Introduction: Remedying Remediation?

Abstract

Some twenty years after Jay David Bolter and David Grusin’s now classic Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 1999), this theoretical introduction seeks to question and clarify the contours and stakes of remediation, and to sound the notion anew for productivity, pertinence and potential limits, moving the debates outside the strict perimeter of media and communication studies. The goal is to understand what remediation does, and especially what it does to images within the context of their accelerated circulation. After an overview of the intellectual debates around remediation in the age of the digital “revolution,” this article explores the related notions of post-medium, super-medium, demediation and counter-mediation, and ventures to interrogate the counter-practices and alternative manifestations of remediation to open new avenues of inquiry.