roanokeremediated-blog

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What is remediation?

Remediation means “remedy.” In media, remediation is an act of representation of one medium in another medium. However, nowadays we can use that term in reference to any mediation by the new media. It is because new technology, in the words of  Bolter and Grusin, “promises to reform its predecessors.”

Below, in the first instance we can see a lower quality photo taken by a phone camera. Second picture in the high quality is taken by a professional camera. So here, it can be said, advanced technology remediates (”reforms”) lower-quality technology.

The third picture shows us a more literal remediation. We can see that the material was recorder by a phone camera. This video was then remediated by television and the Internet into a tv series. Now, it is remediated into a screenshot. Yet another remediation is through this tumblr blog.

Fourth picture was meant in the series to be originally in the analogue technology. Then, in the series’ reality this analogue video was remediated by television. In fact, producers of the series used digital technology to remediate analogue technology--new medium remediating old medium.

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What is immediacy?

Immediacy is the logic of representation that effaces medium. In immediacy a viewer is supposed to forget about the act of mediation, and feel the immediate presence of the presented content.

Below, there are examples of immediacy from AHS: Roanoke.

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What is hypermediacy?

Hypermediacy is the logic of representation that makes a medium visible. In hypermediacy, viewer is supposed to be aware of and acknowledge the act of mediation. 

Below, there are examples of hypermediacy from AHS: Roanoke.

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The sixth season of the anthology introduces the story of the big mansion in North Carolina. It was built in 1792 by Edward Philippe Mott. He was an awfully wealthy man, who was a huge enthusiast and collector of the medium of his times–paintings. Today we are taking selfies, Mott ordered his portraits. How different those media are after all? According to Bolter and Grusin: ”…a painting (…), a photograph (…), and a computer system for virtual reality are different in many important ways, but they are all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation.” So, the AHS: Roanoke season as a medium itself creates the effect of immediacy with the costumes and the scenery of 1790′s. However, it rubs our noses in this effect, as it alludes to the older media remediating reality. Painting is an attempt to remake reality so as to erase the act of remediation, as so are many other media of our times.

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In the 18th century, times of Edward Philippe Mott, the art was, as we call it today, “traditional.” However, Mott seems to anticipate the remediative power of art which became charateristic to modern style. The effect of remediation of the modern paintings is described by Bolter and Grusin:

“Modern art played a key role in convicing our culture of the reality of mediation. In many cases, modern painting was no longer about the world but about itself. Paradoxically, by eliminating ‘the real’ or ‘the world’ as a referent, modernism emphasized the reality of both the act of painting and its product. Painters offered us their works as objects in the world, not as a representation of an external world.”

So, here Mott expresses his envy of art. What I believe he envies is that art remediates reality and produces new objects that lack reference to reality. Mott had a male lover, who painted him. He trangressed socially-accepted norms. While he was judged in his reality, art “passed by.” 

Do we, for example, also envy our selfies nowadays? It may be so, because however we feel about our reality at the time being, our selfie is unaffected by it. Selfies are “frozen” in the digital database, and its lack of reference to reality may in fact be its real comfort.

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AHS Roanoke discusses how remediation works on the news channels. Actress Sarah Paulson plays three different parts in this season. This "string of doppelgangers” makes another iteration in the show, apart from so many iterated remediations. The actress herself is a medium of the roles she plays. One of the part is, again, an iteration. Namely, the sixth season “hosts” journalist Lana Winters from the second season--AHS: Asylum. In the last episode, Winters interviews Lee Harris. Interview ends with an attack of an armed man, who comes with a revenge on Lee. In the aftermath, Winters talks about the incident from the coziness of her own bed, while she recovers from the event. Live broadcast of the inverview from the journalist’s home creates an effect of immediacy. Live remediated interview makes the presence of the speaker more authentic, as if we were sitting in Lana’s bedroom, listening to her. But the medium does not let us forget about itself. TV news channels, here “WDMF 24,” load screen with ribbons of text and graphics, like a logo of the particular channel. Television news here borrow from the web sites–the newer medium. It is an example of how immediacy depends on hypermediacy. News channels strive to erase the medium’s interference and at the same time boast the medium’s interference.

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“The logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented… Yet (these same) old and new media often refuse to leave us alone… Televised news programs feature multiple video streams, split-screen displays, composites of graphics and text–a welter of media that is somehow meant to make the news more perspicuous.”--Bolter and Grusin.

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“...we can say that media technologies are agents in our culture without falling  into the trap of technological determinism. New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt and unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and tehy refashion other media, which are mebedded in the same or similar contexts.” 

The photographs that I chose testify to the argument of Bolter and Grusin. For example, social media did not emerge out of the vacuum. It responded to the already existing societal needs and habits. So, we now can post our pictures on the Instagram and get likes. But this need was not created by the very technology. Before Instagram, people had already practiced exhibitionistic social lifestyle. They had already craved for social attention beforehand.

We are reminded about the same in the Roanoke’s remediation of a court trial. Before digital technology, trials had been already depicted in an artistic form of “courtroom sketches.” The emergence of digital recording appeared then just as a convenient assistence to the tradition of remediating court trials.

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“The desire for immediacy leads digital media to borrow avidly from each other as well as from their analog predecessor such as film, television, photography. Whenever one medium seems to have convinvced viewers of its immediacy, other media try to appropriate that conviction”--write Bolter and Grusin. Roanoke season also addresses this issue. In the posted material, we can see a literal transition of one medium into the other. Older medium fades over into the newer one. We can see a court sketch drawing, which serves to convince as of the immediacy. So is the following testimony of the supposed juror in front of the camera. But, the very technique of the “dissolve” is a display of hypermediacy.

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Bolter and Grusin quote other scholars, on the “automatism” of the media with the invention of photography:

“In examining automatic reproduction and the artist as a creative agent, Stanley Cavell (1979) expanded on and revised Bazin: ‘Photoraphy overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.” For both Bazin and Cavell, photography offered its own route to immediacy. The photograph was transparent and followed the rules of linear perspective; it achieved transparency through automatic reproduction; and it apparently removed the artist as an agent who stood between the viewer and the reality of the image. Bazin (1980) concluded that ‘photography and the cinema… are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism’…”

The sequel to the “Roanoke”–”Return to Roanoke: Three Days in Hell”–specifically focuses on the automatism of today’s media. The director of the production, Sidney, provides every actor of the reality show with a phone. Sidney requires that everything be filmed, at all times. They all follow the instructions. As the dramatic events unfold, and get more and more gory, the phones become “glued” to their hands. They become mere holders of the apparatus, an “invisible hand,” and the camera is supposed to mediate reality as it is. But the series reminds us with all those scenes of people holding cameras, that human is indeed an agent of remediation. What the picture conveys will always be a subjective visualisation of what human  chooses to record. 

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