Remediation. Understanding Media

Remediation. Understanding New Media
Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin

In Bolter and Grusin’s view, “we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media.” (45) In this respect, new media seem to be in a symbiosis with the older media, as the former define themselves in connection to the latter. It is by refashioning older media that the new media can achieve cultural significance. 

In other words, it can be argued that new media are better grasped when trying to examine the manner in which new media refashion or remediate older media. Thus new media appropriate various aspects from other media so as the audience can be entrapped easily in the illusion of immediacy. 

When talking about remediation, it should be mentioned that only "the content has been borrowed, but the medium has not been appropriated or quoted."(44) Such type of borrowing is labelled as "repurposing" which means "to take a "property" from one medium and reuse it in another. With reuse comes necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media. The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can compare them." (45) 

The concept of remediation can be better described through other two concepts, namely the logic of immediacy and the logic of hypermediacy. 

On the one hand, immediacy refers to a viewer's desire to connect, understand, and interact immediately with the medium. Digital media strive for immediacy in order to surpass the boundaries of representation and dive into reality which is basically defined by the viewer's experience. To understand how immediacy actually works, Bolter and Grusin argue that

"Photography was supposedly more immediate than painting, film than photography, television than film, and now virtual reality fulfills the promise of immediacy and supposedly ends the progression. The rhetoric of remediation favors immediacy and transparency, even though as the medium matures it offers new opportunities for hypermediacy."(60) 

On the other hand, hypermediacy is considered to be the opposite of immediacy since the latter implies erasure, unity, and linearity, whereas the former concept relies on opacity, fragmentation, multiplication and it contains a whole gamut of ingredients like text, graphics, video, sound, and animation. To draw on the diagram posted above, immediacy is more of a window through the event itself whereas hypermediacy is a window at the live event seeking to achieve a mediated experience and "create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality." (53)

In order to better understand the concept of remediation, I am going to include below a video which is in fact a case of remediation of Alan Watts' speech, "What do you desire?" 

     
Please find the transcript below. 


"What do you desire? What makes you itch? 
What sort of a situation would you like?

Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, "we’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?"

Well, it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?

When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually turn it – you could eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. 

That’s everybody is – somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track.

See what we are doing, is we’re bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lifes we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it’s all retch, and no vomit it never gets there. 

And so, therefore, it’s so important 
to consider this question: What do I desire?"

Works Cited: 

Barrow, Time. "Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation." Blog.timebarrow.com. N.p., 8 Aug. 2010. Web. 27 May 2013.

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.

Dobson, Stephen. "Remediation. Understanding New Media – Revisiting a Classic."Seminar.net - International Journal of Media,technology and Lifelong Learning(n.d.): 1-9.

Article Author: Alexandra Mihai 

The Remediation of Cinema

As it is has become clear from Alexandra’s presentation, remediation is mainly concerned with the refashioning and the restructuring of form, so as to fit the demands on today’s market. The traditional is no longer the fashion and this is also valid for the film industry, where the new media is the new challenge, as revealed by Jay David Bolter:

Remediation can be thought of as a process of transfer, in which the definition of the real or the authentic is transferred from one form to another. The transference is always a translation in the sense that the authentic or the real is redefined in terms appropriate to the remediating media form. (Bolter Transference, 14)

A special case is that of the animated film, which incorporates digital visual technology in the traditional film, as well as myths, stories and legends, so that in the end, Jay David Bolter  and Richard Grusin explain, it “cannibalizes and refashions everything it touches with a ferocity that is itself mediated and excused because the genre is not ‘serious’ and is supposed to speak to children” (147). 

The possibility of film to exploit the graphic power of digital media enables it to “create visually convincing worlds, without the troubling notion that the user must be in control of these new worlds” (149). The ultimate achievement in specific area of film-making is that “in being able finally to compete with the ‘realism’ of the Hollywood style, the animated film has also become increasingly aware of and confident of its own status as mediation” (150).

Alexandra gave an outline of the main concepts involved in remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy and I should like to note that it is the interplay of the two, which mainly results into special effects, that makes today’s films attractive. Having the “experience of trompe l’oeil before realizing that it is a trompe l’oeil” (158) creates amazement and eventually satisfies the principles of remediation.  

In the case of the remediation of the videogame aesthethics, for instance, alternative narrative structures are being produced and film of this type does more than integrate spectacle within the narrative, but fashions it as a plot in which the characters become immortal. Cinema today is “interactive cinema”, with a virtual reality promising “immediate two-way communication” and “authenticity of representation in narrative film” (Bolter Transference, 23). 

- A genuine video game film - 

Works cited:

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999

Bolter, J. David. Transference and Transparency: Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema. http://cri.histart.umontreal.ca/cri/fr/intermedialites/p6/pdfs/p6_bolter_text.pdf

Article Author: Cristina Milea 

Remediation Today. Case Study: "Tangled"

Alexandra and Cristina have dealt with theoretical issues concerning remediation and its relevance to the cinematic field. But what perhaps most textbooks and scholars fail to do is to account for the world’s unceasing fascination with our older stories. Throughout history, people have kept ‘borrowing’ the content of existing stories and refashioning them to fit other media as well. Recent years have seen a tidal wave of adaptations, rewritings and remediations of literally anything ranging from classic novels to fairytales, paintings, and Biblical scenes, and, as new technologies develop, they are instantly employed to accommodate the same old stories to newer media, which allow us to experience them in significantly different ways. What this old practice has to show us, therefore, is that the stories we’ve created are renewable sources of creative energy, whose full potential is yet to be explored.

Let us take a concrete example. The Walt Disney Company – the world’s largest media and entertainment company – has produced a great number of cartoons, live-action and animated films, many of which are screen adaptations of classical stories such as those written by the brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. The success of such adaptations has been huge and one needs only look at the reception of a recent Disney production like Tangled to see that we still love our dear old stories.

Tangled marked the studio’s 50th animated motion picture. As such, the filmmakers wanted to create, as John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Disney and Pixar, explains, “a unique world and story that evoke the rich, dramatic feeling that is classically Disney, but is also fresh and humorous, and that gives the audience something it has never seen before in computer animation.” And Rapunzel provided just the type of timeless story that the studio could use to put their distinctive mark on, confirming perhaps Linda Hutcheon’s theory that “part of the pleasure of adaptations comes from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise” (4).

But why should we watch our stories instead of reading them? In other words, what is it that makes remediation such a popular practice, even though, as Linda Hutcheon illustrates in her A Theory of Adaptation, contemporary adaptations are often discredited as “secondary”, “derivative” or “culturally inferior” (2)? Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s view, Alexandra brought into discussion the issue of immediacy and its effects upon the audience. Indeed, experiencing a story both visually and aurally helps the public engage with it in a way that the written word will most likely fail to do. Characters are assigned distinctive voices, and key scenes are complemented by inspiredly chosen music. What is more, due to variations in perspective and other film effects, the viewer can at times get the feeling that they are living and walking in the character’s shoes, as in this scene from Tangled where Rapunzel gazes at the sky lit with flying lanterns. The public is given the chance to behold the fictional world from Rapunzel’s point of view, which considerably diminishes the distance between viewer and character, and consequently between reality and the world unfolding on the screen.

Also, the fact that there is no overt reference to the original story written by the brothers Grimm helps maintain the illusion of continuity and immediacy that viewers expect, for they want to watch the film in the same seamless way that they read the story. However, there are allusions to other stories in the film. For example, in the library scene, two of the books that can be seen resting on the floor or on other piles of books are Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – a wonderful trick which is aimed at enhancing the impression that the fictional universe of Tangled stands as a distinct world in its own right and should not be regarded as a mere story from a children’s book. 

Rapunzel’s story was not the only thing that the creators of Tangled tried to appropriate by means of remediation. It was the medium itself. The filmmakers wanted to bring back the painterly touch of old Disney classics, although the film was made using computer-generated imagery (CGI). Keane Glen and his animators drew their inspiration from a painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, which Keane describes as “romantic” and “lush”: "There’s no photoreal hair. I want luscious hair, and we are inventing new ways of doing that. I want to bring the warmth and intuitive feel of hand-drawn to CGI."

Animating Rapunzel’s hair actually represented the biggest challenge for the filmmakers. In Tangled, Rapunzel’s hair is almost a central character that has a life and will of its own. In order to bring Rapunzel and her golden locks to life, the team had to create a whole new piece of software. As animation supervisor Clay Kaytis explains: “No studio has ever had to do 70 feet of hair before. You’ve seen computer-animated hair, and most of the time, it’s pretty passive. Characters don’t usually interact with it; they don’t throw it around or whip it into chairs. This is the first time anyone’s ever done this kind of work.” And it was worth the effort. Thanks to the animators’ skill and the ‘perks’ of technology, the long waterfall of shiny magical locks is an image that viewers are very unlikely to be able to forget.

Works Cited: 

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006

http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Tangled

http://movies.about.com/od/rapunzel/a/making-of-tangled.htm

Article Author: Madalina Bunget