immediacy The Digital Age

• Digital Photography vs. Traditional Photography
• The fact that digital photography is automatic
  suggests an affinity to photography. In both
  cases, the human agent is erased, although the
  techniques of erasure are rather different.
  p.27
• Traditional Photography Nature inscribes
  itself chemically and mechanically
• Digital Graphics Work of humans with deferred
  agency.
• It is not easy to regard the program as a
  natural productdigital graphic images are the
  work of humans, whose agency, however, is often
  deferred so far from the act of drawing that it
  seems to disappear. p.27

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Immediacy Adding Motion
 

•  Film and animation New Immediacy
• Motion adds new methods for achieving immediacy.
  
• We can now involve the viewer more intimately in
  the image p.28
• Sequence of shots can be put under viewers
  control p.29

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Immediacy Naïve Immediacy
 

• Naïve Immediacy
• Linear perspective is still regarded as having
  some claim to being natural. (p30)
• Vast audiences for popular film and television
  continue to assume that unmediated presentation
  is the ultimate goal of visual representation
  (p30)
• Naïve Immediacy works because there is some
  necessary contact point between the medium and
  what it represents. (p30)
• Photography light Linear perspective
  mathematical relationships

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Hypermediacy
 

• Heterogeneous
• Windowed style of World Wide Web pages. P.31
• Process Oriented
• Emphasizes process or performance rather than
  the finished art object. P.31
• Random Access
• It is a medium that offers random access it has
  no physical beginning, middle or end. p.31
• If the logic of immediacy leads one either to
  erase or to render automatic the act of
  representation, the logic of hypermediacy
  acknowledges multiple acts of representation and
  makes them visible. P.33-34

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Hypermediacy
 
Hypermediacy does not need the computer. This
definition suggests that the logic of hypermedia
had to wait for the invention of the cathode ray
tube and the transistor. However, the same logic
is at work in the frenetic graphic design of
cyber culture magazines like Wired, and Mondo
2000, in the patchwork layout of such mainstream
print publications as USA Today, and even in the
earlier multimediated spaces of Dutch
paintings, medieval cathedrals, and illuminated
manuscripts. P.31
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Hypermediacy The GUI
 

• The GUI
• The inventors of the GUI at Xerox PARC thought
  they were designing a transparent interface.
  P.31
• But, transparency and immediacy must compete with
  another value multiplicity p.31-32
• The designers thought they were making the
  interfaces more natural, but
• In fact, the graphical user interface referred
  not only to culturally familiar objects, but
  specifically to prior media, such as painting,
  typewriting, and handwriting. In making such
  references, computer designers were in fact
  creating a more complex system in which iconic
  and arbitrary forms of representation interact.
  P.32

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Hypermediacy The GUI
 
Properties of a GUI No attempt to unify the
space. P.33 The multiplicity of windows and
the heterogeneity of their contents means that
the user is constantly brought back into contact
with the interface. P.33 Automatic and
interactive Clickable. Always returns control to
the user Opaque Buttons get in the way of
transparency
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Hypermediacy
 
 Question The logic of hypermediacy multiplies
the signs of mediation and in this way tries to
reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience.
P.34 Q Do you think there is a corrolation
between multiplicity and richness of experience?
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Hypermediacy A Brief History
 

• Hypermediated spaces
• Theme parks and video arcades.
• Historical Hypermediacy
• Hypermediacy has often had to content itself
  with a secondary, if nonetheless important,
  status. P.34
• Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance
  altarpieces, baroque cabinets, modernist collage
  and photomontage. P.34
• The diorama, the phenakistoscope, and stereoscope
  were media that realized transparent immediacy
  but incorporated it within hypermediacy. P.37

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Hypermediacy Modernism
 

• Modernism
• It was not until modernism that the cultural
  dominance of the paradigm of transparency was
  effectively challenged. In modernist art, the
  logic of hypermediacy could express itself both
  as a fracturing of the space of the picture and
  as a hyperconscious recognition or
  acknowledgement of the medium. P.38
• In collage and photomontage as in hypermedia, to
  create is to rearrange existing forms. P.39
• 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. P.41

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Hypermediacy Authenticity
 

• Authentic Experience through Hypermedia
• Erkki Huhtamo Technology is gradually becoming
  a second nature, a territory both external and
  internalized, and an object of desire. There is
  no need to make it transparent any longer, simply
  because it is not felt to be in contradiction to
  the authentic of the experience. P.42
• Rock Music
• As live performance became hypermediated, so did
  the recordingsThe evolution of recording
  techniques also changed the nature of live
  performance. P.42.

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Hypermediacy Hypertext
 

• Hypertext
• As Michael Joyce reminds us, replacement is the
  essence of hypertext, and in a sense the whole
  World Wide Web is an exercise in replacement
  Print stays itself electronic text replaces
  itself. P.44
• Methods of replacement
• Erasure (interpenetration)
• Tiling (juxtaposition)
• Overlapping (multiplication)

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Hypermediacy to Remediation
 

From Hypermedia to remediation Hypermedia
CD-ROMs and windowed applications replace one
medium with another all the time, confronting the
user with the problem of multiple representation
and challenging her to consider why one medium
might offer a more appropriate representation
than another. In doing so they are performing
what we characterize as acts of remediation.
P.44
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Remediation
 

In adaptations of novels to film The content
has been borrowed but the medium has not been
appropriated or quoted. (Repurposing)
p.44 McLuhan The content of any medium is
always another medium p.45 Remediation The
representation of one medium in another medium.
P. 45
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Remediation The Spectrum
 

• Spectrum of Remediation
• Direct (non-ironic) Remediation
• Remediation that Emphasizes Difference
• Aggressive Remediation
• Absorption as Remediation

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Remediation Direct
 

• Direct (non-ironic) Remediation
• Older medium is represented in digital form
  without apparent irony or critique.
• Allows access that might otherwise not be
  possible.
• The digital medium wants to erase itself, so
  that the viewer stands in the same relationship
  to the content as she would if she were
  confronting the original medium p45
• Examples Digitizes paintings or photographs

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Remediation Difference
 

• Remediation that Emphasizes Difference
• In these cases, the electronic version is
  offered as an improvement, although the new is
  still justified in terms of the old and seeks to
  remain faithful to the older mediums character.
  P.46
•  
• Examples Digital Encyclopedias, Expanded Books.

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Remediation Aggressive
 

• Aggressive Remediation
• The digital medium can try 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. p.46
• Example Emergency Broadcast Networks
  Telecommunication Breakdown
• This tearing out of context makes us aware of
  the artificiality of both the digital version and
  the original clip. P.47

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Remediation Absorption
 

• Absorption as Remediation
• Trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so
  that the discontinuities between the two are
  minimized. The very act of remediation, however,
  ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely
  effaced the new medium remains dependant on the
  older one in acknowledged and unacknowledged
  ways. P.47
•  
• Examples Computer games like Myst or Doom which
  remediate cinema are sometimes called
  interactive films...The idea is that the players
  become characters in a cinematic narrative. P.47

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Remediation Bi-Directional
 

• Remediation acts in both directions
• World Wide Web Borrowing the monitoring function
  of broadcast television. (Streaming Web cams)
  p.47
• In fact, television and the World Wide Web are
  engaged in an unacknowledged competition in which
  each now seeks to remediate the other. P 47-48
• Film is trying to remediate digital technology
  through the use of digital effects. - The
  goal is to make these electronic interventions
  transparent. P.48

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Remediation Virtual Reality
 

• Virtual Reality
• This from of aggressive remediation does create
  an apparently seamless space. It conceals its
  relationship to earlier media in the name of
  transparency it promises the user an unmediated
  experience, whose paradigm again is virtual
  reality. p.48
• Virtual Reality Aims to give the user a sense of
  presence
• VR remediates television and film by the
  strategy of incorporationthese technologies
  remain at least as reference points by which the
  immediacy of virtual reality is measured.
  Paradoxically, then, remediation is as important
  for the logic of transparency as it is for
  hypermediacy. p.48

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Remediation Within Media
 

• Within Media Refashioning
• Film to film. Literature to literature.
• Most common form of reuse.
• Maintains the sanctity of the medium.
• Often used for homage or rivalry
• Refashioning ones predecessors is key to
  understanding representation in earlier media. It
  becomes less surprising, that remediation should
  also be the key to digital media. P.49
  

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Remediation The Future
 

• Is remediation just a phase?
• Steven Holtzman argues that Repurposing is a
  transitional step that allows us to get secure
  footing on unfamiliar terrain. P.49
• Bolter argues Digital media can never reach
  this state of transcendence, but will instead
  function in a constant dialectic with earlier
  media. P.50
• Repurposing as remediation is both what is
  unique to digital worlds and what denies the
  possibility of that uniqueness. P.50
• Q Is sampling all that is left?