Hypermediacy

This paper will discuss how picturebook applications place themselves within the tradition of children’s literature. In the discussion the various ends of hypermediacy will be emphasized.
Children’s literature is characterized through a child perspective, which is a narratological means developed within literary modernism. It reflects a consideration for the child reader’s cognitive capacity. Even though the narrator may have an adult voice, the story’s point of view reflects the point of view of a child, in order that the reader may be able to recognize—or at least imagine—the story’s universe, characters, milieu and plot. In picturebooks for children the child perspective is equally dominant through the pictures and the verbal text. And in picturebook applications environmental sounds duplicates the effect. One might therefore ask whether the child perspective is highlighted in multimodal children’s literature with hypermediacy as a result.
Picturebook applications seem to combine a cognitive consideration with performative aesthetics. Interactive elements increase the possibility of play. Thus, the applications can be characterized as playgrounds, which is a common way to define postmodern picturebooks (Meerbergen 2012, Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). The interactive elements might also increase the reader’s involvement in the storytelling, which is a common ambition in contemporary picturebooks (Ørjasæter 2014a). Schwebs 2014 argues that the affordances of an app is to bring a story to life in a multi-sensous way, and that the story-telling is embodied in the reader through the finger gestures. My point is that even hypermediated picturebooks such as Stian Hole’s trilogy on Garman have developed means for embodied sensuous experience (Ørjasæter 2014b). But when the picturebook Garmann’s summer is adapted to a picturebook application the multi-sensous story-telling becomes redundant. The story is told out loud as well as presented as scripture. The environment becomes audible as well as visible. The effect of this seemingly redundancy in the storytelling might be regarded as hypermediacy. The question is how it affects the work’s capacity to make embodied sensuous impression.
Apart from Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999) where Bolter and Grusin introduce their hypermediacy concept, the discussion in this paper will be influenced by Software takes command (2013) where Lev Manovich points out that ”computers and software are not just ’technology’ but rather the new medium in which we can think and imagine differently” (13). Thus, the research question in this paper will be: What does hypermediacy do to the way one thinks about children’s literature? Does it in any way alter what one thinks children’s literature is?

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

One of the most controversial computer games in recent years has been "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" (Rockstar Games 2004). Much of the controversy surrounding the game (including the disparaging critiques of the likes of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) centered around the relationship between the game's simulation of violence, sex, and racial stereotypes and the potential for this game interface to affect the real-world actions of its players. Though "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" is often considered to simply be a gang-violence simulator, this paper will argue that the relationship between the digital interface and the potentially-affected material space can be altered in such a way as to create a sense of distanciation. Drawing from Bertolt Brecht's theory of the Alienation Effect (which is echoed in Bolter and Grusin's theory of the hypermediated interface), I will demonstrate how the customization possible in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" provides a framework for distanciation and socio-political critique essential to Brecht's theory. The potential break from gang-violence simulation ("Grand Theft Auto's" default mode) is found in the ability to alter the avatar of the protagonist, CJ. By creating an avatar that glaringly juxtaposes the gang life surrounding him, the avatar alienates players from a sense of immersion in the simulation. The success of this juxtaposition is highly dependent on the relationship of the avatar of CJ and the game narrative he engages. As the customized CJ (who can more closely resemble the Shakespearean clown than a violent gang member) continues to engage the narrative, the story begins to emerge as a social satire and absurd exaggeration of the generic stereotypes the game supposedly advocates.

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.