Remediation: Understanding New Media

Summary

Bolter and Grusin introduce the concept of remediation as the defining characteristic of new digital media: the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms and vice versa. They argue that remediation operates through a “double logic” — the twin desires for immediacy (transparent, invisible interface that puts the viewer in direct contact with the content) and hypermediacy (visible, multiplied, heterogeneous media that foregrounds the act of mediation itself). Neither logic ever fully wins; all media exist in tension between the two. The book traces this dynamic across virtual reality, film, television, the World Wide Web, video games, and digital photography, showing how each medium defines itself by borrowing from, honouring, rivalling, or refashioning its predecessors.

Key Contributions

• Establishes remediation as the fundamental relationship between media — not replacement but refashioning
• Defines the double logic: immediacy (the desire to erase the medium) and hypermediacy (the fascination with the medium itself)
• Shows that remediation is not unique to digital media — it has operated throughout the history of Western visual representation (perspective painting, photography, cinema)
• Challenges the myth of media revolution — no medium appears in isolation; every medium is always already remediated
• Provides a vocabulary for analysing how new creative tools and interfaces relate to their predecessors

Methods

• Historical and theoretical analysis drawing on art history, media studies, and cultural criticism
• Close readings of specific media forms: VR, film, web design, video games, digital photography, webcams
• Case studies including the Strange Days wire (VR as ultimate immediacy), CNN’s website vs television coverage, and flight simulators
• Extends Marshall McLuhan’s “the content of a new medium is always an older medium” into a systematic theory

Connections to Active Projects

AutoTonnetz: The Tonnetz is a 19th-century paper representation of harmonic relationships. AutoTonnetz remediates it into an embedded LED/MIDI interface — transforming a static, visual-only theoretical diagram into a dynamic, audio-visual, tactile instrument. This is a textbook case of remediation. The immediacy/hypermediacy tension is visible in design choices: should the interface make the Tonnetz structure transparent (user thinks in harmony, not in LEDs) or should it foreground the medium (the light patterns and physical form become the experience)? Bolter and Grusin would argue AutoTonnetz necessarily does both, and the balance between them is a core design parameter.

Organised Sound: The perception study directly engages with immediacy vs hypermediacy. When raters evaluate audio-visual coherence, they are partly measuring whether the combination feels immediate (unified, transparent) or hypermediated (each modality calling attention to itself). The intermedial interference concept from Chiaramonte maps onto this: constructive interference creates immediacy, destructive interference creates hypermediacy. The remediation framework helps theorise why some AV combinations feel unified and others feel disjunct.

Swarm Robotics: Peripheral relevance — networked AutoTonnetz units remediate both solo instruments and orchestral ensembles, creating a new hybrid form.

Suggested Reading

• McLuhan (1964) — Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (the original “medium is the message” and content-as-older-medium insight)
• Manovich (2001) — The Language of New Media (complementary theorisation of new media through cinema history)
• Kittler (1999) — Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (media archaeology approach, German tradition)
• Rajewsky (2005) — Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remediation (direct response to Bolter & Grusin from literary studies perspective)