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Issue 6. Medium Theory

Remediation as medial transformation: Case studies of two dance performances by 'Commerce'

Author: Bert Vandenbussche
Published: February 2003

Abstract (E): On the basis of an analysis of two dance performances, Pause and Second, both by the dance company Commerce, this article examines and illustrates the meanings of the concept of "remediation” as used by Bolter and Grusin in their Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999). The author argues that remediation as used by Bolter and Grusin carries two distinct meanings, first the repurposing of the content of one medium into another, and second, the transformation of one medium into another. On the basis of the Marshall McLuhan's distinction between "message” and "content,” the author then isolates a third meaning of remediation, which can be defined as hybridisation. In this sense, one medium is not just transformed into another, but a new form is created through the merging of two separate media. [mb]

Abstract (F): Cet article part de l'analyse de deux spectacles de danse, Pause et Second, l'un et l'autre par la compagnie Commerce. Il analyse et illustre ensuite le concept de "rémédiation" introduit par Bolter et Grusin dans leur ouvrage Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999). L'auteur montre que ce concept a deux sens, d'abord l'intégration et la redéfinition du contenu d'un média dans un autre média, ensuite la transformation d'un média en un autre. Rappelant la distinction faite par McLuhan entre "message" et "contenu", l'auteur dégage un troisième sens du terme de rémédiation, que l'on peut définir comme hybridisation. Dans une telle optique, la rémédiation ne transforme pas un média en un autre, mais crée une nouvelle forme à travers la fusion de deux médias autonomes. (mb)

Keywords: Bolter and Grusin, McLuhan, remediation, perfomance studies, dance, video, hypermediacy, hybridity

Introduction

The past few years many media theorists have focussed on the theme of 'remediation', more specifically on the influence of new media on culture in general and on the relation towards the already existing media in particular. Within this context "Remediation. Understanding New Media" of Bolter and Grusin is an interesting study because it carefully explores the notion 'remediation' in many directions. As point of departure the authors assume in the wake of McLuhan a mutual relationship between the old en new media: "What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media" (Bolter and Grusin 15). With this premise at the back of our mind and the study of Bolter and Grusin as guideline we will examine in which ways 'remediation' can be active within the field of contemporary dance performance. As extension of the choreographic and dramaturgical praxis more and more choreographers are using the 'new' medium video. To name just a few of them: "Highway 101" (2000-2001) and "Alibi" (2002) by Meg Stuart en Damaged Goods, "Demgegenüber Borniertheid-rendered" (reworked in 2002) by Thomas Plischke, "Terminal" (2002) by Heine Avdal and "Vanity" and "The princess project" (both probably in 2001) by Vincent Dunoyer. In this article we'll focus on "pause" and "second", two productions of the dance company Commerce in which the video camera and projection play a constitutive role. In which ways does the medium video remediate the medium dance and vice versa? Which statute does the remediation take? This analysis of the relationship between the two media will give us the opportunity to, on the one hand, exemplify different concepts of 'remediation' as they have been put forward by Bolter and Grusin, but also, on the other hand, to formulate on the basis of a few remarks a new interpretation of the notion.

Remediation according to Bolter and Grusin

Anyone who has read Bolter and Grusin's Remediation, will understand that the concept of 'remediation' cannot be pinned down easily because it is being used in many different ways. You have to describe accurately to which substance the term is referring. First of all the two authors fill remediation in as 'repurposing', as the reusing or recycling of a particular subject matter taken from one medium within another medium without displaying a formal interaction between the two media (Bolter en Grusin 45). As example they quote the filming of the novels by Jane Austen ("Sense and Sensibility", "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice"). In the same sense we may understand the borrowing of the text in "pause" from an unknown book.

Just after the lights have gone out a woman sits at the beginning of "pause" on a table in the front of the stage, staring at the public. She declaims a few sentences that are apparently written on the cards that she's holding in her hands. Fragments of a text about perception and darkness. When everything is being told, she turns her back at the public and takes a seat. The dance performance can begin.

In this small 'pièce de théatre' there isn't any reference to the specific book and to the medium of writing as such. When the spectator doesn't recognize the spoken text, he won't even experience the effect of remediation. Within the terminology of McLuhan this kind of remediation amounts to the transposing of the 'message' from one medium to the other. Nevertheless the American founder of media theory put this 'message' in opposition with the 'content'. This way Bolter and Grusin derive a second interpretation of the concept of 'remediation' from McLuhan's thesis that the 'content' of a medium always is another medium.

Roaming all over the stage the actress in "pause" registrates in all kinds of positions with a video camera at first sight banal things: a glass, blocks, the wall, the floor etcetera. During the proper performance it is for the spectator not clear neither what she's doing nor what her intention is. When at the end of de showing after the applause the projection of her video registration is shown in the adjoining room, you can see some more things: photographs, texts of songs, the actress herself and the two dancing dancers.  

From this point of view, remediation is understood as a strategy to represent within a medium not the subject matter of another medium, but the medium itself (Bolter and Grusin 45). The video registration of "pause" shows other media such as dance, photography, writing and theatre. However, theory concerning performativity would be critical of this division by Bolter and Grusin (see in the first instance the studies of Parker and Kosofsky, Phelan, Auslander and Sayre). The reusing of a particular subject matter as well as the representing of another medium fall within performance studies in the same category of the representation, of the 'Vorstellung'. This 'Vorstellung' contrasts with the 'Darstellung', the presence as such.  Furthermore McLuhan's distinction can be interpreted in another way as the opposition between the meaning that is been communicated in a particular medium ('message') and the formal functioning of that medium as such ('content'). Paradoxically formulated we can assume that Bolter and Grusin interpret the 'content' as the 'message' with regard to the second kind of remediation. They equal the 'Darstellung' with the 'Vorstellung'. If, however, we keep the original distinction of McLuhan in line with the difference between 'Vorstellung' and 'Darstellung', than we can give the notion of 'content' a purely formal, operative form. The following scenes describe the resulting possibility of remediation.

Remediation as Medial Transformation

During the first ten minutes the two dancers are moving in a sitting position across the floor. The movements aren't smooth or continuous, but are constantly interrupted, brought to a stop in order babble on later on. Sometimes a dancer perseveres a bit longer such a 'stop position', completely immobilised. Suddenly both dancers halt simultaneously: they are sitting next to each other in the same position.  The male dancer starts a series of movements that are repeated just a little bit later by the female dancer. However, she's moving quicker through the sequence so as to end both at the same moment with the same 'freeze': lying on their side they are keeping one arm and two legs in the air. Fifteen seconds long they look frozen. As if the videotape has stopped.

The male dancer sits on the floor with his head hidden between his wide-open legs. His arms and feet are dangling aimlessly over the knees. Suddenly the arms are turning around in the air for a few moments. Quickened as by the FFW-button of the video recorder.   

Certain passages in "pause" and "second" require a specific perception from the public, one that resembles the experience of looking to a videotape. In this way it looks as if in the perception of the spectator a video screen is pushed in front of the dance, or to put in the terminology of the computer, a video interface. As a result of this, the movements of the dancers are momentaneously perceived as a video projection. We would like to push this medial transformation forward as a specific category of remediation that must be distinguished from the representation of a medium. The described scenes don't show or represent the video as such, but rather present some properties of the medium. This results in a perceptive experience by which a medium gets charged with some particular medial characteristics of another medium. Consequently it succeeds in transforming itself partly in front of the public perception to the other medium through the peculiar use of the 'content' of that medium. Here it becomes clear why we should interpret 'content' as a formal functioning of a medium and not as a particular representation of a medium in another medium.

Two more remarks should be made concerning this specific type of remediation. First of all, one of the best known theses of McLuhan states that an old medium always folds back on its formal aspects during the advent of a new medium, that it starts to look for its purely medial functioning. Bolter and Grusin refer to this phenomenon with the term 'hypermediacy'. It is a characteristic that "makes us aware of the medium or media" (Bolter and Grusin 34). To exemplify this notion Bolter and Grusin, like many other authors, refer among other things to the history of modern art, especially painting, after the rise of photography in the nineteenth century. Due to the different technical conditions, a photographer could reproduce images more true-to-nature than a painter. Consequently, the art of painting turned away from the task of reproducing 'reality' and began a search for its identity as painting in its formal functioning. In this sense the well-known art critic Clement Greenberg stated that art should aspire to the essence of its own medium to be purely art and not something else. Within the visual arts this development towards medium specificity culminated for Greenberg in the abstraction of Abstract Expressionism. Striking enough, the use of the 'newer' medium video in the work of Commerce doesn't lead to a similar kind of hypermediacy as a medium specific comprehension of dance. Neither "pause" nor "second" are showing pure, absolute dance in the tradition of for example Merce Cunningham, the dancing counterpart of modernism in the visual arts. On the contrary the use of video saddles dance with an impure situation of medial crossing. As a spectator, one doesn't become aware of the medium dance as dance, but rather of the medial functioning of dance as video. From this viewpoint, hypermediacy makes us indeed aware of a medium, but only through the remediation of another medium.

Secondly, this deviant understanding of the notion remediation paradoxically relates Bolter and Grusin's definition of medium and the process of mediation as such: "a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media […]. A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media" (Bolter and Grusin 65). In our case: dance is the medium that remediates some 'techniques and forms' of the video. Each mediating is always a remediating and consequently each remediating is always a mediating. This circular reasoning is strikingly illustrated at the end of "second" by the following scene.

During the performance, the direct rendering of the registration with two video camera's let the public see many things: dancers in movement, the crumpling up of a sweater, the deformation of a face and the like. One of the last images is surprisingly enough that of one video camera itself. One camera takes the other in its field of vision. As if the pointed technical construction of the image comes into its own, it is being put itself into image.  

This can be read as a metacritique of the formation of images because one camera always needs another to be discovered at the centre of the production of images. It is, as Verschraegen puts it, "a critic that undermines itself in the awareness that it is as indispensable as impossible. For, how can one keep up a critical relation towards the media if one's own body is inextricably knitted and connected with those media?" (Verschraegen 16; translation BvB). Moreover, one can see on the compilation video of "pause" how the actress sets up some layered construction of images during the performance. Images that don't register the dance immediately but via a reflection in a dark sunglass or in a glass of water. A statement that assumes that the spectator will never be able to see pure dance without any kind of mediation. Rather, they will always look at the (re)mediating presentation of the dance through another medium. 

Remediation as Hybridisation

The scenes with regard to the medial transforming of movements into something like 'video-dance' demonstrate that not just the 'body', but also the 'mind' of the spectator is inseparably interwoven with the media. The apparatus of the human perception is always adapted to and conditioned by a new medium, in this case video. Analogous to Latour's viewpoint concerning 'technoscience,' Bolter and Grusin endorse the following thesis: "The events of our mediated culture are constituted by combinations of subject, media, and objects, which do not exist in their segregated forms. Thus, there is nothing prior to or outside the act of mediation" (Bolter and Grusin 58). At this point the notion remediation gains its full meaning: it isn't just estimated in terms of the mutual relationship of two media, but also in terms of the influence on the human subject in his physical and psychic components. On the basis of the material features one can of course make a strict division between the media video and dance, but it is just from the viewpoint of the spectator, of the public perception that the hybridisation of the two media in "second" can be fully appreciated.

A video camera is aimed at a television screen. This results in a multiplication of the screen, the effect of the 'Russian doll': a screen in a screen in a screen in a screen… A dancer walks in between the camera and the television, but by using the relay function the man appears only seven seconds later in the first screen. Subsequently he appears in the second screen once more seven seconds later. Meanwhile the dancer continues circling around the television as a result of which the manifolding keeps spreading over the different television screens. Finally this runs into a whirlpool of circles, narrowing more and more, in which the dancer walks around the television screen (in the television screen [in the television screen {in the television screen} in the television screen] in the television screen).

A dual situation. On the one hand, you are becoming aware as spectator of the formal and material differences between dance and video: the materiality of the dancing body versus the immateriality of the light impulses of the projected body, the spatiality of the dance versus the two-dimensionality of the video image… This really is a hypermedial situation in the logic of Bolter and Grusin, i.e. becoming aware of the medial functioning as such. On the other hand, we doubt if this scene wants to privilege this kind of medial distinction between the 'real' body of the dancer and the 'fictional,' thus 'false' image of the television screen. Rather it alludes to a blending of the media dance and video in the perception of the spectator, a hybridisation of the looking subject and the performing object (dancer, screen or camera - it doesn't matter). A fusion that creates a haunting, 'hypermediated' sequence of images, a labyrinth that allows the gaze the pleasure to stroll around. A simple staging of the material and a simple pattern of movements produce in this way an unexpected and truly unseen image. To end with McLuhan: "The hybridisation or the meeting point of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born" (McLuhan 55). Or to paraphrase the definition of Verschraegen concerning media: intermedia are "machines of experience that appeal to another register of the reality, uncover an unknown dimension of reality" (Verschraegen16).  

Conclusion

The two dance performance "pause" and "second" exemplify remediation as many things. In accordance with two definitions by Bolter and Grusin they imply the 'repurposing' of a certain meaning or 'message' and the representation of a medium by another medium. Moreover by radically distinguishing McLuhan's division between 'message' and 'content' the two productions let us specify another type of remediation as a momentaneous medial transformation. In the perception of the public the movements of the dancers get charged up with characteristics of the video recorder. The medium dance is perceived through the medium specific pair of glasses, or should we say lens, of the medium video.

References

Auslander, Philip. From Acting to Performance  Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism. London-New York: Routledge, 1997.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation Understanding New Media. Cambridge-London: the MITT Press, 1999.

Greenberg, Clement. Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1962 The Collected Essays and Criticism. John O'Brien (ed.), 4, Chicago-London 1993.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. 1964. London: 1997.

Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Eds). Performativity and Performance. London-New York: Routledge, 1995.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked  The Politics of Performance. London-New York: Routledge, 1993.

Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance  The American Avant-Garde since 1970.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Vandenbussche, Bert. "Dans, bekeken door het oog van de camera." Etcetera. June 2002:34-36.

Verschraegen, Gert. "Media en middelmaat". Witte Raaf. July and August 2001:14-16.

Bio: Bert Vandenbussche is doctoral student at the departement of art history at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He is co-author of the bilingual Tussen beeld en beweging/Between Image and Movement (2002) and and has published on performance studies in several leading journals.

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