ABSTRACT
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have written an account of new media entitled Remediation, a term they define as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’ (1999: 273). Remediation works through two contradictory styles: hypermediacy, defined as ‘a style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium’ (1999: 272), and immediacy, ‘a style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation’ (1999: 272-3). The tension between these two forms of re-working creates some of the energy of new media, yet the process is not exclusive to new digital forms and has a history of its own.
