Remediation explains the transition from old (print) media to new (digital) media and the way of delivering visual language. This also has changed through the transition of mediums. This project examines how visual language has been affected by remediation of media in the development of technology.
- From the Print and Paint to the Web and Mobile.
– We can observe the remediation of writing space and visual language in the transition from old media (print and paint) to new media (web and mobile). For example, since web and mobile space arise, emoji became a fastest growing language. Emoji are now available to you as an optional written language, just like any global language. ‘The Scream’ by Munch is refashioning into the screaming emoji as result of the remediation from paint to the pixel.
– The web space has already become a familiar medium for us despite the fact that it is a media that has only recently appeared in comparison with books, TV, and movies. We can find the reason why we are familiar with web space like other old media from the remediation. Technology allows visual language to develop and recreate. For example, The New York Times exists in many medium nowadays, like paper, website and mobile app. In these different mediums, map graphic in newspaper re-fashioned to the interactive graphics or video in web or mobile. Texts are no longer static. It linked to another pages and languages.
Marshall McLuhan said it best: Remediation refers to the blending of old and new media1, and not always unidirectionally. Old media can remediate new media as well, as an attempt to reassert themselves in a world where digital media rule2. Digital technologies don’t radically change the mediascape so much as alter and add to older media3, as with the Web borrowing from television, photography, film, and print. The term can also refer to the blending of several different forms of media in one document, such as with the integration of a large, ornately decorated letter at the beginning of chapters in medieval texts; it is a fusion of images and words and yet they constitute parts of a whole5. Remediation has not newly emerged along with digital technologies but has existed for centuries.
2. From the Book to the Film.
– Remediation is essentially the appropriation of the content of one medium into another. Remediation through history has made changes from one media to another. As an example, the early fairy tales like Snow White were handwritten with drawing and decorations along the pages. Later, with the invention of printing by Gutenberg made everything more easy to publish. This lead to having a more efficient media that adopt new features. The advanced of technology, helped the transition of the literary world into the digital world. Now, the stories could be portrait into animated films. These bringing into life the stories that once were on books. But not only that, an old medium was re-created again taken it to the next level. This time, making the story more real using real actors and using special effects as a subject of remediation
3. From the Film (Kino-Eye) to the Virtual Reality.
– We can say cinema uses shots, shot sequences, scenes and dramatic sequences to communicate an idea in the same way that written language uses letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. However, The Man with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov approached the cinema differently with the ‘kino-eye’ technology. Each section of the Man with the Movie Camera covers the different parts of the day (work, rest and leisure), and through this, Vertov establishes images which provide the visual language which is brought into play throughout the length of the film.
In 1923, Vertov wrote:
“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them… Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations… My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you.”
The power of the film medium for Vertov was not simply one of observation and presentation, rather it was the entry into a much deeper conversation about the potential to use film almost like a scientific and cultural experiment, to explore and test ‘cinema truth’ (kino-Pravda) as a revolutionary tool.
– We hope this gives a clear view of remediation connection from film to VR. Before there was VR there was film, and sometimes you have to remember where you came from in order to know where you’re going. With a VR three dimensional interface and 360-degree screen, the eye is subordinated to the kino-eye. The body is subordinated to the virtual body of the virtual camera.
DTC375 - Language, Text and Technology 