Hypermediacy

A reoccurring motive in my writing and my art is to show how a particular medium is working. Therefore, I find Bolter and Grusin’s terms “immediacy” and “hypermediacy,” in their work Remediation, very useful. I am particularly interested in hypermediacy which, “makes us aware of the medium or media (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 35). An example that I found useful was that of seeing the desktop interface as hypermediacy, where, “unlike perspective painting or three-dimensional computer graphic, this windowed interface does not attempt to unify the space around any one point of view… and unlike the painting or computer graphic, the desktop interface dose not erase itself” (Bolter and Grusin 33). 

On some level I see immediacy as a necessary component in understanding the world around us: we need to be allowed entry into an image or word in order to make sense of them. So we need the oscillation between “transparency and opacity” (Bolter and Grusin 33). That said, I think that the transparency (and therefore the immediacy) in representations that take advantage of “linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity” have had a much more powerful influence on our perceptions of reality, than hypermediacy has. Therefore, in my opinion the oscillation between transparency and opacity does not occur enough. In a very obvious example, I feel like companies spend much more time and money getting audiences to watch films, as opposed to getting audiences to understand films.

Taking all of this into consideration, I hope to apply these concerns to my cyber poem. Although I am not sure exactly how or what I am going to do, I know I want to work within the realm of hypermediacy in some way. I want to bring out how the medium I am using is relating to what I am saying, in order to educate my audience not just on what I am saying, but on how I am saying it. This way the audience can apply these findings to other instances where the medium is used, even if the content of what others have to say is different. In this way I want to provide them with an entry point into, not just understanding what I want them to understand, but understanding their world in a way that I will not be able to anticipate.  In this way I will hopefully try to bring in the aspects of a good user experience as described by Kolko; being mindful that situations change over time.