Narrative Theory Series
Remediation
Look carefully at the images below:
It can take awhile to realize what is going on in these paintings– that the painter has set up an easel in front of a window, and the painting on the easel depicts what is outside the window. Or does it? What if, for example, there were actually KFCs and McDs outside the windows now, and so the painter wants to paint the city as it used to be? Or, what if, in the first image, there is no castle spire but the painter would like there to be one? And in the second image, what if a factory now stands where a field used to be? Or, what if the painting is faithfully showing what is actually outside the window? How can we know? Or, is the point actually that we cannot know? Or is there some other point, about the nature of representation itself? Hmmmmmm.
These paintings are examples of what is known as reflexivity in media. A reflexive, also called a self-reflexive, work is one that refers to itself to examine its conditions production. Such works don’t just refer to themselves in the sense that they refer to the content of the work, but also the medium of the work and its techniques of making. So in the Magritte paintings, the paintings refer to painting itself as a medium of expression or meaning. The paintings are literally about painting.
Many books have been written about Magritte, so we can only skim the surface here. It’s worth noting that the paintings have been placed in front of a window. Why do you think he did that? A window is usually made of glass and allows for a transparent view onto the world outside. A stretched sheet of canvas that you paint on, and the paint pigments, have opacity, the opposite of transparency, because we cannot see through it.
Painting in a photorealistic and representational style is creates the illusion of transparency, even though it is actually an opaque medium. But the same of course can be said of any representational medium, such as film or a virtual world. All media has effects of either opacity and transparency, depending on how they are used.
Let’s compare these images below, which show different ways of looking through a scope to target something.
These scopes all perform similar functions, but they have noticeable differences in their representational effects, and these differences are things you might attend to in your own narrative media design. Let’s analyze these images:
- Top Left: notice that the field of view outside the scope is restricted, so that we can only see what is through the lens of the scope, which is also etched with crosshairs. The dark round boundaries that occlude the image field and the crosshairs are examples of opacity working in the overall image. Aiming at a bus suggests some kind of assassin moment in a movie. This is an assumption meant to somewhat mislead us, since the scope is actually attached to a microphone for audio surveillance (the image is from the film, The Conversation).
- Bottom Left: Our view is less occluded because we can see outside the scope edges, and there are no crosshairs. This feels like a weekend hunting outing and is very ‘barebones’ in its aesthetics, being straightforward with no ornamentation. The most interesting spatial effect here is the way the ground line is interrupted. Because this is a true optical scope, there is a break in the ground line between the view inside and outside of the scope. These actual spatial disruptions aren’t usually going to be modeled in 3D space where it would be very difficult to override the entire Cartesian coordinate systems of a game engine within the scope area just to achieve this aspect of realism.
- Top Right: here there is no scope, but scope functions have been dispersed into the general scene of action. Many small bits of information overlay are interposed on top of the visual field, producing data that the interactor needs to know about in navigating the game. The general visual trope of scopes is relied on implicitly in the overall design, since players of first person shooters will be familiar with a range of scope-like visual elements that become part of the overall UI and UX.
- Bottom Right: the image of an actual scope reappears, similar to the one on bottom left (where we can see the world outside the scope), which allows more of the world to be in view. In addition, we get a variation of the crosshairs and also get information overlays on top of the scene of action. However, since this scope is digital and not analog, there are no optical light-distortion effects evident in the way the spatial continuity is rendered inside and outside of the scope, and the 3D Cartesian grid is uniform throughout.
In the interface for your digital narrative, you want to be asking questions such as:
- How opaque or transparent should the interface be relative to the digital narrative?
- How does one convey other kinds of information beyond the immediate narrative, through the interface?
- Does the interface itself have any role to play in the narrative?
- Does use of the interface support or subvert the narrative?
- Is my overall aesthetic design based on transparency (to the world), opacity (layering of media effects), or a hybrid of both?
The media scholars Bolter and Grusin, in their book Remediation, developed a number of concepts for thinking about these questions, such as remediation, immediacy and hypermediation. Remediation, in its simplest formulation, claims that all media remediate other media. This is similar to McLuhan’s concept that the content of new media is old media. In other words, all media in some way share common features with and often borrow from other media.
For example, why do we say that ‘websites’ have web ‘pages’? There are no pages, only content-filled rectangles on screens. There are no sites, either, since a ‘website’ is distributed information between your browser on a monitor wherever you happen to be at, and the servers where the content resides for others to browse simultaneously.
But we remediate the general idea of location or architecture by calling them websites, and we invoke the medium of books by saying that these site-less sites are made of web pages. That’s how remediation works — it’s everywhere and we usually don’t notice it. Architecture and books are totally different from websites and pages, but we invoke old media to describe the new and it seeps into our vocabulary even though there’s a bit of something nonsensical to these terms.
Let’s change examples and look at some lines of dialogue from The Force Awakens:
Forgive me. I feel it again. The pull to the light. Supreme Leader senses it. Show me again, the power of the darkness, and I will let nothing stand in our way. Show me, Grandfather, and I will finish what you started.
We can explore remediation from a technical standpoint like so:
- The scriptwriters write some dialogues, get together, read it out loud, talk about it and revise the script.
- Adam Driver goes into the sound studio to deliver the lines in a recording booth.
- The audio engineers apply sound effects processing to his voice
- The new processed audio gets added to the film track.
- We see the film with both sound and image together.
- We can read the script online but now it is on a screen instead of on paper.
When someone speaks, we can glean all kinds of information about them, for example maybe their age, whether they are calm or angry, their sex/gender, perhaps their level of education, accent or dialect, body language, loudness, pitch of their voice, etc. Once their speech gets written down, however, all of this information is lost, and we are left with just the ‘bare bones’ of the meaning.
But, this loss of information is also a gain in capacity– now that their voice has been freed from their body, it can be printed in a book or online and circulate the world more freely. So remediation also refers to this trade-off space, by which media extracts some features of other media and rejects some features as well, but in doing so adds new features.
Let’s contrast the helmet-voices of Kylo Ren w/ Iron Man to explore a bit the difference between opacity and hypermediation in vocal performances.
Note, for example, that Kylo Ren inside his helmet sounds very different from Tony Stark in his Iron Man helmet. Tony’s voice stays more natural, because he is a hero, whereas because Kylo is a villain, he has to sound more unnatural. These are effects not of remediation, but of immediacy and hypermediation. Iron Man in his helmet has a fairly transparent (immediate, non-opaque) quality compared to the hypermediated (less transparent, more opaque) quality of the young Sith Lord Apprentice.
Immediacy and Hypermediation
Let’s explore Bolter and Grusin’s concepts some more:
Remediation is the incorporation or representation of one medium in another medium.
Remediation is a defining characteristic of new digital media because digital media is constantly remediating its predecessors (television, radio, print journalism and other forms of old media).
Remediation can be complete or visible. A film based on a book is remediating the printed story. The film may not provide any reference to the original medium or acknowldgement that it is an adaptation. By attempting to absorb the old medium entirely, the new medium presents itself without any connection to its original source. On the other hand, a medium such as a movie clip can be torn out of context and inserted into a new medium such as music. Bolter and Grusin describe this as visible remediation because, “The work becomes a mosiac in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces’ and their new, inappropriate setting.” …. [1]
The Double-logic of remediation
Although our culture wants to multiply its media it also wants to erase all traces of mediation. For example, a typical webiste may be hypermediated, offering photographs and streaming video. These media mediate between the viewer and the meaning of the photographs and video. The viewer does not want mediation, an intervening agency, but instead the wants immediacy, a way to get beyond mediation.[2]
The Process of Remediation
Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other. This process is integral to media.[3]. Media constantly interacts with other media by reproducing and replacing and making other changes. New Media constantly justifies itself by remediating old media.
Remediation and Reality
Because media intervenes, or mediates between viewers and what is represented, meaning is not immediate. In order to receive the meaning immediately, the viewer can ignore the presence of the medium and the act of mediation or by diminishing the medium’s representational function. When painters of modern art chose everyday objects, like soup cans to represent, they removed mediation. The viewers received the meaning immediately because the object came from their “real” world; it is not representative of something abstract.
1 Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation: Understanding New Media”. 2000, page 47. 2 pages 5–6.
3 page 55.
Immediacy is like the effect of looking out the hypothetical window above in Magritte’s paintings. The world is represented in a manner that is just instantly transparent to our looking at it. Hypermediation adds another layer whereby we become more aware of the medium playing a role in the communication. It is more like placing a painting in front of the window that looks like the window, since it adds a sense of media opaqueness to the representation.
Suspension of Disbelief
Bolter and Grusin also argue that these effects of immediacy and hypermediation are not specific to new media but, since they are features of media in general, can be used to understand media from any era. A classic thinker and poet often associated with similar ideas is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You may not know him very well, but his famous poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner was remediated by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden in their song Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
There is of course plenty of difference between the poem and the song! Even the song gets very different from itself around the 5'31" mark in the video, when the poem starts to be read in more of a poem-like fashion, by a whispering heavy metal dude.
Coleridge’s concept of ‘the suspension of disbelief’ is often associated with immediacy, since this relates to our capacity to grant representational status to elements of stories that are obviously fictitious and have no basis in reality. Hypermediated forms of narrative often ask us to become aware of the artificiality of the narrative construct, especially in its more critical forms such as Epic Theater (discussed below).
However, as we saw above, we can also rather easily grant hypermediated character renderings like Kylo Ren’s voice an immediate sense of accepted belief, since hypermediation is part of the way fantastical characters are presented generally. In fact, Coleridge originally used his famous concept in reference to creating supernatural characters:
Remediation in UI
In the examples of interactive narrative interfaces below, we can find the following media remediated:
- Hand drawn maps
- Technical maps
- Words
- Hyperlinks
- Treasure story
- Geometric graphic design
- Blue prints
Below we find these elements remediated:
- Vintage computer interface aesthetics
- Anatomical drawings
- Illustration
- Text
The screenshot below is very minimal, giving just the barest sense of space and using the screen to create a spatialized layout of text. Also seen are some basic zoom and navigation features.
The next screenshots show text and image compositions, with or without some overall organizing sense of structured space.
In the last three screenshots above, we start to see more cinematic and photographic elements coming into play, as well as moving image (video) and sound, which cannot be shown of course when remediated as 2D screenshots.
Perspective and Spatial Immediacy
While the UI images above are mostly hypermediated — because they emphasize the assemblage of multiple media formats into a single screen area — effects of immediacy are also ubiquitous in media. Immediacy is also technological, and involves technique, and is not necessarily ‘natural’ to media.
Even with the example of looking through a window, that window is still a technology (glass). One of the most familiar technologies of immediacy is perspective, the geometric rules for creating the illusion of depth. The power of perspective is that it produces an effect of depth immediately. That is, we don’t have to think about the fact that the surface of the image is just two dimensional and that the depth we perceive is produced artificially by drawing or painting tricks.
This all-at-once effect of perceiving depth is why it is called immediate. It just happens instantaneously, allowing for the effect of transparency to occur in representation.
The same is true of 3D virtual environments, where the technologies and mathematics of the 3-axis Cartesian grid produce immediate effects of depth and volume without calling explicit attention to its technical production. The 3D effect just happens instantaneously, and normally we don’t think about it too much as members of a playing audience.
For creators of 3D media, however, there will be many moments of hypermediated frustration when using or learning the software, because computer graphics applications are usually rather feature-dense and complicated to master.
Examples of Immediacy and Hypermediation
Immediacy:
- The viewer looks through the screen.
- The screen is a representation device.
- The viewer is lost in the experience.
- The viewer does not notice the conditions of the mediated experience.
Examples of Immediacy:
- Being lost in a great film or story.
- Undergoing the suspension of disbelief.
- The Holodeck is the dream of the immediate, immersive experience, the “Holy Grail” of new media immediacy.
- Any form of representation that aims for an naturalistic illusion of continuous time and space
Designing Immediacy:
- Good writing/story. Interesting plot, believable characters, a motivated chain of events.
- Using visual perspective
- Photo-realistic aesthetics
- Naturalistic behavior/acting
- Appropriate music and effects that match the imagery in ways that enhance the effects of immediacy
Hypermediation:
- The viewer looks at the screen.
- The viewer is aware of the constructed/mediated nature of the experience.
- Screen is sometimes a control device.
Examples of Hypermediation:
- Montage
- Information overlays
- Non-naturalistic visual effects
- Experimental (e.g. anti-narrative) forms, disrupting immersion
In interactive narratives, we often have to perform both of these forms of mediation at the same time. For instance, a game controller is a form of hypermediation because it does not reproduce naturalistic reality. Rather, is a manual technical affordance full of buttons and controls that have to be manipulated in order to produce effects on the screen, whereas the world depicted may actually be mostly associated with some form of representational realism.
Lev Manovich is a scholar associated with the concept of ‘oscillating’ back and forth between these two states, so that we can say that with an interactive narrative, we experience both effects by cycling between them:
- Immediacy (Bolter and Grusin): immersion, suspension of disbelief.
- Hypermediation (Bolter and Grusin): being aware that one is undergoing a mediated experience.
- Oscillation (Lev Manovich): rapidly cycling back and forth between these two states, characteristic of interactive works.
Interactive narratives that use mobile devices, for example, have many built-in affordances to draw upon, any of which could produce oscillatory effects in a user’s attention while engaging the narrative.
Affordances of Mobile for Narrative:
- touchscreen
- QR code reader
- accelerometer
- gyroscope
- compass
- face time
- camera
From a narrative design perspective, your role is to decide how each of these affordances connects to the logic of storytelling and/or gameplay. In other words, you choose intentionally whether an accelerometer or a camera or a gyroscope can be used to make a story rich and meaningful, rather than just being features of a mobile device, for some particular character action or spatial navigation.
Historical Precedents
Classical perspective and Cartesian 3-axis grids, discussed above, are our examples for immediacy effects in media. Now we will present some historical examples of classic forms of hypermediation — Surrealist art and Epic Theatre.
Brecht was the foremost theorist and practitioner of what is called Epic Theatre, which is often opposed to Conventional or Dramatic Theatre forms. The tables below illustrate the concept of this difference:
Both these tables above show similar ideas but different summative concepts. So what are these tables getting at? The gist of the epic theatre concept is that it differs from conventional (or dramatic theatre) by:
- making you think rather than feel
- showing up all of the artificiality of the illusion rather than try to immerse you in it
- making you want to act in the real world, rather than try to escape from it via entertainment
- presenting disconnected episodes rather than a smooth linear plot
- making humans a subject of inquiry or study, rather than a compelling personality to obsess over, as with celebrity culture
- providing knowledge of a situation rather than an emotionally moving experience
- using arguments instead of suggestions
- showing the world as it might be, rather than how it is or has been
These are significant differences, which aim more at a thinking and acting spectator rather than a passive escapist and over-emotional spectator who is just looking to become distracted from reality. Epic theatre instead says, “No! We will not let you escape from reality. You must act and make decisions in this world now, entertainment is for emotional sops!” That’s sort of what an epic theatre person might say : )
Hypermediation and the Epic Theatre Aesthetic
So what is it like? Here’s a short video to give you a sense of the epic theatre approach.
You’ve probably noticed some epic theatre stylistic characteristics after reviewing the two tables above! But to reiterate the key aspects of how these ideas are applied in this video:
- note how the dialogue drifted all over the place, in an episodic manner with no logic of continuance
- the characters kept changing roles! usually a character is a character, e.g. Batman does not become Superman, but here both characters take turn as patient and therapist
- it makes you think about the conventions of acting and playing fake roles
- this is also supported by being shot in a virtual studio, featuring constantly changing backgrounds
- the overall conversation is very intellectual and abstract
- your emotions are not pandered to, and there’s no mood music
- it ends with the lines “what do you think?”
- random absurd prop changes, like the coat with all the dangling tags, recalling the artificiality of theatre
There are other things one can mention, but hopefully this gives you an idea of how to apply epic theatre principles to narrative. By the way, all of these ideas can also be described as producing ‘the alienation effect’ which is another name that can be associated with this aesthetic. This overall alienation effect tries to alienate us from all the usual conventions which try to enthrall us in the emotionally absorbing distractions of entertainment.
Alienation effect, also called a-effect or distancing effect, German Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, idea central to the dramatic theory of the German dramatist-director Bertolt Brecht. It involves the use of techniques designed to distance the audience from emotional involvement in the play through jolting reminders of the artificiality of the theatrical performance. (source)
Surrealism as Hypermediation
The next stylistic example to mention from the mid-20th century is Surrealism, which was a movement in the arts and literature inspired by Sigmund Freud, the so-called ‘founder’ of psychoanalysis (actually he gets this title because he wrote better than all the other psychoanalysts of his time, writing with more literary flair and voluminously, too).
One particular psychoanalytic effect the Surrealists were interested in was producing feelings of The Uncanny. The uncanny was an emotional effect described by Freud as a feeling of not quite being at home, when something is dredged up from the unconscious that had been repressed. Freud’s slant on this idea was that HOME is precisely where many of our insecurities, anxieties, and hang-ups originate in the first place– our primal scene with parents and siblings– so the idea is to make us feel not at home so that these repressed qualities of our mind can be let out, which allows us to then (in theory at least!) deal with them, or at least make art with them.
So it shouldn’t surprise us then that the Surrealists often produced imagery that was intended to shock or disturb. One particular form that is of interest, in the context of hypermediation is the Exquisite Corpse technique. The exquisite corpse was a game that artists played in which a piece of paper was folded up into several sections, and each artist would draw only on one fold of the overall sheet, responding only to a part of the next image over.
Thus the final image would be an assemblage that could never be produced by a single person as a continuous image, but instead was the result of a kind of Frankenstein-like combination of different pieces joined into one:
Audience Participation as Hypermediation
More contemporary examples of hypermediation in popular culture include works such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Run Lola Run.
Cultural participatory activities can be considered to be a form of interaction. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a cult classic that still plays in theaters today, usually at second run movie houses for midnight shows, even though it was released back in 1975! Rocky Horror was doing fan culture ‘cosplay’ in the West long before it was imported from East Asian cultural domains.
The notion of hypermediated comes into play because the all of these audience interactions work to DISRUPT the illusionistic reality of the original film, so that instead of just being spectators on the ‘proper’ side of the 4th Wall, the film goers might perform up on stage with the film as a backdrop, or yell out various lines to alter the original meaning of the film’s dialog and produce alternative, community-produced scripts.
Run Lola Run
A more recent example of remediation as an explicit film aesthetic is Run Lola Run– if you’re not familiar with the film, watch this section from the opening scene:
Run Lola Run works on several levels:
- As a feature length music video
- As a narrative film with game-like elements
- As an assemblage of many different media forms
- As remediated database
- As electronic music that keeps remixing itself
First, Lola is a linear film, approx. 90 minutes long telling a story in a linear way. However, throughout, it regularly introduces other forms of mediation, changing for example between color academy film, black and white 16mm film, handheld digital video, animation, Polaroids stills, television, and of course the ever-present electronica music that runs through the whole film.
The film also can be understood as a database, or the remediation of a database. It doesn’t at first seem to be anything at al like a database, but it has the structure of one. Below is a representation of the film as a database, with 17 rows, which represent the main events of the narrative which are varied with each replay, and the columns represent the three plays or three tries of Lola as she tries to figure out how to win the game of the narrative. This concept of Lola-as-Database is from Jim Bizzocchi’s research.
Below I have embedded some of Run Two from the film:
Even though Run Lola Run is not designed as a work of iCinema (interactive cinema), its structure and storyline support the same kind of interaction essentials often associated with iCinema, in that it is:
- story driven
- has rich, multi-dimensional characters
- has game-like features
- choices affect how the story is experienced
Combining Hypermediation and Immediacy
Mixing these two kinds of media effects is something I like to do in my digital art. Below I’ll show a few examples and discuss how these effects are combined, since by default I am an expert on my own work : ) and so I can provide some insights into how a visual artist might go about mixing effects of transparency and opacity.
Because I use Unreal Engine (and related technologies based on the same platform like MetaHuman Creator, Quixels Megascans and TwinMotion), you sometimes gets odd computational artefacts in the rendering of images. I often like to keep these visual ‘mistakes’ in my work, and once you know about them, you can recreate them intentionally.
A lot of mathematical errors occur around lighting and reflections. In my Still Life №1, look at the rather strange things happening with regards to the lobster reflections. Those reflections are hypermediated, while the rest of the image is based on an immediacy aesthetic. I have manipulated the reflections probe so that the lobster produces non-mimetic reflections.
In The Aesthetic Spirit, the reflections are distorted to a lesser degree. However, the main hypermediated ‘moment’ in the image is connected to the window on the right, where (intentionally of course) you can see the wood siding of the trailer continue behind the window, which makes no sense realistically speaking — but it does make sense as an element of hypermediated aesthetic, playing up the artificiality of texturing what is essentially a rectangular volume with mottled and weathered painted siding.
With Air (which is part of the 2022 Beijing International Art Biennale and 2022 Winter Olympics in China btw : ) the overall effect is very much hypermediated, but the sky and sea gulls present a more naturalistic effect of media transparency or immediacy.
Similarly, Troika is an overall hypermediated image as well, but a scratched and smudged window with visible fingerprints is treated as a visual play on the general concept of a transparent window, since this window is not as clear and see-through as Magritte’s but is more like a real dirty window one might encounter on actual buildings, rather than a kind of ‘pure’ abstract conceptual window representing invisible media and immediacy in general.
Remediation: a Closer Reading
Having generally discussed concepts related to Remediation (both the book and the concept) above, here I will do a closer reading of the text to highlight some of the conceptual complexities of this way of framing media technologies and their effects.
In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin introduce key concepts to understand media in general. The first key conceptual distinction introduced is between Immediacy and Hypermediation, or between media organized around the goal of Transparency (i.e. media as a window onto the world), and media that highlights its constructed status via a sensorial complexity that eschews Transparency in favor of Opacity (i.e. media displaying its own surface effects).
Also, media richness is often achieved by combining, hybridizing, or ‘remediating’ other forms of media. A good example of this kind of remediation would be Hardcore Henry, a film shot with GoPro cameras that emulates first person shooter video games (obviously the clip below will feature some violence, given the overall concept of the film):
Thus the terms immediacy and hypermediation are really about the overall effects of media transparency and opacity. These two key concepts B&G are often associated with — Immediacy and Hypermediation– have embedded within them this other conceptual binary that motivates and further explains them– opacity and transparency are like semiotic ghosts inhabiting the semiotic bodies of the two concepts hypermediation and immediacy.
Immediacy seeks fullness in media by being transparent to reality, while hypermediation seeks a fullness of experience by piling up overlays of perceived media effects.
Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past their limits or representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the viewer’s experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate and therefore authentic emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality.(53).
To propel this semiotic swapping of meanings, new terms are introduced, namely the desire and feeling of the authentic and real.
Media manifest essential desires, presumably human desires, though at times media discourse sometimes seems to displace desire into the technical systems, since in the passage above it is unclear whether it is the media that desire or whether it is we who desire these effects.
One characteristic Remediation shares with another canonical text, Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, is its selection of a guiding image and metaphor in the form of ‘Holy Grail’ technology that epitomizes the texts’ themes. For Murray, the holodeck technology depicted in one of the Star Trek tv series serves as an orienting conceptual construct to fashion the ideal outcome of where interactive narrative is heading, and this imaginary image of the final ultimate technology provides the basis for her theory of interactive narrative.
For B&G, this technology is “the wire” which is a technology in the film Strange Days. The wire conveys one person’s subjective experience to another directly, paradoxically without mediation — because the experience is directly transmitted and experienced by another’s consciousness — but of course with mediation, because the wire is a medium, a technology for the immediate mediation of unmediated experience (so to speak).
Interestingly, this technology is asymmetrically on the side of transparency, because mundane perception with our plain ol’ everyday sensorium is not so hypermediated. Regular life is also full of boring moments — thus Hitchcock said [1] that “Cinema is life, with all the boring parts cut out.” But he also said, “Cinema isn’t a slice of life, it’s a slice of cake.”
Thus we can find in other sci-fi films with similar premises as Strange Days, such as Brainstorm (1983), the general need to ramp up the “feeling of fullness” and “satiety of experience” out of the transparent character of presumably immediate unmediated experience, which seeks out intense forms of lived experience to produce more hypermediated effects.:
A team of scientists invent a brain/computer interface that allows sensations to be recorded from a person’s brain and converted to tape so that others may experience them. The team includes estranged husband and wife Michael and Karen Brace, as well as Michael’s colleague Lillian Reynolds. At CEO Alex Terson’s instruction, the team demonstrates the device to investors in order to gain financing.
One team member, Gordo Forbes, has sexual intercourse while wearing the recorder, and shares the tape with Hal Abramson. Hal splices one section of the tape into a continuous orgasm, which results in sensory overload — leading to his forced retirement. Tensions increase as the possibilities for abuse become clear. [2]
Films like Strange Days and Brainstorm present techno-fantasies of the perfect ideal in ultimate immediacy. These films imagine that media can achieve full presence of the real that eliminates any trace of the physical medium itself. These films also presage contemporary interest in developing brain-computer interfaces that would create hybrid forms of entertainment that merge full immersive interactivity with extreme continuity (unity of time, space and causality) borrowed from cinematic aesthetics
B&G also produce variations around their other key term, Remediation:
- remediation as the mediation of mediation — media operate in a general ecology of other media and thus comment, reproduce, and replace each other.
- inseparability of mediation and reality — here the term ‘reality’ does not refer to a surplus of authentic emotion but to what one might call “actually real reality.” There is no postmodern ‘getting rid of the real’ because media are real.
- Media reform reality as they reform themselves.
One critical aspect of remediation that B&G do not touch on is that remediation is lossy. In the re-use and re-forming of one medium by another, there is no full translation, but rather what occurs is a process of feature extraction whereby some characteristics are lost in translation.
There is a general tradeoff in any remediation of how much of a medium gets to be kept. To give an example, imagine the way that writing remediates speech. In this remediation, many aspects of meaning are lost: accents, pronunciation, emphases, temporal pauses, mood, perhaps “race class gender” components, and so on.
Remediation is lossy, as when every photographic/film/video frame immediately loses all that surrounded the framed image, in addition to losing the z-axis of the third dimension in a 2D display. Media loses and re-loses in a lossy process even as it increases momentary feelings of sensory plenitude — momentary because we quickly get used to the new media effects and subsequently desire new effects.
Related Articles
Narrative in Analog & Digital Media
Narrative Continuity vs Poetic Montage
The Structure of Narrative Time
The Fourth Wall & Direct Address
Fact, Fiction & Narrative Contestation
Character Interactions and Narrative Progression
Agency in Interactive Narrative
References
- Ringler, S. M. (2008). A Dictionary of Cinema Quotations from Filmmakers and Critics: Over 3400 Axioms, Criticisms, Opinions and Witticisms from 100 Years of the Cinema. Jefferson, N.C.: Mcfarland & Co Inc Pub.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
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