My new can out media your old = Remediation

I’ve read Remediation before and it has become one of those books I’m glad I had to read in school. I never would have picked this book up and read it given an entire bookstore to choose from. It would have remained on the shelve at Big Box Books until the world ended. It’s not because I’m not interested in what it between it’s page. It’s because the title of the book. Who knows what remediation is? Nobody (let’s assume you don’t know for the next few mintues). It’s kinda funny how we are constantly surround by it but the average person on the street wouldn’t know how to answer if you asked them to give you an example of remediation.

J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin define remediation as the formal logic by which new media refashions prior media forms. The key principles of remediation are immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy builds upon the idea of transparency and that the more unaware of the medium you are, the more of the message you get. As a viewer, you aren’t looking at a painting of a landscape, your looking through a window at an actual landscape. Hypermediacy builds upon the idea of opacity. The more aware of the medium you, the more you know it a representation of a message, not the actual message. You know your watching a video of a landscape on your computer, why would someone try to convince you other wise?

For years, film has been used to remediate oral storytelling and theatrical plays. Both principles of remediation have been used to tell stories. The most recent use of Immedicay in filmmaking has been James Cameron’s Avatar. Cameron invented new technologies so he could immerse movie goers into a world of his creation. With the uses of 3D cameras and a ridiculous number of computers, people where transported to his world. I remember news reports of people having severe depression and needing support groups for recovery after watching the movie because they couldn’t really go to the world he created. The technology was so immersive, people actually forgot they had paid to see a movie.

A movie that uses Hypermediation to tell a story is Snatch. A British gangster film, it doesn’t try to convince you that your on another planet, it makes you very aware that you are watching a movie. It’s filled with fast cuts, slam zooms, dream like moments of one character point of views and crazy amounts of coincidence. There is no way the chain of events that happened in this movie would happen in real life but it’s this style of storytelling that makes the film a good movie.
Just because the viewer knows it’s a movie doesn’t make you unaware of the story being told.

This is the subject matter of John Guillory’s Essay Genesis of the Media Concept. Here Guillory retraces the concept of communication through thinking and it’s relation to media. When he talks about media, he separates it from art as the term wasn’t always applied in this sense. He makes the connection between writing and it’s uses to transfer ones own thoughts to another person, as a communication medium. Guillory does a thorough job of recounting this transition/conversation through history and how communication came to mean the transferring of an idea. This is one of the reasons stories are used to teach core principles to other people, usually children. My father told me the story of who cried wolf when I was a child and I still remember the moral behind the story, don’t say there is a danger yourself and others if the danger isn’t real. The best movies are the ones that mentally engage you, draw you in and transfer that story to you.

Film is the remediation of literary print; print is remediation of writing; writing is remediation of theatrical plays; plays are remediation of the tribe oral storyteller. One of my favor films that uses hypermediation to tell a story is Amelie. Do yourself a favor, watch it.

Amendment:

My case study of remediation started with the presentation of GUILLAUME REYMOND’s PAC-MAN video art. In this video, Reymond remediates the video game PAC-MAN with the help of 111 human pixels.
The hypermediacy of this video brought to mind a few question I wanted the class to answer/discuss:
1. Is this video something beyond remediation?
2. Does the hypermediation of the video distract you or draw you into the piece?

I think I want to do my final project on the following statement.
So much of what we experience on a daily basis is hypermediated, are experiences we have that aren’t mediated still mentally viewed as ‘real’ life?