Premediation

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Abstract
In our 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay Bolter and I defined "remediation" as the double logic according to which media (particularly but not exclusively digital media) refashion prior media forms.1 In response to the question of what was new about digital media at the end of the twentieth century, we proposed that these media were new precisely because of the ways in which they refashioned older media. Specifically, we examined the ways in which such media as computer graphics, video games, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web define themselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and refashioning their predecessors, principally television, film, photography, and painting, but also print. Video and computer games, we argued, remediate film by styling themselves as "interactive movies," incorporating standard Hollywood cinematic techniques. Virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting. Digital photography remediates the analog photograph. The Web absorbs and refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium, including television, film, radio, and print. Furthermore, we argued that older media remediate newer ones within the same media economy. The traditional Hollywood cinema, for example, has responded to the challenge of digital media in a variety of different ways: by employing computer graphics in otherwise conventional films, by creating films entirely with computer animation, or by replacing the logic of linear narrative with more iterative, gamelike logics. Television, too, has made such extensive use of new media that TV screens often look like Web pages. Remediation, we suggested, seemed to be a characteristic not only of contemporary media but of visual media at least since the Renaissance, with its invention of linear-perspective painting—as evidenced by the recent interest among art historians in the role that optical devices (including the camera lucida, camera obscura, and photographic projection) played in the history of realistic painting. Each medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and [End Page 17] refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as homage seem always to be at work.

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