1 Remediation by Bolter & Gruisin Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation – discussion points

2 Immediacy Virtual reality is immersive – a medium whose purpose is to disappear The caves Computer scientists: the viewer should forget that she is in fact wearing a computer interface… Jaron Lanier: you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a TRex….. …transparent, perceptual immediacy….

3 Transparent immediacy In two- and three-dimensional images in traditional computer, film, or television screens Ten years ago: computers as numerical engines Now devices for generating images, videoconferences etc. Desktop metaphor vs. the command-line interface Immediacy supposed to make the computer inteface ’natural’ rather than arbitrary.

4 Immediacy The novelty of virtual reality –Completes and overcomes the history of media? Perspective means a ’seeing through’ – also students of perspective were promised immediacy through transparency In digital graphics, human programmers involved at several levels: –Computer operating systems written by one group of specialists

5 –Graphic languages written by others –Applications are programs that exploit resources offered by languages and operating systems –All these programmers erased the moment the computer generates an image by executing the instructions they have collectively written

6 Immediacy A name for a group of beliefs and practices: the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents. In photography: the contact point is the light reflected from the object In linear-perspective painting the contact point is the mathematical relationship between supposed objects and their projection on the canvas Immediacy has a hold on the viewer

7 Hypermediacy Hypermediacy: ’windowed style’ of www pages, the desktop interface, multimedia programs, video games Interactive applications often grouped as ’hypermedia’ and hypermedia’s ’combination of random access with multiple media’ leading to what Bob Cotten and Richard Oliver (1993) refer to as: –’an entirely new kind of media experience born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies.’

8 Its raw ingredients: images, sound, text, animation and video – brought together in any combination No physical beginning, middle or end It all started when in the 60s and 70s Douglas Englebart, Alan Kay and colleagues at Xerox PARC and elsewhere invented GUI (the graphic user interface and called their resizable, scrollable rectangles ”windows”

9 The programmer is not visible in the interface – but the user is as a subject clicking on buttons, choosing menu items, and dragging icons and windows

10 Hypermediacy though the centuries The European cathedral with stained glass windows – hypermediated spaces with inscriptions an pictures Alterpieces in Musée de Cluny: carved, painted perspectival scenes on inside and outside of cabinets In mechanical technologies of reproduction of the nineteenth century Digital artists

11 Remediation Def: The representation of one medium in another Bolter & Gruisin: remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media Electronic remediation emphasizes the difference between ’old-fashioned’ books, and electronic versions offered as impovements: encyclopedias on CD-Rom Digital medium more aggressive in its remediation?

12 THE END