For my canonical text, I am reading Bolter and Grusin’s, Remediation: Understanding New Media. This work first came out in 1999 and it’s amazing how although the general look of the media and images they cite looks very dated (digital technologies have come along way in a short period of time), the general predictions and ideas Bolter and Grusin propose have indeed come true to a great extent. For instance, their discussions of cultural networks (65) and how the internet will bring about a new kind of democracy (74) really speak to the political changes that came after the book was written such as the “Arab Spring” and movements such as “Occupy” and “Wikileaks.”
This week’s reading went through section I:†Theory†and covered the core concepts of “Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation,†“Mediation and Remediation†and “Networks of Remediation.†They use the term Remediation to mean “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another†(59). They align with some of the poststructuralist views that “all interpretation is reinterpretation†(56), though they spin it as “all mediation is remediation†(55) and “all mediation remediates the real†(59). Whenever a new medium is employed, it is filling in a gap that was left open by a preceding medium.
Bolter and Grusin maintain that new media attempts a dual role simultaneously: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (5). “The logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented” (6). Hypermediacy draws attention to the fact that heterogeneous media are inbetween us and the thing represented (34).
While thinking about remediation, the hypermediacy of many rock concerts, and how new media remediates “the real,” I recalled a video I had seen a while back while writing a paper on tracing conversations about the Beatles RockBand Video Game during the months before it came out. The video depicts a song from a Paul McCartney concert in Coachella, California, on 17 April, 2009—almost five months before the Beatles Rock Band Video Game was released. From the perspective of an audience member, the video shows a tiny Paul McCartney on stage playing “Got to Get You into My Life,†a song he originally recorded in 1966.
Video still of McCartney Concert, grabbed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHZIpZCsrwA&
In front of him is a sea of phone cameras capturing the live, heavily amplified performance as well as larger-than-life images from the then-unreleased Beatles Rock Band Game. The 3D likeness of a much younger Paul McCartney displays on large screens behind the actual 60-something Paul McCartney and is most likely the first place most of the audience had seen what the game would look like. On the sides of the stage are even larger screens that show the live concert on the stage. The living McCartney is shown as a gigantic tower on these massive screens. The images of The Beatles Rock Band Game point to a time when gamers and Beatles fans would be able to to interact with the Beatles’ music in ways they never had before.
Talk about remediation!
Witness the whole video here.
These first three chapters discuss how media reforms and refashions earlier media, i.e. how photography remediated traditional painting and art, and how film remediated theatrical experiences, as well as the desire inherent in the gendered male gaze. This is going to be very useful as I’m currently looking at remediation of broadcast television on the internet.
Bolter, J.D. and R. Grusin. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
So I’ll ask the weird question; why didn’t you embed the video?
GREAT example of remediation. I too think the book is very useful although the examples are so quickly dated. Increasingly, I’m interested in how people internalize transparency (aka, I’m watching it “live” through my friend’s phone who is at the concert). How do we dismiss the transactional distance (I’m pulling in a term from DL theory) and somehow still feel “there” (aka, the technology and space is transparent)?
I didn’t embed the video because you would have lost all the comments on the Youtube page. I thought those were important to view too.
Regarding your comments on “internalizing transparency” vs. the “transactional distance,” there’s a term that Suzanne Hidi (University of Toronto) focuses her study on called “Situational Interest.” Hidi applies it to the context of education and what motivates student engagement, but in a way it might be valid to consider that the more interested or engaged a fan is with their idol, the less distance they’ll want to feel and therefore, the less opacity is perceived by the fan. It makes me think of the saying “Love covers a multitude of sins.”
Just a thought.
Diane, using the McCartney performance at Coachella to discuss Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation is such a great example. Viewing the video you have posted in light of your discussion, I think of the text Suzanne (Bea) and I are reading for the canonical text assignment, Baudrillard’s The Illusion of the End. In discussing how we as a society are obsessed with “high fidelity” as it pertains to musical perfection, Baudrillard argues music “disappears into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effects” (5). What is interesting to me is that our musical ears are so attuned to the sound of perfection that listening to a live concert version of a song or, say, an “Out of the Box” in-studio, acoustic performance sounds flawed because of the lack of editing and rerecording, etc.
In the McCartney example of remediation, the background images likely represent a more polished version of the song that McCartney performs live even as his high tech concert performance and the mobile phone recording (archiving…) of the event remediates the old. Also, another thought is how the “high fidelity” of today’s concert experience supposedly remediates that of simpler, less mediated concerts. I remember going to a U2 concert about, gosh, 20 years ago and being blown away by the hypermediated experience.
See Suzanne’s blog also; she shares some insightful ideas about Baudrillard’s comments on music and links to an interesting post from the Grammy’s. Enjoyed your post!
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Diane, I love this example of the McCartney concert! Bolster and Grusin’s logic of immediacy connects with my reading of McLuhan. McLuhan talks about hot and cold media. Hot media is more detailed, more “real” and allows the viewer to be more passive. Cold media is more rough hewn, less detailed and requires viewer participation to seem real. It strikes me that many of the references Bolter and Grusin’s mention become “hot media” through remediation. I’m thinking of the use of Skype for communication remediation the telephone.
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