Overview

The introduction begins with a discussion of the sci-fi film “Strange Days” which partly revolves around a new technology called “The Wire”, which is a sensory recording/playback device.

Like digital media today, it threatens to obsolete other forms of media, but at the same time is bound with similar restrictions and constraints as film and other media.

Remediation is about how media strive to achieve immediacy in spite of their mediation. Newer media attempt to do exactly what their predecessors have done, billing themselves as improved versions of other media. The book is an attempt to challenge the idea that media exist in isolation.

Transparency is an effort to make the presence of the medium disappear. The rhetoric of transparency is introduced through the discovery and use of perspective in the renaissance. Perspective is a technological means of controlling space from a single location, and is also a technology in the sense of its mathematical formulation. As a technology though, it is necessarily about representation and reconstruction of the real world and the human eye. This is an example of immediacy, but that is dependent on the subject of the immediate.

If accurate reproduction is a manifestation of immediacy, then that would imply that Umberto Eco’s openness, and by extension, much of the avant garde, is “latent”.

The automation of computer graphics follows in the same trends as the automation of photography. And in doing so it gauges its accuracy via comparison to photographs. However, the aesthetic that is being pursued is the automated nature of reproduction: the effacement of the programmer, the removal or hiding of the subjective influence in the technology itself.

The introduction of interactivity makes the issue of immediacy and transparency complicated. Interactivity requires certain elements (which may be transparent in the sense that they might be evocative of other forms, eg desktop, paintbox, etc), but to provide immediacy they must be manifest and visible, counter to transparency.

Hypermediation is a situation that involves a coming together of many kinds of media, and often highlights the mediated nature of its construction. This trend can be found in medieval illumination, baroque cabinets, and of course many contemporary things, of which new media is a prime source.

adaptation and hypermediacy: adaptations do not draw attention to their nature as mediating the original. This is also called “repurposing”. Bolter notes that McLuhan once said that the content of any medium is always another medium. The representation of one medium in another is remediation. Does that mean that adaptation is a subset of this?

The remediation of an encyclopedia in digital form bills itself as, not an encyclopedia, but an improved encyclopedia. The transition, involving hyperlinking and providing digital affordances to traditional form draws attention to the electronic medium. Thus such adaptations are translucent, not transparent.

For a game adaptation of a narrative form, the discussion of transparency and mediation become interesting to compare. A goal is to not be transparent, but to evoke the original medium in a way that allows it to be read in a new and open manner.

Remediation as a figurative representation, rather than conceptual. What tends to get “taken out” (of one media and then put into another) is not content, but representational practices. For example: film techniques as adopted by games.

So, the issue is representational practices.
so, for abstract things, like fractal/generative art
these have not really had a foundation in practice, so they forged their own style,
which, admittedly, looks pretty awful, but had informed graphical representation for a long time.

Attempting to challenge the idea that the computer is totally independent of other practices and disciplines. Convergence is serving to undermine that idea, continuing to challenge the idea of the utter-newness.

“A medium is only dead when it’s not being remediated anymore.”