On Media Response - Remediation Rocks

Media is constantly changing and getting recycled, that is what makes it so cool! With the invention of new technologies come new ways to create art, and new ways to disseminate information. As McLuhan says, the medium is the message and with that, the message is constantly changing through which medium we decide to send it through. As Hovagimyan writes, painting completely changed with the arrival of photography. Suddenly, the photograph was capturing a moment in time with exact details, and there was less pressure on painting to convey realism. As we see today, the arrival of photography didn’t cause painting to go extinct, merely transform. This is remediation. Remediation, according to Bolder and Grusin, is “the representation of one medium in another” but it is also the historical process defined by the ways new media refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer challenges of new media. For example, there are artists who specialize in painting scenes that look hyperreal, as if they were photographed. There are many ways to look at remediation. Remediation can be seen as a new medium offered as an improvement, the new medium is still justified and seeks to remain faithful to the older medium’s character; the new media projects itself as progress. Remediation can be viewed as a new medium aggressively trying to replace the older one; refashioning the older medium or media entirely while still marking the presence of older media and maintaining sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy. The third way to view remediation is the new medium trying to absorb the older medium so there are not as many discontinuities, the entire act of remediation ensuring that the older medium is not entirely erased – it is replicating the way of the older medium. For example, Edward Hopper’s New York Movie Theatre painting is a painting representing film. My favorite example of remediation is the end credits in Wall-E. The end credits of Wall-E are a remediation of art in general from cave paintings to hieroglyphics to Mediterranean mosaics to pointillism to Van Gogh to a video game. The creators are secretly saying, “Look! The digital age can create an image just as good as Van Gogh complete with pixels and the ability to zip it up and send it through cyberspace. Wall-E is an example of Remediation II, the new medium trying to replace the older medium, refashioning the older media while maintaining the sense of multiplicity and hypermediacy. In the end credits of Wall-E, the digital is superseding and taking over – it is an homage to past mediums with a hint of aggression. While watching the end credits we are reminded that we are engaging in both the older medium of painting and the newer media of cinema (specifically digital cinema) because we can see pixels move – we are completely conscious that the new medium (cinema) is conveying an older medium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuR8uq9J7gw - Wall-E end credits

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xpqut_the-revolution-will-not-be-televise_music - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised