Inspiration: Reversed Remediation: Evelien Lohbeck’s noteboek

This is an interesting video of multimedia artwork that inspired me to work on something interesting like this.

Evelien Lohbeck’s multimedia artwork noteboek (2008), has been selected as a Top Video in theBiennial of Creative Video, the showcase organized by the Guggenheim Museum and YouTube. ¹Noteboek exemplifies what I call ‘reversed remediation’. ² This aesthetic strategy subverts Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation,’ which serves a historical desire for immediacy.³Countering Marshall McLuhan’s fear of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium; reversed remediation offers a chance to wake up the viewer. ⁴ It creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one’s perception of the world. (Art)works that employ reversed remediation destabilize remediation mechanisms, by making media visible instead of transparent. It makes critical awareness possible because it lays bare the workings of media instead of obfuscating them. The following discussion distinguishes between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and applies this theoretical foundation to Lohbeck’s noteboek.


Hypermediacy, Remediation, and Reversed Remediation

Hypermediacy, the multiplying of technologies, is the central operational method for both remediation and reversed remediation. According to Bolter and Grusin, in remediation, hypermediacy is used to enable a seamless transition between different (older and newer) media in order to render all media transparent, which follows a historically-determined desire for immediacy. In reversed remediation, hypermediacy is used to display the incongruities between media in order to frustrate immersion and fosters critical awareness. Hypermediacy’s oscillation between remediation and reversed remediation has at its mid-way point a fulcrum, where the movement hovers for a moment and can be pushed in either direction. To push it towards remediation, the multiple media used must work together to create a familiar outcome that soothes the user into immersion. To push it towards reversed remediation, the multiple media used must work together to create an unfamiliar (uncanny) outcome that propels the user out of immersion and into a state of critical awareness. In Lohbeck’s noteboek, this happens when one wants to manipulate a drawn duration bar but suddenly realizes that an analog environment is inserted into a digital environment, calling one’s attention to this irreconcilable incongruity between different registers of media.

Hypermediacy achieves a sense of immediacy through an illusion of transparency. Bolter and Grusin’s critique of transparency as a feature of hypermediacy only concerns “the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and regarding it as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation”.⁵They acknowledge instances in which the medium is foregrounded rather than made transparent. For example, they suggest that the viewer of a collage becomes hyperconscious, as s/he oscillates between interpreting the paper clippings and torn up photographs and looking through the actual objects into an imagined representational space beyond the surface. They do not however, explore the possibility that this oscillation space offers artists the ability to critique the medium that is used and for viewers the opportunity to contemplate how one perceives and makes sense of multiple layers of media. In other words, they use the notion of hypermediacy exclusively as a vehicle for explaining remediation where it could serve just as well as a vehicle for explaining its opposite - reversed remediation. Hypermediacy creates an opportunity to actually see the media at work. It can interrupt the advancement of remediation, render turbid the metaphorical transparent window between user and medium and transform it into a mirror. Reversed remediation thus can be explained as a strategy that purposely makes media visible by displaying its characteristics in order to raise the awareness of the workings of the media employed.

The Visible Entanglement of Different Media in noteboek

Lohbeck’s Noteboek is an example of contemporary art dealing with the entanglement of media that eventually reverses the mechanism of remediation. Rather than obfuscating them in favor of a seamless transition between old and new media in order to establish an immersive relationship between user and media, Lohbeck displays the characteristics of a medium, revealing them as media per se. With her artworks in general she attempts to “confuse reality and challenge the expectations of the audience” (Lohbeck, 2008).⁶ This attempt already succeeds with the ironic title ofnoteboek, it seems that she has made an error by typing an ‘e’ instead of an ‘o’ in the word boek, but boek is the Dutch word for book and when pronounced, it sounds the same. By strikingly drawing our attention to the word boek, she makes the viewer aware of the exact word that stresses the relationship between the digital laptop and the analog (note)book.

Because noteboek’s ‘native’ environment is online, there are many different ways one might arrive at the artwork. One way to begin one’s experience of the piece is through Lohbeck’s main website, which combines hand-drawn and digital elements. By clicking the hand-drawn Internet Explorer icon one can access the ‘/films.html’ page, which offers a display of stills representing fourteen motion graphic works, including noteboek. The stills are live links to the respective videos. Clicking on a still opens an embedded YouTube video on a small screen on a new page with an identical layout.

(Reversed Remediation: Evelien Lohbeck’s noteboek) via rhizome.org