Technologies
of Time and Space:
A prehistory of multimedia
"What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media" (Bolter and Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media).
In Remediation: Understanding New Media Bolter and Grusin (1999) proposed a theory of media evolution that attempted to break with the myth of the 'newness' of new media and the linear destruction and succession of older media by newer ones. Coining the notion of 'Remediation', they argued that media engage with and re-fashion each other. New media begin by incorporating many of the stylistic and other conventions of traditional media, however their popularity is often due to their ability to provide an experience of greater realism. Traditional media, in their turn, start using the new conventions and styles typical of the new media thus maintaining market currency. Bolter and Guerin identify the dynamic as one between the forces of immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy involves the transparency of a medium - its senjse of realism, while hypermediacy addresses the awareness of the media object itself.
And this is very much what we will see when we examine the history of what could be termed 'modern communications' media - that is, media that is reliant on artificial energy and allows communication at a distance.
Many
of us remember when 'multimedia' just meant using different materials
within the same creative work -- paintings, for example, were multimedia
if they included a few objects stuck onto the canvas as well as paint.
During the 70s and 80s, at least within the art world, its usage became
narrower and was usually restricted to works which included a temporal
and/or performance element. This included, for example, the use of slideshows
and film. More recently, since the advent of widespread use of personal
computers, its meaning has become further restricted. Cotton and Oliver,
in their 1993 publication 'Understanding Hypermedia', define
it as "born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies.
Its raw ingredients are images, sound, text, animation and video which
can be brought together in any combination."(*1). Most commentators
include some notion of 'interactivity' within their definitions and,
increasingly, reference the growing usage of telecommunications networks
to deliver content to users. 'New Media' is an even more vexed concept.
There is little agreement in what does or does not constitute it --
although most people think it has something to do with computers.
As
with any other creative medium it is impossible to more than subjectively
react to 'new media' or 'multimedia' works unless you have some grasp
of the history and concepts which have informed its development.
Let's
look first at what we mean by 'media': My dictionary doesn't even mention
the press or television -- although the use of egg white as a medium
in painting does gets a look in. In fact, the closest the dictionary
gets is to say; "means or agency". On the other hand when we
say 'media' we mean 'communications media' and we probably mean
something like SF writer Bruce Sterling did when, in his alternate life
as an archivist, he wrote:
"Media
is a commodity. Media is something that is sold to us. Media can be
something that we are sold to, even. Media is an everyday thing. You
can buy bandwidth in job lots. You can watch television, buy books,
videos, records, CDs, but that's not it. That's not what's interesting.
-
Media is an extension of the senses.
- Media
is a mode of consciousness.
-
Media is extra-somatic memory. It's a crystallization of human thought
that survives the death of the individual.
-
Media generates simulacra. The mechanical reproduction of images
is media.
- Media
is a means of social interaction.
- Media
is a means of command and control.
-
Media is statistics, knowledge that is gathered and generated by
the state.
- Media
is economics, transactions, records, contracts, money and the records
of money.
- Media
is the means of civil society and public opinion. Media is a means
of debate and decision and agitpropaganda."
Bruce
Sterling "The
Life and Death of Media", Speech at Sixth International Symposium
on Electronic Art ISEA '95Montreal Sept 19 1995
This
represents a profound transformation of our understanding of our lives
and reality. Media, many have argued, has come to constitute our reality.
The advent of each new communications technology increases our ability
to reach out and access an ever larger world and, in so doing, changes
us and that world. McLuhen's
aphorism; 'the medium is the message' has become famous because it sums
up this reality. McLuhen
goes on to note, "This is merely to say that the personal and social
consequences of any mediumÐthat is, of any extension of ourselvesÐresult
from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension
of ourselves, or by any new technology." He points out that a medium
does not have to have interpretable content - a message as such, (he
uses the example of electric light), and notes that the content
of any medium is always another medium - the content of writing is speech,
the written word is the content of print etc., whilst its message is
the change of scale or pace or pattern or possibilities that it introduces
into human affairs.
So
technology both alters our picture of the world and fundamentally transforms
us as well. Widespread literacy and the advent of printed books changed
us from intuitive to analytical thinkers and expanded our ability to
generalise and reason about cause and effect. The development of computers
in the post-World War 11 era has brought profound and far reaching changes
in our social interactions and our concept of the universe -- indeed
we have come to think of the building blocks of life as being information
and growth as being the result of communication between parts.
What
is now known as interactive multimedia grew out of a very wide range
of parallel developments in fields as diverse as art, film, television,
telecommunications, digital optical storage, psychology and computer
science. The major 'hard' technological developments which made interactive
multimedia/hypermedia available were the invention and deployment of
the telegraph, telephone and cinematography in the 19th century, radio
at the turn of the century, the invention of television in the the 1930s,
the digital computer in the 40's and 50's and the emergence of the personal
computer in the 70's. Each of these 'stepping stones' has had a profound
effect on the development of interactive multimedia not just because
they were essential enabling technologies (in the sense that we needed
to be able to capture, store and transmit or display pictures, sound,
and text), but because the communications models that each of these
set up have provided the basis for and continue to inform or affect
the ways in which we think about, create and consume multimedia. And,
of course, there has been a reciprocal effect back on these technologies
with, for example, the development of web radio, interactive TV (although
we are still waiting for this one to eventuate in any useful form),
CGI in cinematic post-production, computer animation, video conferencing,
etc. Other technologies have been superseded; for example, the telegraph
has been completely replaced, initially and partially by the telephone,
then the fax machine and today by email.
American
writer, Harold
Innis, has observed that prior to the advent of digital technology,
media either extended communication through space or through time. He
cites the development of alphabetical writing, movable type printing,
musical notation, painting etc as technologies that extend content through
time; the telephone and radio as examples that extend content through
space. Interactive multimedia is the first media which extends communications
through both of these dimensions simultaneously; it allows the extension
of communication through time in its role as a storage mechanism, and
through space particularly through the Internet. It also overturns previous
technologies' relationships with users/audiences. Most communications
technologies of the 20th century century have been 'one to many' technologies
providing fixed programming to mass audiences (think cinema, television,
radio), or 'one to one' communications devices (the telephone and the
photographic print). Interactive multimedia, and by this we increasingly
mean the Internet, allows both of these possibilities as well as everything
in-between. Other media, with some minor exceptions and of course the
major exception of print, temporally constrain their audiences both
in when they will receive their content and by having an unchangeable
extension through time -- you can't fast forward through a radio show
or flip to the end of a movie or telephone conversation to find out
the conclusions. Even print media cannot generally be cross-referenced
in real time. The exceptions, of course, are all in individual storage
media -- video tapes and various audio recording formats. Digital media,
on the other hand, collapses time -- both in storing its content, no
matter how linear in display, as an indistinguishable mass of '1s' and
'0s', and in displaying its content which can be called up at any time.
For
our purposes in examining the roots of digital media, although speech,
the alphabet, printing and art are all important enabling technologies,
the telegraph and photography are really where it all began. These two
constitute a matched pair in that not only were the developed more or
less concurrently but each was a major step in the extension of time
or space. The photograph allowed the extension of a single visual moment,
objectively recorded on a durable surface, into the future; whilst telegraphy
was the first technology to bridge spaces greater than the throw of
the human voice. It initiated the birth of the 'skin of electric communications'
which now wraps the entire globe and is exemplified by the Internet.
It was the first electronic medium, the first industrial use of electricity,
and the most abstract form of communication ever invented.
A
brief history of the Morse Telegraph
Morse's
invention of the telegraph in the 1830-40s was also a precursor to our
contemporary communications network in that it transmitted its messages
as a series of dot and dashes, a binary code, in an almost instantaneous
manner. It did this at time in which information had had to be physically
carried from one location to another and was therefore limited in its
dissemination by the speed of its conveyance irrespective of whether
it was via the postal system or carried by private messenger. Time lag
for transmitting information was expected and could stretch into months
when the source and destination were widely separated geographically.
At first the very speed of telegraphic communication was a cause for
distrust and this was exacerbated by the sheer abstractness of the medium
of communication, dots and dashes, which required training before messages
could be encoded or decoded. Trained telegraph operators were a prerequisite
and messages could only travel via special telegraph stations connected
by cables to each other. It took several years before the public trusted
information which had arrived to them via cable -- newspapers, for example
refused to print news which had arrived via cable as they doubted its
veracity. Reuters, now the largest news agency in the world, had its
beginnings in the 1840's and initially became successful because it
operated a bio-communications (pigeon
post) network in conjunction with its telegraph network. Major newspapers
would only print information transmitted via pigeon post or human agency
up until 1858, when the London Times consented to print a speech by
Napoleon III received by Reuters via the Channel wire -- this despite
the fact that the cable had been in place for some seven years.
This
distrust of telegraphic communications was scarcely a lone example of
general resistance to change -- it seems that the veracity and/or morality
of information stored and/or transmitted by almost every new communications
technology has been questioned and for some time refused. Even writing
was condemned, most famously by Socrates, when it was first introduced
into Greece. He argued that stored words were inherently false, certain
to be misinterpreted by the reader without the author there to ensure
correct understanding. Telephones were thought to lead to the breakdown
of social participation and to encourage dishonesty. Motion pictures
were, and continue to be, condemned as a cause of all kinds of social
and individual dysfuntions -- in 1910 Professor William A McKeever described
them as a 'school for criminals' (*1) and lawyers and conservative social
reformers continue to argue that both individual crimes as well as a
general social malaise have been 'caused' by exposure to pernicious
films. Television has likewise been condemned, whilst more contemporaneously,
the Internet has provoked widespread governmental and community concern
that it promotes crime and endangers children.
Telegraphy
not only made the telephone conceptually possible, it laid the material
grounds for its dissemination with the telephone networks extending
the cabling already put in place for the telegraphy network. Telephony
was an 'accidental' invention. Graham Alexander Bell, was actually trying
to develop an hearing aid for his deaf wife. He had seized upon telegraphy
as a paradigm, seeking a 'harmonic telegraph' to transform speech into
electrical signals which could be written visually as in a telegraph.
Telephony, from its patenting in 1876 (just hours before a patent application
for an almost identical device was lodged by Elias Grey), was far more
publicly popular than the telegraph despite being derided by experts
as simply an 'electric toy'. By the turn of the century telephone calls
outnumbered telegraph messages by 50:1 and it provided the catalyst
for the invention of the radio.
Alexander
Graham Bell's Path to the Telephone
Telephone
History Series by Tom Farley
Hacker
Crackdown: CRASHING THE SYSTEM, by Bruce Sterling
Paul
Levinson positions the popularity of the telephone as residing in the
fundamental role of speech in the human condition -- a role so central
to our understanding of humanity that it seems odd to call speech a
medium at all. Speech seems to be 'hardwired' into the human brain --
we learn to speak unconsciously and it is the one communicative act
that all undamaged human being partake of. People needed minimal amounts
of training to use a telephone and it provided a possibility whose usefulness
in the their everyday lives the public could immediately grasp. The
telephone is also unique amongst communications media in that it is
intrusive -- it makes each of us individually available to other people
whether we want contact with them or not (despite answering machines)
-- in a very real sense it has made every space a public space, particularly
since the advent of cellular phones.
The
other aspect of telephony to be noted is that it has remained little
changed from its original form -- sure, we now have cordless and cellular
phones, but all those other possible developments, and in particular
'picture phones', have failed to transpire. Of course, video conferencing
and internet applications such as CUSeeMe are available, but they have
not become central to people's communications with each other in the
way in which telephones very rapidly did, and they have certainly not
superseded or affected telephony in the way in which television did
radio.
Marconi
originally intended the radio to be a 'telephone without wires for the
populace' -- a 'many to many' communications device which has only seen
its fulfillment in the Internet He was stymied in this intention by
the high cost of transmitters compared with the relatively low cost
of receivers which ensured, instead, its development as a 'one to many'
mass communications device. Marconi's first trans-Atlantic test took
place in 1901 in which he transmitted the simple message 'S' (3 dots
in Morse code). It took Sarnoff's notion of a 'radio music box' for
a use to be found for radio -- however, once that use was found, the
radio, with its potential of transmitting in realtime to millions of
receivers, changed the world. Once the radio was understood to be something
other than a wireless telephone, its political uses and consequences
were quickly grasped by governments. In the States this government interest
took the form of control and censorship building on the 1927 Federal
Radio Act which insisted that radio was to serve the "public convenience,
interest and necessity. The 'public interest' came to be judged as whether
or not content was obscene or seditious.
Guglielmo
Marconi 1874 - 1937
More
influential, however, was the potential that radio embodied as a propaganda
tool. Radio brought public 'theatrical' entertainment into the home.
Previously theatrical entertainments were only accessible in the public
sphere -- the cinema, concert hall, or theatre. Radio, as did television
later, brought the world into the home -- and gave political leaders
a hitherto unimagined access to entire populations. Radio, and later,
television, were technologies for an increasingly 'antisocial' society.
Changes in industrial production, a distinct rise in the general standard
of living, and the mass embrace of the motor car was changing the landscape
of society. Workers could own their own homes and suburbs sprung up.
An increasingly large management class was expected to relocate at the
whim of their employers and workers were also increasingly mobile as
they changed jobs or were fired in response to economic cycles. The
extended family, which had persisted in an attenuated form through the
Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, disappeared and the nuclear
family became the standard social unit. People no longer lived their
entire lives within walking distance of their birthplaces and with people
they had known their entire lives; suburbs were communities of strangers
whose major relationship was that of similarity of income and lifestyle.
Competition between print media 'barons' led to the sensationalisation
of the news, with newspapers seizing on each and any lurid assault,
rape or murder in their attempts to boost circulation. The serial killer
became a media phenomena. Mass migration after both world wars tended
to further cut traditional community ties and people retreated into
their homes, exhausted by their workaday world and increasingly fearful
of that outside their doors. Individual social space shrunk to a narrow
orbit; workplace, home, shop, designated entertainment area -- and as
space shrunk so too did social contacts. Radio, and later television,
provided a substitute community -- but without demands or stress of
personal involvement. Consumed within family settings, media took the
family as its main subject, replacing direct involvement in the local
community with an ersatz intimacy with glamorized fictional families.

'Mother
Listens In': Winner of 3LO's Photo Contest, 1925
Source:
Archives of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Social
education used the popularity of the continuing narratives of radio
'soaps' -- so called because their popularity ensured their sponsorship
by soap manufactures -- the BBC series The
Archers', for example, was funded by the British Government to educate
the rural population regarding new and more efficient agricultural techniques.
In 1934 Lewis Mumford warned that ...the secondary personal contact
with voice...may increase the amount of mass regimentation", he
noted that overcoming the tyranny of distance has "...mobilised
and hastened mass-reactions." Political leaders were not slow to
use this to their party's advantage. In Russia, a huge country with
low literacy rates and a highly oral culture, radio provided the Communists
with an extremely effective means to mobilise the population in favour
of their policies -- perhaps most influentially Stalin's July 1941 appeal
to 'scorch the earth' in resistance to the German invaders. In America
Roosevelt used radio to project an image of action and strength, despite
his confinement to wheelchair. his 'fireside
chats' were so effective that he was returned to power 3 times.
It
was Hitler however whose regime was most dependent on the power of radio.
He had always had a strong belief in the superior power of the spoken
word, writing in Mein Kampf that "all great, world-shaking events
have been brought about, not by written matter, but by the spoken word."
(*3) More importantly, given that he espoused a doctrine of Aryan superiority
whilst looking anything but, radio allowed people to focus on what he
said rather than how he looked.
It is important to remember that radio was essentially a live medium
until the 50s --indeed, playing recorded material was anathema to broadcasters.
In addition, radio was a hugely profitable business generating huge
amounts of advertising revenue by virtue of its ability to reach into
every home and compel listeners to hear sponsors' messages if they wanted
to hear the programs. Television, invented early in the century but
not commercially viable until the 50's, changed all that by compellingly
combining the intimacy of radio with visual images. The invention of
television can be traced to early mechanical devices such as Nipkow's
scanning disk for transmitting images (1884), but the complete development
of a functioning television system is credited to both Philo T. Farnsworth
and Vladimir Zworykin in the 1920's. The rise of the television paralleled
the development of radio with the sponsor firmly in control of programming.
Some have suggested that television's 'Golden Age' was, in fact, primarily
a strategy to market television sets -- 'sell-o-vision', using programs
with beautiful or spectacular scenic locations. Advertisers quickly
realized that TV presented an unparalleled opportunity to reach consumer
markets which could be used to create 'needs' for new products. "In
the 'American system of broadcasting', television has become far more
that a commercial enterprise, it is a marketplace of far reaching social,
political and economic consequences -- a 'technology of cultural domination'."
(*4).
Whatever,
the immediate effect of television was that radio seemed a dead duck.
Its lifeblood, advertising revenues, dropped alarmingly as sponsors
deserted for the glamorous new medium and radio seemed fated to go the
way of the telegraph until it found a new raison d' tre through parallel
technological development. Ever smaller portable radios broke the tyranny
of the living room and allowed people to listen in the car, at work,
at the beach... and incidentally shifted radio listening from a communal
familial activity with its concomitant of control by parents, to being
an individual and self-determined activity. Advances in audio recording
and storage technologies, including multi-tracking and over-dubbing,
allowed recorded material to approach live-broadcasts in terms of quality
of sound at a fraction of the cost. And social and economic changes
created the concept of 'youth' as a distinct socio-economic market symbolised
by the fiercely partisan positions taken vis--vis rock and roll.
Radio survived because it transformed itself into a promotional tool
for the new music industry and because it could be listened to anywhere
and whilst doing something else -- that is, it allowed multitasking
in a way in which no other medium did.
Audio
recording and storage technologies had developed more or less independently
of audio transmission. The
phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. He initially saw
its chief commercial potential as being a telephone recording device.
However, despite improvements in recorded sound quality due to improvements
in storage medium (from wax cylinder to wire to Bakelite disc), the
phonograph remained essentially unchanged for 70 years in that once
a series of sounds were recorded they could not be reconfigured. It
was not until the 40s that audio tape, invented in 1928, became available
and allowed editing first via splicing, and then multitracking and overdubbing.
Nothing much changed until the 70s when the audio cassette sparked a
home recording boom which, at the time, seemed to threaten the dominance
of the record companies.
Thomas
Alva Edison 1847-1931
Audio
recordings' greatest effect was in relation to cinema, itself an outgrowth
of photography. Humans have always tried to record the appearance of
things but until photography was invented in the 19th century such representations
were intrinsically subjective and dependent on the skill of the artist.
The 16th century saw a huge outburst of scientific interest and research
following the invention of the movable type press in the mid-15th century.
Optics was one of the hottest topics as concurrent advances in glass-production
and lens grinding technology allowed the production of ever more precise
and flawless lens. Camera
obscuras and camera lucidas were common as both artists' tools and
as amusements. The magic lantern, a simple device consisting of a box
containing a light source and a curved mirror, was invented in 1645
by a Jesuit
scholar and was an essential technological and conceptual step towards
cinema. It was not until the 19th century that a means was found to
fix reflections of reality onto a surface. Photography's ability to
record, in seemingly objective and complete detail, real images, at
once threatened arts primary purpose -- recording the world. Painting
retaliated by finding a new purpose in stressing and celebrating the
subjectivity of the artist, accusing photography of being g incapable
of ever being more than a record of reality. Despite almost immediate
use of the medium as a creative tool, photography still is considered
by many to be a minor art at best.
The
ability to fix images to a durable surface afforded by photography,
in conjunction with the independent development of moving pictures through
the 'philosophical toys' such as the zoetrope
and praxinoscope
of the 19th century led to cinema, via Edison's Kinetiscope,
at the end of the century. Credit for its invention usually goes to
the Lumiere brothers. The most important technological innovations include
the development by Eastman of celluloid film, the introduction of synced
sound in 1927, and Technicolour film in 1935. What perhaps has been
more significant innovation in cinema have come from developments in
concept and practice -- how cinema has been thought about and made.
Commentators,
and bureaucrats, have often used cinema as a model for multimedia, comparing
its current state of development to that of the early days of cinema.
By this they mean two things: firstly that the technology is still at
ar relatively primitive stage -- display and storage is still very limited
and clumsy whilst improvements such as virtual reality and reality engines
are extremely expensive. More i importantly the second similarity that
they are drawing attention to is the way that we think about multimedia.
And the use of the cinema metaphor is part of the problem. We are making
and thinking about multimedia as though it is simply a superior kind
of cinema or television, just as in the early days of film its major
creative use was as a means of recording staged entertainments. Once
over the sheer excitement of seeing moving images of real people early
cinematographers quickly realized that to sustain their audiences they
needed to appeal to them with stories. And the theatre was the obvious
source of previous content and experience in staging fictional entertainments.
So early narrative cinema tended to be made as though the camera was
a theatre audience member. Long unmoving takes operating through time
in a linear manner -- telling the story from the beginning to end. However
film is not theatre and in those early days it suffered from a variety
of technical limitations including shortness of film stock, and lack
of sound and colour.
Of
course it did not take long for someone to notice that film could do
something that live performance could not -- it could be edited. The
French animator/vaudeville artist, Melies, Melies
is credited with having invented stop-motion cinematography, and
in-camera editing, when, in 1898, his camera jammed whilst he was filming
passer-bys on the Place de l'Opera in Paris. He fixed his camera and
resumed shooting but was astonished to discover, when he had developed
and was projecting the film, that it seemed to show men magically turning
into women, children into adults and, most portentously, a bus into
a hearse. He quickly grasped the potential of his discovery and used
it in many of his subsequent films including 'A Trip to the Moon' (1902),
the first science fiction movie.
However,
stopping and starting the film inside the camera was cumbersome entailing
that each shot was set up in sequence and any mistakes could mean starting
over from scratch. Luckily the rolled celluloid film patented by George
Eastman for still cameras in 1889 proved to be an ideal medium for motion
pictures and allowed for mechanical splicing. This allowed film to be
more than a copy of life in action; scenes that followed one another
in real life could be separated on film, and scenes that had no connection
to each other in real life could be brought together. American filmmaker,
Edwin Porter saw the creative possibilities of Melies discovery and
added to them by physically cutting and splicing film together in 'The
Life of the American Fireman' and
' The Great Train Robbery', both produced in 1903. Despite arguments
that such editing went against natural order and audiences would not
be able to follow them, viewers loved the innovation and had no trouble
following the narratives as they jumped from place to place and back
and forward in time. DW Griffith built on these innovations as well
as inventing a whole host of new cinematic tricks including the moving
camera and variable focal length shots a decade or so later, whilst
the advent of Soviet montage, particularly through its most famous exponent,
Eisenstein, completed the transformation of film from being a passive
copier of the real to being an active creator of cinematic realities.
Soviet
Montage
In
a famous 1919 experiment, Lev Kuleshov edited footage of an actor's
face before three other images; a bowl of hot soup, a woman lying dead
in a coffin, and a little girl playing with a toy bear. Each sequence
was shown to a separate audience, and each audience saw three very different
emotions -- hunger, horror, parental love -- expressed by identical
images of the actor. Kuleshov had demonstrated that editing, the concatenation
of separate shots, was more powerful than the content. Eisenstein went
on to further explicate that narrative is created not by the content
of the individual shots in a film but by their interaction. This was
really the birth of cinema as we know it and the basis of comparisons
between film history and contemporary multimedia. It took three decades
for cinema to find its own unique identity, what it was good at, and
to stop trying to apply the conventions of earlier media.
Many
think that it still remains for multimedia to do the same thing. Jay
David Bolter and Richard Guarin in their recent book, 'Remediation'
disagree. For them no media can be as purist as formalist critics like
Harold Greenberg would have it -- they see each succeeding media 'enfolding'
the styles, techniques and content of earlier media, 're-mediating'
them and forming a new identity from old components. In turn, older media attempt to retain their currency by adopting the stylistic and conceptual paraphernalia of new media: eg multiple windows, fast edits, etc. This process has
become increasingly rapid as digital technologies transform the production
and transmission of all media.
"Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium. (Typically, of course, users did not realize that the older medium had failed in its promise until the new one appeared.) The supposed virtue of virtual reality, of videoconferencing and interactive television, and of the World Wide Web is that each of these technologies repairs the inadequacy of the medium or media that it now supersedes. In each case that inadequacy is represented as a lack of immediacy, and this seems to be generally true in the history of remediation. Photography was supposedly more immediate than painting, film than photography, television than film, and now virtual reality fulfills the promise of immediacy and supposedly ends the progression. The rhetoric of remediation favors immediacy and transparency, even though as the medium matures it offers new opportunities for hypermediacy."
Bolter and Grusin p.60
?Bolter and Guerin locate the process of remediation as having two principal styles or strategies: transparent immediacy and hypermediacy. Each of these strategies has a long and complicated history. A painting by the seventeenth-century artist Pieter Saenredam, a photopraph by Edward Weston, and a computer system of virutal reality are all attempts to achieve transparent immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium. A medieval illuminated manuscript, an early twentieth-century photomontage, and today's buttoned and windowed multimedia applications are instances of hypermediacy--a fascination with the medium itself. Although these two strategies appear contradictory, they are, say the authors, the two necessary halves of remediation. In Remediation, immediacy (or transparent immediacy) is defined as a "style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation" Hypermediacy is a "style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium"
See A Brief Glossary of Mediation
N
E X T : Computers and the development of Interactivity
On-line
Sources (not credited within the text)
The
Life and Death of Media; Bruce Sterling
KISS
of the Panopticon
Dead
Media Project
Griffin
University Dead Media Project
The
Media History Project
Persistence
of Vision: Animation Technologies and concepts
A
D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N D
Radio
4's - The Archers, as Postmodern Drama. by Linda Tame
Lewis
Mumford; Art and Technology 1934 - Writings and Theories
Make
a Thomas Edison Phonograph
The
silent feature: 1910-27
Footnoted
Books
*1 p.
8, Bob Cotton & Richard Oliver, Understanding Hypermedia: From
multimedia to virtual reality, Phaidon, London, 1993.
*2 p
56, Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A natural history and future
of the information revolution, Routledge, London and New York,
1997
*3
p. 469, Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A natural history and future
of the information revolution, Routledge, London and New York,
1997
*4 p. 3 Peter D'Agostino, 'Transmission: Theory and practice for
a new television aesthetics', 1985
*5 Jay
David Bolter & Richard Guarin, Remediations, 1999
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Shiralee
Saul: Originally authored 1998, last updated July 2006