Duplicate record (aggregate and delete one)

Reversed Remediation

A Critical Display of the Workings of Media in Art

By Saskia Isabella Maria Korsten

JIn this paper I distinguish between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and apply this theoretical foundation to new media art that exemplify what I call ‘reversed remediation’.

This aesthetic strategy subverts Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notionof ‘remediation,’ which serves a historical desire for immediacy.CounteringMarshall McLuhan’s fear of the narcotic state that the user of a medium canenter when becoming a closed system with the medium; reversed remediationoffers a chance to wake up the viewer. It creates a state of critical awarenessabout how media shape one’s perception of the world. (Art)works that employreversed remediation destabilize remediation mechanisms, by making mediavisible instead of transparent. It makes critical awareness possible because itlays bare the workings of media instead of obfuscating them.

Hypermediacy, themultiplying of technologies, is the central operational method for bothremediation and reversed remediation. In remediation, hypermediacy is used toenable a seamless transition between different media in order to render allmedia transparent. This soothes the user into immersion. In reversedremediation, hypermediacy is used to display the incongruities between media inorder to frustrate immersion. This fosters critical awareness. For example, inEvelien Lohbeck’s artwork noteboek, this happens when one wants tomanipulate a drawn duration bar but suddenly realizes that an analogenvironment is inserted into a digital environment. One’s attention is thuscalled to the irreconcilable incongruity between different registers of media.

This paper examines the way literary practice in digital media illuminates traditional literary processes that otherwise remain unremarked, and conversely, what the literary concept of ‘address’ might contribute to an understanding of the way digital media are reinventing literary agency. It explores handwriting as an embodied praxis linking thought with corporeality through the medium of gesture, and its transformations in text-based new media art. Handwriting (and especially signatures) has long been thought to make personality traits manifest. Its expressive gestural and kinematic aspect can be illuminated by Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception in which two-dimensional diagrams are shown as consistently corresponding to and eliciting a small number of categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) in viewers. Diane Gromala’s ‘Biomorphic Typography’ (2000 onwards) in which the user’s keystrokes generate biofeedback input which combines with the behaviours assigned to typography to animate text in the present time of writing draws on these conventions and complicates them in the process. By contrast, John Geraci’s locative media project ‘Grafedia’ (2004-2005), in which, as he says, ‘walls are made into websites’ handwriting signals the public discourse of graffiti with all its connotations of haste and illegality. In this work, users can write by hand on any of the various physical surfaces of the world and link this graffiti to rich media content that can be accessed by others as they come across the texts, appropriates the live dimension of handwriting as graffiti into the memorialising and communicative functions of a larger textual work that might also be collaboratively elaborated over time. The handwritten graffiti (in blue and underscored) mimics the default HTML hyperlink, which makes it visible as a piece of Grafedia, also signals the complex reciprocity between handwriting and print in new media work.

(Source: authors' abstract)