Remediation: Crossing Discursive Boundaries

Remediation: Introducing voices and discourses from Central Europe

In the 1990s hopes appeared that the Internet will provide a completely new form of existence for Russian literature, that books will look like this: you click a link, a new webpage opens, you write a chapter and submit it. Everybody will rejoice as well as write their contribution. I did it. It was interesting for me to see what was going to come out of it. Nothing came out of it.

Roman Leibov

The concept of remediation coined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin almost two decades ago seems to endure the test of time fairly well as it keeps reverberating on many levels of contemporary critical thought and artistic practice. Two theses, in particular, remain highly attractive: new media do not replace old media – as Bolter and Grusin proved – but draw from them in evolutionary process where certain elements are being transformed but other remain stable or are transformed later in a constant exchange of poetic and narrative strategies between the mediations of old and new. The second thesis highlights a double logic that governs the process of remediation. On one hand it is immediation, a tendency towards an unmediated communication, which obscures its media dependent status and technical aspects in order to achieve the transparency of immediate experience of the represented reality. On the other hand it is hypermediation – a tendency towards hybrid, auto reflective mediality of the representation in order to make it somehow closer to the represented phenomena by multiplication of forms and interfaces it is reflected in.

What this book aims to achieve is to examine the notion of remediation and concepts associated with it from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe with broad and varied examples drawn from literary and artistic practices of last decades: from Slovenia and Czech Republic to Russia, from video art, happening and (analog) art installation to hypertext, cyberpoetry and works made for gesture and body sensitive platforms like Kinect or mobile phones.

The voices comprised in this monograph come from parts of the world which – understandably – were not even mentioned in the original works on remediation. At the time when the first edition of The Writing Space (Bolter, 1990) was published, followed by Remediation (Bolter, Grusin, 2000) Central Europe was undergoing historical transformations, and the benefits of technological changes that were apparent in the U.S and the West were not clearly visible. Yet the emergence of new media and the Internet did accelerate changes in the region, first and foremost in the field of artistic production and distribution. It was the Internet that made Russian avantgarde artists turn into net artists and connect with the global network of new media art to play a prominent role in it. The technological changes allowed also for rediscovery of local traditions and art movements marginalized or even banned by communist regimes, like Russian Silver Age, Czech avant-garde from before World War II, Croatian Quorum generation from nineteen eighties etc. – new writing spaces were a natural ally to those marginalized movements and today their ideas and techniques could be remediated in new digital platforms and cultural contexts. In countries where censorship institutions were not able to totally control the samizdat literature and alternative distribution, Internet allowed for altogether different kind of alliances that brought together artists of digital age with representatives of avant-garde and neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s, marginalized – in this case – by anti-communist and politically oriented players in the dominant cultural field (Poland).

The volume is divided into three parts: Contexts, Histories, and Poetics. It starts with a sobering look at evolution of technology and its impact on society, cultural heritage, and human condition as presented by Pavel Rankov. His reflection on dematerialization of cultural and technological tools – and “massification” of technology in the process – introduces an ethical perspective remediation in a world where the real and the virtual merge into a single convergent environment, where simulacra overflows reality in a “remediation of everything” with the self in the middle, creating its mirror image via Big Data with enormous mass of information about itself but with perhaps not so much knowledge, and even less wisdom.

Further in the first part Janez Strehovec situates new literary forms of e-literature and the process of remediations that they employ in a broader horizon of film history and theory. It is a text put in motion and interfaces of interaction that engage user’s body, which Slovenian scholar scrutinizes in order to devise a phenomenology of perception founded on Bolter’s theory of immediacy and hypermediacy.

By examining developments in the user interface construction and function of the reader, Strehovec prepares a future-proof theoretical framework, where mimesis is replaced by poiesis, representation of the world by construction of virtual worlds with user and its need for multi-sensory motor stimuli at its center. This “post-remediation” model, which focuses on movement, feelings and affection, body, and biopolitics, is even more apparent in ever evolving interfaces of recent years, including newest instances of VR and voice recognition interfaces for conversational bots.

Treating digital technologies as Foucauldian heterotopias, which secretly undermine the “syntax” of language and the ways words and things are “held together” (Foucault 2002, xix), Jana Tomašovičová analyses the disruption that a database paradigm inflicts on science and culture. It changes pre-fixed forms of order and preference: images, sounds, and words are loosened from their original indexicality and are converted into numerical code, which enables the modification and combination of the obtained data. Database thus represents a new type of space which subverts the standard organization of signs. As such the database paradigm can be treated as a sort of meta-remediation, a breeding ground of all subsequent transformations where one medium is reshaped and extended by another, while the borders of all involved media are gradually wiped out. The associated transcoding processes that take place within digital heterotopias result in new representations of scientific objects unattainable before the digital disruption. Tomašovičová presents telling examples from the field of bio-medicine, where the algorithmically enhanced art of mapping of the human body reveals visual representations so novel and unseen that the molecular system of the human body can be considered itself a unique form of heterotopia, ready to transform other areas of science and culture.

Agnieszka Jelewska and Michał Krawczak reflect on the impact of video and video art from the 1960s, when the format was remediating the reality of TV and film production and initiating a democratization of the medium, till the 1990s and further, when video itself got remediated into digital media platforms of YouTube and its clones. Video, they argue, started a revolution that emancipated digital devices after which they themselves became a part of a digital world in which we live in. From then on remediations happen not only within the media, but – as Jelewska and Krawczak suggest – on a deeper, interconnected levels of digital reality. If one cannot talk about mediations without remediations, then every mediation is always already remediating the mediated world.

The concept of remediation might have had its big initial impact in theorizing the future and delivering a key for understanding the plethora of cultural changes accelerated by digital technology, with its promises of ultimate immediation in form of VR, but its lasting impact is more universal thanks to foregrounding processes that are taking place for centuries. The double logic of hypermediation and immediation is one of the constant forces shaping the flow of cultural paradigms and art movements.

While new perspectives on remediation and its historical applications are the main focus of previous chapters of our monographs, a more hands-on and practical approaches are presented in the third part – “Poetics”. It begins with an outline of semantic and semiotic transformations crucial to interpretation and comparative studies of “born-digital” works of art and literature. Ewa Szczęsna, Piotr Kubiński, and Mariusz Pisarski introduce three categories for describing processes of transitioning from page to screen: atomization, kinetization, and modulation. All of them greatly influence the ontology of text starting from the smallest units of meaning, both in the text and within its paratextual navigational frame. The processes in question are exemplified on Polish e-poetry and categorized further into secondary analytical entities applied to computer games. This way a semantically oriented bridge is built between Lev Manovich’s enumeration of major characteristics of the language of new media and Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation.

Some fascinating examples of new forms of remediations, in which digital and analogue spheres are bound by multidirectional connections, far from the obvious, historically imposed order. Piotr Marecki examines how the concept of space and spatial reading of a chose-your-own-path model of works can be refashioned and greatly amplified in his sticker biography Stobierskiade: a geo-locational, distributive type of writing with elements of augmented reality but incorporated back from digital to analogue domain. Stobierskiade (2013) takes Bolter’s idea of writing space and notion of collaborative writing back from computer screens to urban and natural landscape, where the work is distributed in form of stickers with textual and visual segments of its narrative and QR links to additional content online. Recontextualising Dadaist experiments in distribution of artistic content and Situationist psychogeographic strategies of inscribing artistic message into urban landscape, Marecki’s project sets stage for an intermedial play between different semiotic orders, physical and virtual space, analogue, and digital media.