“Immediacy is, however, a one-sided determination; thought does not contain it alone, but also the determination to mediate itself with itself, and thereby the mediation being at the same time the abrogation of mediation–it is immediacy.” "然而,直接性是一种片面的确定性;思想并不只包含它,还包含以自身为中介的确定性,从而中介同时也是中介的废除--这就是直接性。"
Hegel 黑格尔
“And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.” "一如既往,矛盾中的一致性表达了欲望的力量"。
Derrida 德里达
The Double Logic of Strange Days 奇怪日子的双重逻辑
“This is not like TV only better,” says Lenny Nero in the futuristic film Strange Days. “This is life. It’s a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there. You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it . . . feeling it.” Lenny is touting a blackmarket device called “the wire” to a potential customer. The wire is a technological wonder that deserves Lenny’s praise. It fits over the wearer’s head like a skull cap, and sensors in the cap somehow make contact with the perceptual centers in the brain. In its recording mode, the wire captures the sense perceptions of the wearer; in its playback mode, the device delivers these recorded perceptions to the wearer. If we accept the popular view that the role of media is to record and transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to make obsolete all technologies of representation. Lenny mentions television, but we can extend his critique to books, paintings, photographs, film, and so on. The wire’s appeal is [End Page 311] that it bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly from one consciousness to another. "未来主义电影《奇怪的日子》中的莱尼-尼禄说:"这和电视不一样,只是更好看。"这就是生活。这是某个人的生活片段。纯净无暇,直接来自大脑皮层。你身临其境"你在做,在看,在听......在感受"莱尼正在向潜在客户兜售一种名为 "窃听器 "的黑市设备。窃听器是一项值得莱尼称赞的技术奇迹。它像骷髅帽一样套在佩戴者的头上,帽内的传感器以某种方式与大脑的感知中枢接触。在记录模式下,导线捕捉佩戴者的感官知觉;在回放模式下,设备将记录的知觉传递给佩戴者。如果我们接受这样一种流行观点,即媒体的作用是记录感官体验并将其从一个人传递给另一个人,那么窃听器就有可能使所有的表征技术过时。列尼提到了电视,但我们可以将他的批评延伸到书籍、绘画、照片、电影等等。电线的魅力在于 [尾页 311]它绕过了所有形式的中介,直接从一个人的意识传递到另一个人的意识。
Strange Days itself is less enthusiastic about the wire than Lenny and his customers. Although the wire embodies the desire to get beyond mediation, Strange Days offers us a world fascinated by the power and ubiquity of media technologies. Los Angeles in the last two days of 1999, on the eve of " 2 K, ," is saturated with cellular phones, voice- and textbased telephone answering systems, radios, and billboard-sized television screens that constitute public media spaces. And in this media-saturated world, the wire itself is the ultimate mediating technology, despite or indeed because the wire is designed to efface itself, to disappear from the user’s consciousness. Two scenes, in which Lenny coaches the “actors” who will appear in a pornographic recording, make it clear that the experience the wire [End Page 312] offers can be as mediated as a traditional film. And if the wire itself is cinematic, the whole of Strange Days is also conscious of its own cinematic tradition, with its obvious debts to films from Vertigo to Blade Runner. Although Lenny insists that the wire is “not TV only better,” the film ends up representing the wire as “film only better.” 与莱尼和他的顾客相比,《奇怪的日子》本身并不那么热衷于电线。虽然窃听器体现了人们对超越中介的渴望,但《奇怪的日子》为我们展现了一个为媒体技术的力量和无处不在而着迷的世界。1999 年的最后两天,在 "2 K "前夕的洛杉矶,手机、语音和文字电话应答系统、收音机以及构成公共媒体空间的广告牌大小的电视屏幕已经达到了饱和状态。而在这个媒体饱和的世界里,窃听器本身就是终极的中介技术,尽管窃听器的设计本身就是为了让自己消失,从用户的意识中消失。在莱尼指导 "演员 "出演色情录像的两个场景中,我们可以清楚地看到,窃听器 [尾页 312]所提供的体验可以像传统电影一样被媒介化。如果说铁丝网本身就是电影,那么整部《奇怪的日子》也意识到了自己的电影传统,从《迷魂记》到《银翼杀手》,都明显借鉴了这一传统。尽管莱尼坚持认为,窃听器 "不是电视,只是更好",但影片最终却将窃听器表现为 "只是更好的电影"。
Strange Days is a compelling film for us because it captures the ambivalent and contradictory ways in which new digital media function for our culture 对我们来说,《奇怪的日子》是一部引人入胜的影片,因为它捕捉到了新数字媒体在我们的文化中发挥作用的矛盾和冲突方式
today. The film projects our own cultural moment a few years into the future in order to examine that moment with greater clarity. The wire is just a fanciful extrapolation of contemporary virtual reality (see fig. 1), with its goal of unmediated visual and aural experience; and the proliferation of media in 2K L.A. is only a slight exaggeration of our current media-rich environment, in which digital technologies are proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them. In addressing our culture’s contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy, the film enacts what we understand as a double logic of “re-mediation.” Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation. 今天。影片将我们自己的文化时刻投射到几年后的未来,以便更清晰地审视这一时刻。电线只是对当代虚拟现实(见图 1)的遐想推断,其目标是无中介的视觉和听觉体验;而 2K 洛杉矶中媒体的激增只是对我们当前媒体丰富环境的轻微夸张,在这种环境中,数字技术的激增速度超过了我们的文化、法律或教育机构的跟进速度。在探讨我们的文化对即时性和超即时性的矛盾需求时,影片体现了我们所理解的 "再媒介化 "的双重逻辑。我们的文化既想增加媒体数量,又想抹去所有媒体痕迹:它想在增加媒体技术的同时抹去媒体。
In this last decade of the twentieth century, we are in an unusual position to appreciate the double logic of remediation–not only because [End Page 313] we are bombarded with images (in print, on television, in films, and now on the World Wide Web and through other digital media), but also because of the intensity with which these two logics are being pursued in all these media. “Live” point-of-view television programs show us what it is like to accompany a policeman on a dangerous raid or indeed to be a skydiver or a race-car driver hurtling through space. Filmmakers routinely spend tens of millions of dollars to film “on location” or to recreate period costumes and places in order to make their viewers feel as if they were “really” there. Internet sites offer stories, images, and now video that is up-to-the-minute, all in the name of perceptual immediacy. Yet these media enact another logic with equal enthusiasm: web sites are often riots of diverse media forms, including graphics, digitized photographs, animation, and video–all set up in pages whose graphic design principles recall the psychedelic 1960s or dada in the 1920s. Hollywood films, like Natural Born Killers or Strange Days itself, routinely mix media and styles. Televised news programs now feature multiple video streams, split-screen displays, composites of graphics and text–a welter of media that is meant to make the news more perspicuous to us. 在二十世纪的最后十年里,我们处于一个不同寻常的位置来理解补救的双重逻辑--这不仅是因为 [尾页 313]我们受到图像的狂轰滥炸(印刷品、电视、电影,以及现在的万维网和其他数字媒体),还因为所有这些媒体都在强烈地追求这两种逻辑。"实况 "视角电视节目向我们展示了陪同警察进行危险突击的感觉,或者是跳伞运动员或在太空中飞驰的赛车手的感觉。电影制片人经常花费数千万美元进行 "外景 "拍摄,或重现当时的服装和场所,让观众感觉自己 "真的 "身临其境。互联网站提供最新的故事、图片和视频,所有这些都是以感知即时性为名。然而,这些媒体以同样的热情贯彻着另一种逻辑:网站往往是各种媒体形式的狂欢,包括图形、数字化照片、动画和视频--所有这些都被设置在页面中,其图形设计原则让人想起 20 世纪 60 年代的迷幻或 20 世纪 20 年代的达达。好莱坞电影,如《天生杀人狂》或《奇怪的日子》本身,经常混合媒体和风格。现在的电视新闻节目有多种视频流、分屏显示、图形和文字的合成--这些媒体的混合旨在让新闻对我们来说更加清晰明了。
What is remarkable is that these seemingly contradictory logics not only coexist in digital media today, but are mutually dependent. Immediacy depends upon hypermediacy. In the effort to create a seamless moving image, filmmakers combine live-action footage with computer compositing and two- and three-dimensional computer graphics. In the effort to be up to the minute and complete, television news producers assemble on the screen ribbons of text, photographs, graphics, and even audio without a video signal when necessary (as was the case during the Persian Gulf War). At the same time, even the most hypermediated productions strive for a kind of immediacy. So, for example, music videos rely on multiple media and elaborate editing to create an immediate and apparently spontaneous style. The desire for immediacy leads to a process of appropriation and critique by which digital media reshape or “remediate” one another and their analog predecessors such as film, television, and photography. 难能可贵的是,这些看似矛盾的逻辑在当今的数字媒体中不仅共存,而且相互依存。即时性依赖于超即时性。为了创造出天衣无缝的动态影像,电影制作者将实景拍摄与计算机合成、二维和三维计算机图形相结合。电视新闻制作者为了追求即时性和完整性,在必要时(如波斯湾战争期间)将文字、照片、图形,甚至是没有视频信号的音频拼接在屏幕上。与此同时,即使是最超媒介化的制作也在努力追求一种即时性。例如,音乐录影带依靠多种媒体和精心剪辑来创造一种即时的、看似自发的风格。对即时性的追求导致了一个挪用和批判的过程,通过这个过程,数字媒体重塑或 "改造 "了彼此及其模拟前身,如电影、电视和摄影。
Once we notice this process in our media today, we can identify similar processes throughout the last several hundred years of Western visual representation. Thus, a medieval illuminated manuscript, a seventeenth-century painting by David Bailly, and the website for CNN news are analogous but disparate expressions of a fascination with media. A painting by Canaletto, a photograph by Edward Weston, a “live” television broadcast from the Olympics, and the computer [End Page 314] system for virtual reality are different but related attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the act of mediation. It is not that immediacy and hypermediacy must both be at work in every period, but that the interplay between the two would seem to define a genealogy stretching back at least to the Renaissance invention of linear perspective. Our notion of genealogy is indebted to Foucault’s in the sense that we too are looking for historical affiliations or resonances and not for origins. Foucault characterized genealogy as “an 一旦我们注意到今天媒体中的这一过程,我们就能在过去几百年的西方视觉表现中发现类似的过程。因此,中世纪的彩饰手稿、十七世纪大卫-贝利(David Bailly)的画作以及 CNN 新闻网站都是对媒体着迷的类似但不同的表达方式。卡纳莱托的画作、爱德华-韦斯顿的摄影作品、奥运会的 "现场 "电视直播以及虚拟现实的计算机 [尾页 314]系统,都是通过忽略或否认中介行为来实现即时性的不同但相关的尝试。这并不是说,即时性和超中介性必须在每个时期都同时起作用,而是说,两者之间的相互作用似乎界定了一个至少可追溯到文艺复兴时期发明的线性透视法的谱系。我们的谱系学概念借鉴了福柯的概念,因为我们也在寻找历史的联系或共鸣,而不是起源。福柯将谱系学描述为 "一种
examination of descent,” which “permits the discovery, under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept, of the myriad events through which–thanks to which, against which–they were formed.” ^(1){ }^{1} Our genealogical traits will be immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation, and we will examine these traits historically, but with particular attention to contemporary digital media. ^(?){ }^{?} 对血统的研究",它 "允许在某一特征或概念的独特方面,发现其形成所经历的无数事件--由于这些事件,它们得以形成"。 ^(1){ }^{1} 我们的家谱特征将是即时性、超媒介性和补救性,我们将从历史角度研究这些特征,但特别关注当代数字媒体。 ^(?){ }^{?}
We will begin by showing how the desire for immediacy is pursued in digital graphics by adapting earlier strategies borrowed from linear perspective painting, as well as photography, film, and television. In examining hypermediacy, we will show how digital multimedia adapt strategies from modernist painting and earlier forms. We will then be in a position to explore more fully the curious reciprocal logic of our third trait, remediation itself. We will conclude with some proposals for remediation as a general theory of media. 首先,我们将展示数字图形如何借鉴线性透视绘画以及摄影、电影和电视的早期策略来追求即时性。在研究超媒介性时,我们将展示数字多媒体如何从现代主义绘画和早期形式中借鉴策略。然后,我们将能够更充分地探索我们的第三个特征--补救本身--的奇妙互惠逻辑。最后,我们将就补救作为媒体的一般理论提出一些建议。
The Logic of Immediacy 即时性的逻辑
Virtual reality is “immersive,” which means that it is a technology of mediation whose purpose is to disappear. Yet this disappearing act is made difficult by the apparatus that virtual reality requires. In Strange Days, users of the wire had only to put on a slender skull cap, but in today’s virtual reality systems, the viewer must wear a bulky “headmounted display,” a helmet with eyepieces for each eye (Fig. 1a). In other systems known as “caves,” the walls, (and sometimes the floor and ceiling) are themselves giant computer screens. Although [End Page 315] less subtle than the wire, current virtual reality systems strive to serve the same purpose in surrounding the viewer with a computer-generated image. With the head-mounted display in particular, virtual reality is literally “in the viewer’s face.” The viewer is given a first-person point of view, as she gazes on a graphic world from within that world, from a station point that is always the visual center of that world. As the computer scientists themselves put it, the goal of virtual reality is to foster in the viewer a sense of presence: ^(-3){ }^{-3} the viewer should forget that she is in fact wearing a computer interface and accept the graphic image that it offers as her own visual world. 虚拟现实是 "身临其境 "的,这意味着它是一种中介技术,其目的是让人消失。然而,虚拟现实所需的设备却让这种消失行为变得困难重重。在《奇怪的日子》中,电线的使用者只需戴上一顶细长的骷髅帽,但在今天的虚拟现实系统中,观看者必须戴上一个笨重的 "头戴式显示器",一个每只眼睛都配有目镜的头盔(图 1a)。在其他被称为 "洞穴 "的系统中,墙壁(有时是地板和天花板)本身就是巨大的计算机屏幕。尽管[第 315 页结束]没有钢丝那么微妙,但目前的虚拟现实系统也在努力达到同样的目的,即用计算机生成的图像包围观众。尤其是头戴式显示器,虚拟现实简直就是 "面对面"。观看者被赋予了第一人称视角,她在这个世界中,从一个始终是这个世界视觉中心的站点凝视着一个图形世界。正如计算机科学家自己所说,虚拟现实的目标是培养观众的临场感: ^(-3){ }^{-3} 观众应该忘记自己实际上是戴着一个计算机界面,并接受它所提供的图形图像作为自己的视觉世界。
In order to create a sense of presence, virtual reality should come as close as possible to the visual world outside. Its graphic space should be continuous and full of objects and should fill the viewer’s field of vision without rupture. But today’s technology still contains many ruptures, including slow frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colors, bland lighting, and system crashes. Some of these ruptures are apparent even in the single static image that we see in Fig. 1b. We notice immediately the cartoon-like simplicity of the scene, which no user could confuse with the world that greets her when she takes off the helmet. For the enthusiasts of virtual reality, however, today’s technological limitations simply point to its great potential, which for them lies in a future not much further removed than Strange Days. In fact, Lenny Nero’s words could almost have been written by these enthusiasts. The popularizer Howard Rheingold writes that “[a]t the heart of VR [virtual reality] is an experience–the experience of being in a virtual world or remote location.” 4 Jaron Lanier, a developer of one of the first commercial virtual reality systems, suggests that in virtual reality, “you can visit the world of the dinosaur, then become a Tyrannosaurus. Not only can you see DNA, you can experience what it’s like to be a molecule.” ^(5){ }^{5} Meredith Bricken, an interface designer, writes that in a virtual environment, “you can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the [End Page 316] rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river.” ^(6){ }^{6} All these enthusiasts promise us perceptual immediacy, experience without mediation. They expect virtual reality to diminish and ultimately to deny the mediating presence of the computer and its interface. Bricken’s paper is in fact entitled “Virtual Worlds: No Interface to Design.” 为了营造一种存在感,虚拟现实应尽可能接近外部的视觉世界。它的图形空间应该是连续的、充满物体的,而且应该充满观众的视野,没有断裂。但是,当今的技术仍然存在许多缺陷,包括帧速率慢、图形锯齿状、色彩鲜艳、照明平淡和系统崩溃。即使在图 1b 所示的单幅静态图像中,其中一些断裂也是显而易见的。我们立刻就会发现,这个场景就像卡通片一样简单,任何用户都不会把它与摘下头盔后迎接她的世界混为一谈。然而,对于虚拟现实技术的爱好者来说,今天的技术局限性只是说明了虚拟现实技术的巨大潜力,对他们来说,虚拟现实技术的未来并不比《奇怪的日子》遥远多少。事实上,兰尼-尼禄的话几乎就是这些爱好者写的。普及者霍华德-莱因戈尔德(Howard Rheingold)写道:"VR(虚拟现实)的核心是一种体验--置身于虚拟世界或遥远地点的体验。4 Jaron Lanier 是首批商用虚拟现实系统的开发者之一,他认为,在虚拟现实中,"你可以访问恐龙的世界,然后变成一只暴龙。你不仅可以看到 DNA,还可以体验分子的感觉"。 ^(5){ }^{5} 界面设计师梅雷迪斯-布里肯(Meredith Bricken)写道,在虚拟环境中,"你可以是疯帽子,也可以是茶壶;你可以随着歌曲的节奏来回移动。你可以是雨中的一滴小水珠,也可以是河中的一滴小水珠"。 ^(6){ }^{6} 所有这些爱好者都向我们承诺了感知的直接性、无需中介的体验。 他们期望虚拟现实能够削弱并最终否定计算机及其界面的中介性存在。事实上,布里肯的论文题为 "虚拟世界:没有设计界面"。
The logic of immediacy is also at work in non-immersive digital graphics–that is, in two- 在非沉浸式数字图形中,即时性的逻辑也在起作用,即在双幅数字图形中。
and three-dimensional images projected onto traditional (computer, film, or television) screens. Digital graphics have become tremendously popular and lucrative and in fact are leading to a new cultural definition of the computer. If even just ten years ago, we thought of computers exclusively as numerical engines and word processors, we now think of them also as devices for generating images, reworking photographs, holding videoconferences, and providing animation and special effects for film and television. In these new applications, the desire for immediacy is apparent in the claim that digital images are more exciting, lively, and realistic than mere text on a computer screen, and that a videoconference will lead to more effective communication than a telephone call. The desire for immediacy is apparent in the increasing popularity of the digital compositing of film and in Hollywood’s interest in replacing stunt men and eventually even actors with computer animations. And it is apparent in the triumph of the “graphical user interface” for personal computers. The desktop metaphor, which has replaced the wholly textual command-line interface, is supposed to assimilate the computer to the physical desktop and materials (file folders, sheets of paper, in-box, trash basket, etc.) familiar to office workers. The mouse (and the pen-based interface) allow the user the immediacy of touching, dragging, and manipulating visually attractive ideograms. It is the supposed immediacy of this interface that was to make this computer interface “natural” rather than arbitrary. Although the standard desktop interface has been two-dimensional, designers are experimenting with three-dimensional versions–virtual spaces in which the user can move in, around, and through information. ^(7){ }^{7} These three-dimensional views are meant to lend even greater immediacy to the experience of computing. What designers often say they want is an “interfaceless” interface, in which there will [End Page 317] be no recognizable electronic tools, no buttons, windows, scroll bars, or even icons as such. Instead the user will move through the space interacting with the objects “naturally,” i.e., as she does in the physical world. In fact, virtual reality, three-dimensional graphics, and graphical interface design are all seeking to make digital technology “transparent.” In this account, a transparent interface is one that erases itself, so that the user would no longer be aware of confronting a medium, but instead would stand in an immediate relationship to the contents of the medium. 以及投射到传统(计算机、电影或电视)屏幕上的三维图像。数字图形已经变得非常流行和有利可图,事实上,它正在为计算机带来新的文化定义。如果说仅仅在十年前,我们还把计算机仅仅看作是数字引擎和文字处理器,那么现在,我们也把它看作是生成图像、再加工照片、召开视频会议以及为电影和电视提供动画和特效的设备。在这些新的应用中,人们对即时性的渴望是显而易见的:数字图像比电脑屏幕上的文字更令人兴奋、更生动、更逼真;视频会议比电话会议更有效。对即时性的渴望明显体现在电影数字合成的日益普及,以及好莱坞对用电脑动画取代特技人员甚至演员的兴趣上。个人电脑 "图形用户界面 "的成功也是如此。桌面隐喻取代了完全文本化的命令行界面,其目的是将计算机与办公人员熟悉的物理桌面和材料(文件夹、纸张、收件箱、垃圾篓等)同化。鼠标(和基于笔的界面)允许用户直接触摸、拖动和操作具有视觉吸引力的表意文字。正是这种界面的即时性使计算机界面变得 "自然 "而不是随意。虽然标准的桌面界面一直是二维的,但设计师们正在尝试三维版本--用户可以在其中移动、环绕和穿越信息的虚拟空间。 ^(7){ }^{7} 这些三维视图旨在为计算体验带来更直接的感受。设计人员经常说他们想要的是一种 "无界面 "界面,在这种界面中,将 [End Page 317] 没有可识别的电子工具,没有按钮、窗口、滚动条,甚至没有图标。相反,用户将在空间中移动,"自然地 "与物体互动,就像在物理世界中一样。事实上,虚拟现实、三维图形和图形界面设计都在努力使数字技术 "透明"。从这个角度看,透明的界面是一种抹去自身的界面,这样用户就不会再意识到自己面对的是一种媒介,而是与媒介的内容建立一种直接的关系。
The transparent interface is one more manifestation of the desire to deny the mediated character of digital technology altogether. To believe that with digital technology we have passed beyond mediation is also to assert the uniqueness of our present technological moment. For many virtual reality enthusiasts, the computer so far surpasses other technologies in its power to make the world present, that the history of earlier media has little relevance. Even those, like Rheingold, who do acknowledge technological precursors (particularly film and television), still emphasize the novelty of virtual reality. Their view is that virtual reality (or digital technology in general) completes and overcomes the history of media. In the film Strange Days, the wire is the last and most powerful technology created before the end of the millennium. However, the desire for immediacy itself has a long history that is not easily overcome. At least since the Renaissance, it has been a defining feature of Western visual (and for that matter verbal) representation, and to understand immediacy in computer graphics, it is helpful to keep in mind the ways in which painting, photography, film, and television have sought to satisfy this same desire. These earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of mathematization (linear perspective), erasure, and automaticity, all of which are again deployed in digital technology. 透明界面再次表明,人们希望彻底否定数字技术的中介特性。认为数字技术已经超越了中介性,也是在断言我们当前技术时刻的独特性。对于许多虚拟现实爱好者来说,计算机在让世界呈现的能力上远远超越了其他技术,因此早期媒体的历史已经没有什么意义了。即使像莱茵戈尔德这样承认技术先驱(尤其是电影和电视)的人,也仍然强调虚拟现实的新颖性。他们认为,虚拟现实(或一般数字技术)完善并超越了媒体的历史。在电影《奇怪的日子》(Strange Days)中,电线是千禧年结束前最后也是最强大的技术。然而,人们对即时性的渴望本身就有着不易克服的悠久历史。至少自文艺复兴以来,它一直是西方视觉(以及语言)表现形式的一个决定性特征,要理解计算机图形学中的即时性,牢记绘画、摄影、电影和电视寻求满足这种相同欲望的方式是很有帮助的。这些早期的媒体通过透明度的美学价值与数学化(线性透视)、擦除和自动性技术的相互作用来寻求即时性,所有这些技术在数字技术中再次得到应用。
As Albrecht Dürer noted, and as Panofsky reminds us, perspective means a “seeing through” 8 and like the interface designers of today, students of linear perspective promised immediacy through transparency. They trusted in linear perspective to achieve transparency because it used the “right” technique to measure the world–because it mathematized space. Martin Jay and others have argued for a close connection between 正如阿尔布雷希特-丢勒(Albrecht Dürer)所指出的,也正如帕诺夫斯基提醒我们的,透视意味着 "看透 "8,就像今天的界面设计师一样,线性透视的学生们承诺通过透明度来实现直接性。他们相信线性透视能实现透明性,因为它使用了 "正确 "的技术来测量世界--因为它将空间数学化了。马丁-杰伊(Martin Jay)等人认为,线性透视与空间之间存在密切联系。
Albertian perspective and Descartes’s spatial mathematics. For Jay, “Cartesian perspectivalism” constituted a peculiar way of seeing that dominated Western culture from the seventeenth [End Page 318] century to the early twentieth by allowing the Cartesian subject to dominate and control space from a single vantage point. ^(9){ }^{9} Bruno Latour offers a different take on the significance of perspectivalism’s mathematicization of space. Building on William Ivins’ important study On the Rationalization of Sight, Latour argues that by mathematizing space, linear perspective enabled visual representations to be transported from one context to another without being altered or distorted. By manipulating these “immutable mobiles,” practitioners of linear perspective could in effect be manipulating the world itself; the mathematization of space makes the context or medium transparent, and provides immediate access to the world. 10 阿尔贝特视角和笛卡尔的空间数学。在杰伊看来,"笛卡尔的透视主义 "构成了一种奇特的观看方式,从 17 [完 第 318 页] 世纪到 20 世纪初一直主导着西方文化,它允许笛卡尔主体从一个单一的视点来支配和控制空间。 ^(9){ }^{9} 布鲁诺-拉图尔(Bruno Latour)对透视主义空间数学化的意义提出了不同的看法。在威廉-艾文斯(William Ivins)的重要研究《视觉的合理化》(On the Rationalization of Sight)的基础上,拉图尔认为,通过将空间数学化,线性透视使视觉表征能够从一个环境转移到另一个环境,而不会被改变或扭曲。通过操纵这些 "永恒不变的移动装置",线性透视的实践者实际上就是在操纵世界本身;空间的数学化使语境或媒介变得透明,并提供了与世界的直接接触。10
By using projective geometry to represent the space beyond the canvas, linear perspective could thus be regarded as the technique that effaced itself as technique. As Alberti expressed it in his treatise “On Painting”: “[O]n the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.” ^(11){ }^{11} If executed properly, the surface of the painting dissolved and presented to the viewer the scene beyond. To achieve transparency in a traditional painting, linear perspective construction was regarded as necessary but not sufficient, for the artist must also work the surface to erase his brush strokes. Norman Bryson has argued that “through much of the Western tradition oil paint is treated primarily as an erasive medium. What it must first erase is the surface of the picture-plane.” (12)/()\frac{12}{} Erasing the surface in this way concealed and denied the process of painting in favor of the perfected product. Although effacement is by [End Page 319] no means universal in Western painting, even before the nineteenth century, it was one important technique for making the space of the picture continuous with the viewer’s space. This continuity between depicted and “real” space was particularly apparent in trompe-l’oeil art: for example, in ceilings where the painting continues the architecture of the building itself. ^(13){ }^{13} The irony is that it was hard work to make the surface disappear in this fashion, and in fact the artist’s success at effacing his process and thereby himself became for trained viewers a mark of his skill and therefore his presence. 通过使用投影几何来表现画布之外的空间,线性透视可以被视为一种摒弃了技术本身的技术。正如阿尔贝蒂在他的论文《论绘画》中所表述的那样:"在我要作画的表面上,我画一个任意大小的矩形,我把它看作一扇敞开的窗户,通过它可以看到要画的主题"。 ^(11){ }^{11} 如果操作得当,画作的表面就会溶解,向观众呈现出画外的景象。要在传统绘画中实现透明效果,线性透视结构被认为是必要的,但还不够,因为画家还必须在画作表面涂抹笔触。诺曼-布赖森(Norman Bryson)认为,"在西方传统中,油画颜料主要被视为一种擦除媒介。它首先必须擦除的是画面的表面"。 (12)/()\frac{12}{} 以这种方式擦除表面会掩盖和否认绘画的过程,而有利于完美的产品。尽管擦除在西方绘画中 [尾页 319]绝非普遍现象,但即使在 19 世纪之前,它也是使画面空间与观众空间连续的一种重要技巧。描绘的空间与 "真实 "空间之间的这种连续性在透视艺术中尤为明显:例如,在天花板上,绘画延续了建筑本身的结构。 ^(13){ }^{13} 具有讽刺意味的是,以这种方式使表面消失是一项艰苦的工作,事实上,艺术家成功地抹去了他的创作过程,从而也抹去了他自己,这对训练有素的观众来说,是他的技艺的标志,因此也是他存在的标志。
A third strategy for achieving transparency has been to automate the technique of linear perspective. This quality of automacity has been ascribed to the technology of the camera obscura and subsequently to photography, film, and television. In the most familiar story of the development of Western representation, the invention of photography represented the perfection of linear perspective. ^(14){ }^{14} A photograph could be regarded as a perfect Albertian window. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin expressed this view with untroubled certainty: “The decisive moment [in Western painting] undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical systems of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Nièpce. The artist was now in a position to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them.” ^(15){ }^{15} Photography was a mechanical and chemical process, whose automatic character seemed to many to complete the earlier trend to conceal both the process and the artist. ^(16){ }^{16} Stanley Cavell later expanded on and revised Bazin by examining how it was that automatic reproduction called into question the artist as a creative agent: “Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, [End Page 320] one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.” ^(17){ }^{17} For both Bazin and Cavell, photography offered its own route to immediacy: the photograph was transparent and followed the rules of linear perspective; it achieved transparency through automatic reproduction; and it apparently removed the artist as mediating agent between the viewer and the reality of the image. ^(18){ }^{18} 实现透明的第三种策略是将线性透视技术自动化。这种自动化的特质被归因于暗箱照相机技术,以及随后的摄影、电影和电视。在人们最熟悉的西方表象发展故事中,摄影术的发明代表了线性透视的完美。 ^(14){ }^{14} 照片可以被视为完美的阿尔伯特式窗户。安德烈-巴赞(André Bazin)在《摄影图像的本体论》一书中毫不犹豫地表达了这一观点:"[西方绘画]的决定性时刻无疑是在发现第一个科学的、在某种意义上已经是机械的再现系统,即透视系统之后:达-芬奇的暗箱照相机预示了尼埃普斯的照相机。艺术家现在可以创造出三维空间的幻觉,在这个空间里,事物看起来就像我们的眼睛在现实中看到的那样存在"。 ^(15){ }^{15} 摄影是一种机械和化学过程,在许多人看来,它的自动特性似乎完成了早期隐藏过程和艺术家的趋势。 ^(16){ }^{16} 斯坦利-卡维尔(Stanley Cavell)后来对巴金进行了扩展和修正,研究了自动复制是如何对作为创作主体的艺术家提出质疑的:"摄影以一种绘画无法想象的方式克服了主观性,一种无法满足绘画的方式, [End Page 320] 一种与其说是击败绘画行为不如说是完全逃避绘画行为的方式:通过自动化,通过将人从复制任务中剥离出来"。 ^(17){ }^{17} 对巴金和卡维尔来说,摄影提供了自己的直接性途径:照片是透明的,遵循线性透视规则;它通过自动复制实现透明;它显然去除了艺术家作为观众与图像现实之间的中介。 ^(18){ }^{18}
Although Bazin concluded that “[p]hotography and the cinema 尽管巴赞认为 "摄影和电影
… are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism,” he was certainly wrong in predicting that these two visual technologies would satisfy our culture’s desire for immediacy. ^(19){ }^{19} Computer graphics has become the latest expression of that desire, and its strategy for achieving immediacy owes something to several earlier traditions. William J. Mitchell claims: “The tale of computer image synthesis in the 1970s and 1980s . . . strikingly recapitulates the history of European painting from the miracle of Masaccio’s Trinity to the birth of photography. . . . Synthesized images can now be virtually point-for-point matches to photographs of actual scenes, and there is experimental evidence that, for certain sorts of scenes, observers cannot distinguish these images from photographs.” ^(20){ }^{20} But even if we cannot always tell synthesized images from photographs, we can distinguish the somewhat different strategies that painting and photography have adopted in striving for immediacy, and we can explore how digital graphics borrows and adapts each of these strategies. ......这些发现一劳永逸地从本质上满足了我们对现实主义的痴迷",他预言这两种视觉技术将满足我们的文化对即时性的渴望,这无疑是错误的。 ^(19){ }^{19} 计算机图形学已成为这种渴望的最新表现形式,而它实现即时性的策略要归功于早期的一些传统。William J. Mitchell 声称:"20 世纪 70 年代和 80 年代计算机图像合成的故事............引人注目地再现了 20 世纪 70 年代和 80 年代计算机图像合成的历史。......惊人地重现了从马萨乔的《三位一体》奇迹到摄影术诞生的欧洲绘画史。. . .现在,合成图像几乎可以与实际场景的照片点对点匹配,而且有实验证据表明,对于某些场景,观察者无法将这些图像与照片区分开来"。 ^(20){ }^{20} 但是,即使我们不能总是将合成图像与照片区分开来,我们也可以区分出绘画和摄影在追求即时性时所采用的略有不同的策略,我们还可以探索数字图形是如何借鉴和调整这些策略的。
Computer graphics extends the tradition of the Albertian window: it creates images 计算机制图扩展了阿尔贝特窗的传统:它创造图像
in linear perspective, but it applies to linear perspective the rigor of contemporary linear algebra and projective [End Page 321] geometry. ^(21){ }^{21} Computer-generated projective images are mathematically perfect, at least within the limits of computational error and the resolution of the pixelated screen. Renaissance perspective was never perfect in this sense, not only because of hand methods, but also because the artists often manipulated the perspective for dramatic or allegorical effect. ^(22){ }^{22} (Of course digital graphic perspective can be distorted too, but even these distortions are generated mathematically.) Computer graphics also expresses color, illumination, and shading in mathematical terms, ^(23){ }^{23} although so far less successfully than perspective (see fig. 2). So, as with perspective painting, when computer graphics lays claim to the real or the natural, it seems to be appealing to the Cartesian or Galilean proposition that mathematics is appropriate for describing nature. 但它将当代线性代数和投影 [页尾 321] 几何学的严谨性应用于线性透视。 ^(21){ }^{21} 计算机生成的投影图像在数学上是完美的,至少在计算误差和像素屏幕分辨率的范围内是如此。文艺复兴时期的透视图在这个意义上从来都不是完美的,这不仅是因为手工方法,还因为艺术家们经常为了戏剧或寓言效果而操纵透视图。 ^(22){ }^{22} (当然,数字图形的透视也会失真,但即使是这些失真也是通过数学方法产生的)。 ^(23){ }^{23} 计算机制图也可以用数学术语来表达色彩、光照和阴影,但远不如透视画成功(见图 2)。因此,与透视画法一样,当计算机图形学宣称真实或自然时,它似乎是在诉诸笛卡尔或伽利略命题,即数学适合于描述自然。
Furthermore, to Cartesian geometry, computer graphics adds the algorithmic mathematics of John von Neumann and Alan Turing. Computer programs may ultimately be human products, in the sense that they embody algorithms devised by human programmers, but once the program is written and loaded, the machine can operate without human intervention. Programming, then, employs erasure or effacement, much as Norman Bryson defines erasure for Western painting, or as Cavell and Bryson describe the erasure of human agency from the production of photographs. ^(24){ }^{24} Programmers seek to remove the traces of their presence in order to give the program the greatest possible autonomy. In digital graphics, human programmers may be involved at several levels: the computer operating systems are written by one group of specialists; graphics languages (such as Open GL) are written by others; and applications are programs that exploit the resources offered by languages and operating systems. All these classes of programmers are simultaneously erased at the moment in which the computer actually generates an image by executing the instructions they have collectively written. 此外,除了笛卡尔几何之外,计算机制图还加入了约翰-冯-诺依曼和阿兰-图灵的算法数学。计算机程序最终可能是人类的产物,因为它们体现了人类程序员设计的算法,但一旦程序编写完成并加载,机器就可以在没有人类干预的情况下运行。因此,编程采用了抹杀或消除的方式,就像诺曼-布赖森(Norman Bryson)为西方绘画下的抹杀定义一样,或者像卡维尔和布赖森描述的那样,从照片的制作中抹杀了人的作用。 ^(24){ }^{24} 程序员试图消除他们存在的痕迹,以便赋予程序最大的自主权。在数字图形领域,人类程序员可能涉及多个层面:计算机操作系统由一组专家编写;图形语言(如 Open GL)由其他专家编写;应用程序是利用语言和操作系统提供的资源的程序。当计算机通过执行这些程序员共同编写的指令实际生成图像时,所有这些程序员都会同时被清除。
The fact that digital graphics is automatic suggests its affinity to photography. In both cases the human agent is erased, but the techniques [End Page 322] of erasure are rather different. With photography, the automatic process is mechanical and chemical: the shutter opens, and light streams in through the lens and is focused on a chemical film. The process of recording itself is holistic; it has no defined parts or steps. It is for this reason that many in the nineteenth century could regard light or nature itself as the painter. ^(25){ }^{25} In digital graphics, however, it is not easy to regard the program as a natural product, except in the sense that nature steers the electrons inside the computer chips. Digital graphic images are the work of humans, whose agency, however, is often deferred so far from the act of drawing that it seems to disappear. This deferral is especially 数字图像是自动的,这表明它与摄影有相似之处。在这两种情况下,人的作用都被抹去了,但抹去的技术 [尾页 322]却大相径庭。摄影的自动过程是机械和化学的:快门打开,光线通过镜头射入,聚焦在化学胶片上。记录过程本身是整体性的,没有确定的部分或步骤。正因如此,十九世纪的许多人将光或自然本身视为画家。 ^(25){ }^{25} 然而,在数字图形领域,要将程序视为自然产物并不容易,除非从大自然引导计算机芯片内部电子的意义上来说。数字图形图像是人类的杰作,但人类的能动性往往被推迟到远离绘画行为的程度,以至于似乎消失了。这种延迟尤其表现在
important in real-time animation [End Page 323] and virtual reality, where the computer is drawing ten or twenty frames per second, all without the programmer’s intervention. The automatic or deferred quality of computer programming promotes in the viewer a sense of immediate contact with the image. 在实时动画 [完 323 页] 和虚拟现实中,计算机每秒绘制十帧或二十帧画面,而这一切都不需要程序员的干预。计算机编程的自动或延迟特性使观众有一种与图像直接接触的感觉。
Experts on computer graphics often say that they are striving to achieve “photorealism”-in other words to make their synthetic images indistinguishable from photographs. This comparison may take the explicit form of putting a photograph side by side with a synthetic digital image. In such cases the computer is imitating not an external reality, but rather another medium. (We will argue later that this is all any new technology could do-define itself in relationship to earlier technologies of representation.) To achieve photorealism, the synthetic digital image adopts the criteria of the photograph. It offers a single station point, a monocular point of view, and a photographic sense of appropriate composition. Computer graphics experts do not in general imitate “poor” or “distorted” photographs (exotic camera angles or lighting effects), because of course these distorted photographs are themselves not regarded as realistic or immediate. Instead, such photographs make the viewer conscious of the photographic process. Furthermore, photographs and synthetic images achieve the same effect of erasure through different means. The photograph erases the human subject through the mechanics and chemistry of lens, shutter, and film. Digital graphics erases the subject algorithmically through the mathematics of perspective and shading embodied in a program. (Digital photography, then, is a hybrid that combines and reconfigures these two kinds of automaticity.) 计算机制图专家经常说,他们正在努力实现 "逼真"--换句话说,就是要使他们合成的图像与照片无异。这种比较可能采取将照片与合成数字图像并排放置的明确形式。在这种情况下,计算机模仿的不是外部现实,而是另一种媒介。(我们稍后将论证,这就是任何新技术所能做到的--将自身与早期的表现技术相联系)。为了达到逼真的效果,合成数字图像采用了照片的标准。它提供了一个单一的驻足点、一个单目视角和一种摄影的适当构图感。计算机制图专家一般不会模仿 "拙劣 "或 "扭曲 "的照片(奇特的摄影角度或灯光效果),因为这些扭曲的照片本身当然不会被视为逼真或直接。相反,这些照片会让观众意识到摄影过程。此外,照片和合成图像通过不同的手段达到同样的抹杀效果。照片通过镜头、快门和胶片的机械和化学作用抹去人的主体。数码图形则通过程序中体现的透视和阴影数学算法来消除主体。(因此,数码摄影是一种混合体,它将这两种自动性结合在一起并重新配置)。
Obviously the test of photorealism can apply only to single, static images. The equivalent for computer animation would be “filmic” realism: a sequence of computer images that could not be distinguished from a traditional film, a feat that is technically even more challenging than photorealism. On the other hand, the very fact that the images are in motion (in computer animation and virtual reality) suggests new strategies for achieving immediacy. For if immediacy is promoted by removing the programmer/creator from the image, immediacy can also be promoted by involving the viewer more intimately in the image. The production of computer animation seems to be automatic, but the viewing can also be interactive, although the interaction may be as simple as the capacity to change one’s point of view. In painting and photography, the user’s point of view was fixed. In film and television, the point of view was set in motion, but it was the director or editor who controlled the movement. Now computer animation can function like film in this respect, for it too can present a sequence of predetermined camera [End Page 324] shots. However, the sequence can also be placed under the viewer’s control, as it is in animated computer video games or virtual reality. 显然,逼真度的测试只能适用于单一的静态图像。与电脑动画相对应的是 "电影 "般的逼真:一连串电脑图像与传统电影毫无区别,这在技术上比逼真更具挑战性。另一方面,(电脑动画和虚拟现实中的)图像是运动的这一事实本身就为实现即时性提出了新的策略。如果说通过将程序员/创作者从图像中移除可以促进即时性,那么通过让观众更亲密地参与到图像中也可以促进即时性。电脑动画的制作似乎是自动的,但观看也可以是互动的,尽管这种互动可能只是简单地改变视角。在绘画和摄影中,用户的视点是固定的。在电影和电视中,视点是运动的,但由导演或编辑来控制运动。现在,计算机动画在这方面可以像电影一样发挥作用,因为它也可以呈现一连串预先确定的镜头 [第 324 页结束] 。然而,这个序列也可以由观众控制,就像在电脑视频游戏或虚拟现实中一样。
In virtual reality, the helmet that contains the eyepieces also typically contains a tracking device. As the viewer turns her head, the tracker registers the change in her orientation, and the computer redraws the image in each eyepiece to match her new perspective. Because she can move her head, the viewer can see that she is immersed-that she has jumped through Alberti’s window and is now inside the depicted space. For the virtual enthusiasts, Alberti’s window is the plane defined by the videoscreen on the outmoded desktop computer, and it is this plane that virtual reality now shatters. Rheingold claims that “[i]n the 1990s, VR technology is taking people beyond and through the display screen into virtual worlds.” ^(26){ }^{26} As Rheingold implies, in graphics delivered on a conventional video screen (for example in computer games), the interface is more obtrusive: the viewer must use the mouse or the keyboard to control what she sees. But even here, the viewer can manipulate her point of view and may still have a feeling of immersion, especially if she can turn in a full circle. It is remarkable how easily a player can project herself into a computer game like Myst or Doom, despite the low resolution and limited field of view afforded by the screen (see fig. 3). It is also a creed among 在虚拟现实中,包含目镜的头盔通常还包含一个跟踪装置。当观众转动头部时,跟踪器会记录下她的方向变化,然后计算机会重新绘制每个目镜中的图像,以匹配她的新视角。由于她可以移动头部,观众可以看到她已经沉浸其中--她已经跳过阿尔贝蒂的窗户,现在就在所描绘的空间内。对于虚拟爱好者来说,阿尔贝蒂之窗是由过时的台式电脑视频屏幕所定义的平面,而虚拟现实现在打破的正是这个平面。莱茵戈尔德声称,"在 20 世纪 90 年代,虚拟现实技术正带领人们超越显示屏,并通过显示屏进入虚拟世界"。 ^(26){ }^{26} 正如莱因戈尔德所暗示的,在传统视频屏幕上显示的图形(例如电脑游戏),界面更加突兀:观众必须使用鼠标或键盘来控制她所看到的内容。但即使在这种情况下,观众也可以操纵自己的视角,并仍有一种身临其境的感觉,尤其是如果她可以转一圈的话。尽管屏幕的分辨率很低,视野也很有限,但玩家还是可以轻而易举地将自己投射到 Myst 或 Doom 这样的电脑游戏中(见图 3)。这也是
interface designers that interactivity increases the realism and effectiveness of a graphical user interface. The icons become more present to the user if she can reposition them or activate them with a click of the mouse. 界面设计人员认为,交互性可以提高图形用户界面的真实性和有效性。如果用户可以通过点击鼠标来调整图标的位置或激活图标,那么这些图标对用户来说就更有存在感。
Contemporary literary and cultural theorists would take pains to deny any claim that linear perspective painting, photography, film, television, or computer graphics could achieve unmediated presentation. ^(27){ }^{27} [End Page 325] For them the desire for immediacy through visual representation has become a somewhat embarrassing (because under-theorized) tradition. ^(28){ }^{28} Outside of the circles of theory, however, the discourse of the immediate has been and remains culturally compelling. And even within the academic community, among art historians and perceptual psychologists, linear perspective is still regarded as having some claim to being natural. ^(29){ }^{29} Meanwhile, computer graphics experts, computer users, and the vast audience of popular film and television continue to assume that unmediated presentation is the ultimate goal of [End Page 326] visual representation and to believe that technological progress toward that goal is being made. When interactivity is combined with automaticity and the five-hundred-year-old perspective method, the result is one account of mediation that millions of viewers today find compelling. In making this claim, we do not mean fully to endorse either the contemporary theoretical view or the more “naïve” one. We are suggesting instead that the naïve view is the expression of a long historical desire and that it is one necessary half of the double logic of remediation. 当代文学和文化理论家不遗余力地否认任何关于线性透视绘画、摄影、电影、电视或计算机图形可以实现无中介呈现的说法。 ^(27){ }^{27} [第 325 页完] 对他们来说,通过视觉呈现来实现直接性的愿望已经成为一个有点令人尴尬(因为理论化不足)的传统。 ^(28){ }^{28} 然而,在理论界之外,"即时性 "的论述在文化上一直并将继续引人注目。即使在学术界,在艺术史学家和知觉心理学家中间,线性透视仍然被认为具有某种自然性。 ^(29){ }^{29} 与此同时,计算机图形专家、计算机用户以及广大的流行电影和电视观众仍然认为,无中介呈现是视觉呈现的最终目标,并相信技术正在向这一目标迈进。当交互性与自动性和已有五百年历史的透视法结合在一起时,就会产生一种当今数以百万计的观众认为令人信服的中介方式。在提出这一主张时,我们并不完全赞同当代理论观点或更为 "天真 "的观点。相反,我们认为,天真的观点表达了一种长期的历史愿望,是补救的双重逻辑中必要的一半。
The Logic of Hypermediacy 超媒介的逻辑
Like the desire for immediacy, the fascination with hypermediacy also has a history, both as a representational practice and as a cultural logic. In digital media, the practice of hypermediacy is most evident in the heterogeneous, windowed visual style of World Wide Web pages, the desktop interface, multimedia programs, and video games. It is a visual style, in the words of William J. Mitchell, “that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and that emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object.” ^(30){ }^{30} Such interactive applications are often grouped under the rubric of “hypermedia.” Hypermedia’s “combination of random access with multiple media” has been described with typical hyperbole by Bob Cotten and Richard Oliver as “an entirely new kind of media experience born from the marriage of TV and computer technologies. Its raw ingredients are images, sound, text, animation and video, which can be brought together in any combination. It is a medium that offers ‘random access’; it has no physical beginning, middle, or end.” ^(31){ }^{31} This definition suggests that the logic of hypermediacy had to wait for the invention of the cathode ray tube and the transistor. However, we believe the same logic is at work in the frenetic graphic design of cyberculture magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, in the patchwork layout of such mainstream print publications as USA Today, and even in the earlier “multimediated” spaces of Dutch painting, medieval cathedrals, and illuminated manuscripts. 与对即时性的渴望一样,对超媒介的迷恋也有其历史渊源,既是一种表现手法,也是一种文化逻辑。在数字媒体中,超中介性在万维网网页、桌面界面、多媒体程序和视频游戏的异构、窗口化视觉风格中体现得淋漓尽致。用威廉-J-米切尔(William J. Mitchell)的话来说,这是一种 "崇尚碎片化、不确定性和异质性的视觉风格,强调的是过程或表演,而不是艺术成品"。 ^(30){ }^{30} 此类交互式应用通常被归类为 "超媒体"。超媒体的 "随机访问与多种媒体的结合 "被鲍勃-科滕和理查德-奥利弗以典型的夸张手法描述为 "电视与计算机技术结合所产生的一种全新的媒体体验。它的原材料是图像、声音、文字、动画和视频,可以任意组合。它是一种提供'随机访问'的媒体;它没有物理上的开始、中间或结束"。 ^(31){ }^{31} 这一定义表明,超媒体的逻辑必须等到阴极射线管和晶体管的发明。然而,我们相信,在《连线》和《蒙多 2000》等网络文化杂志的狂热平面设计中,在《今日美国》等主流印刷出版物的拼凑版式中,甚至在荷兰绘画、中世纪大教堂和彩饰手稿等早期的 "多媒介 "空间中,都有同样的逻辑在起作用。
When in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Englebart, Alan Kay, and their colleagues at Xerox PARC and elsewhere invented the graphical user interface and called their resizable, scrollable rectangles “windows,” they were implicitly relying on Alberti’s metaphor. Their windows opened onto a world of information made visible and almost [End Page 327] tangible to the user; their goal was to make the surface of these windows, the interface itself, transparent. However, as the windowed style has evolved in the 1980s and 1990s, transparency and immediacy have had to compete with other values. In current interfaces, windows multiply on the screen: it is not unusual for sophisticated users to have ten or twenty overlapping or nested windows open at one time. The multiple representations inside the windows (text, graphics, video) create a heterogeneous space, as they compete for the viewer’s attention. Icons, menus, and toolbars add further layers of visual and verbal meaning. This graphical user interface 20 世纪 60 年代和 70 年代,道格拉斯-恩格勒巴特、艾伦-凯和他们在施乐 PARC 及其他地方的同事发明了图形用户界面,并把他们的可调整大小、可滚动的矩形称为 "窗口",他们隐含地使用了阿尔贝蒂的比喻。他们的窗口向用户打开了一个可见的、几乎 [第 327 页] 有形的信息世界;他们的目标是使这些窗口的表面,即界面本身透明。然而,随着窗口风格在 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代的发展,透明度和直接性不得不与其他价值相竞争。在当前的界面中,窗口在屏幕上成倍增加:对于老练的用户来说,同时打开十个或二十个重叠或嵌套的窗口并不罕见。窗口内的多种表现形式(文本、图形、视频)创造了一个异质空间,因为它们在争夺浏览者的注意力。图标、菜单和工具栏则进一步增加了视觉和语言意义的层次。这种图形用户界面
was to replace the command-line interface, which was itself wholly textual. By introducing graphical objects into the representation scheme, designers believed that they were making the interfaces more “natural,” but they were in fact creating a more complex system in which iconic and arbitrary forms of representation interact. We have only to place fig. 4 beside the virtual environment in Fig. 1b to see that a different visual logic is operating. 它取代了命令行界面,而命令行界面本身完全是文本的。通过将图形对象引入表示方案,设计者认为他们正在使界面更加 "自然",但事实上,他们正在创建一个更加复杂的系统,在这个系统中,图标和任意的表示形式相互作用。我们只需将图 4 放在图 1b 中的虚拟环境旁边,就会发现一种不同的视觉逻辑正在运行。
Unlike a perspective painting or three-dimensional computer graphic, the windowed interface does not attempt to unify the space around any one point of view. Instead, each text window defines its [End Page 328] own verbal, each graphic window its own visual, point of view. Windows may change scale quickly and radically, expanding to fill the screen or shrinking to the size of an icon. And unlike the painting or computer graphic, the desktop interface does not erase itself. The multiplicity of windows and the heterogeneity of their contents mean that the user is repeatedly brought back into contact with the interface. The user learns to read the interface as she would any hypertext. She oscillates between manipulating the windows and examining their contents, just as she oscillates between looking at a hypertext as a texture of links and looking through the links to the textual units as language. 与透视画或三维计算机图形不同,窗口式界面并不试图围绕任何一个视点来统一空间。相反,每个文本窗口都有自己的言语,每个图形窗口都有自己的视觉和视点。窗口可以快速、彻底地改变大小,可以扩大到填满整个屏幕,也可以缩小到图标的大小。与绘画或计算机图形不同,桌面界面不会自动删除。窗口的多重性及其内容的异质性意味着用户会反复与界面接触。用户要学会像阅读超文本一样阅读界面。她在操作窗口和检查窗口内容之间摇摆不定,就像她在把超文本看成链接的纹理和通过链接把文本单元看成语言之间摇摆不定一样。
With each return to the interface, the user confronts the fact that the windowed computer is both automatic and interactive at the same time. We have argued that the automatic character of photography contributes to the photograph’s feeling of immediacy, but the situation is more complicated with the windowed computer. Its interface is automatic in the sense that it consists of layers of programming that are executed with each click of the mouse. The interface is interactive in the sense that these layers of programming always return control to the user, who then initiates another automated action. Although the programmer is not visible in the interface, the user as a subject is constantly present, clicking on buttons, choosing menu items, and dragging icons and windows. Both the apparent autonomy of the machine and the user’s intervention can be interpreted as contributing to the transparency of the technology. On the other hand, the buttons and menus that provide user interaction can also be seen as getting in the way of the transparency of the digital image. If some software designers now characterize the twodimensional, desktop interface as unnatural, they really mean that it is too obviously mediated. They prefer to imagine an “interfaceless” computer offering some brand of virtual reality. However, the possibilities of the windowed style have probably not been fully explored and elaborated. 每次返回界面,用户都要面对这样一个事实,即窗口计算机既是自动的,同时又是交互的。我们已经论证过,摄影的自动特性有助于增强照片的即时感,但窗口计算机的情况则更为复杂。它的界面是自动的,因为它由多层程序组成,每次点击鼠标都会执行这些程序。界面是交互式的,因为这些程序层总是将控制权交还给用户,然后由用户启动另一个自动操作。虽然程序员在界面中不可见,但用户作为主体一直存在,点击按钮、选择菜单项、拖动图标和窗口。机器表面上的自主性和用户的干预都可以被解释为提高了技术的透明度。另一方面,提供用户互动的按钮和菜单也可以被视为妨碍了数字图像的透明性。如果说现在有些软件设计师把二维的桌面界面说成是不自然的,那么他们的真正意思是指它的中介性太明显了。他们更愿意想象一种 "无界面 "的计算机,提供某种虚拟现实。然而,窗口风格的可能性可能还没有得到充分的探索和阐述。
One reason that this style has not been exhausted is that it functions as a cultural counterbalance to the desire for immediacy. If the logic of immediacy leads one to erase or automatize the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where the logic of immediacy suggests a unified visual space, hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window onto the world, but rather as “windowed” itself-with windows that open onto other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy calls for representations of the real that in fact multiply [End Page 329] the signs of mediation and in this way try to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. 这种风格尚未被穷尽的一个原因是,它在文化上起到了平衡即时性欲望的作用。如果说即时性的逻辑导致人们抹杀或自动化表征行为,那么超即时性的逻辑则承认多重表征行为,并使之可见。即时性逻辑暗示了一个统一的视觉空间,而超媒介性则提供了一个异质的空间,在这个空间中,表象不是被视为通向世界的窗口,而是本身就被 "窗口化 "了--窗口向其他表象或其他媒介敞开。超中介性的逻辑要求对现实进行表述,而这种表述实际上是对中介符号的多重 [尾页 329]化,并试图以这种方式再现人类丰富的感官体验。
As an historical counterpart to the desire for immediacy, the fascination with multiplicity can be found in such diverse forms and media as medieval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance decorated altarpieces, Dutch painting, Baroque cabinets, and modernist collage and photomontage. The logic of immediacy has perhaps been dominant in Western representation, at least from the Renaissance until the coming of modernism, while hypermediacy has often had to content itself with a secondary, but nonetheless important status. Sometimes hypermediacy has adopted a playful or subversive attitude, 作为对即时性的渴望的历史对应物,对多重性的迷恋可以在各种形式和媒介中找到,如中世纪的照明手稿、文艺复兴时期的装饰祭坛画、荷兰绘画、巴洛克橱柜以及现代主义拼贴画和摄影蒙太奇。至少从文艺复兴时期到现代主义兴起之前,即时性逻辑或许一直在西方的表现形式中占据主导地位,而超媒介性往往不得不满足于次要但却重要的地位。有时,超中介性会采取一种游戏或颠覆性的态度、
both acknowledging and undercutting the desire for immediacy. At other times, the two logics have coexisted, even when the prevailing readings of art history have made it hard to appreciate their coexistence. At the end of the twentieth century, we are in a position to understand hypermediacy as immediacy’s opposite number, an alter ego that has never been suppressed fully or for long periods of time. 既承认又削弱了对直接性的渴望。在其他时候,这两种逻辑是共存的,即使当时流行的艺术史解读很难理解它们的共存。在二十世纪末,我们可以将超媒介理解为即时性的对立面,一个从未被完全或长期压制的另一个自我。
We cannot hope to explore in detail the complex genealogy of hypermediacy through centuries of Western visual representation: we can only offer a few examples that we find particularly resonant with digital hypermediacy today. Some resonances seem obvious: we note that the European cathedral with its stained glass, relief statuary, and inscriptions constituted a collection of hypermediated spaces, both physical and representational. Within the grand space of the cathedral, altarpieces provided a particularly sophisticated form of hypermediacy, because they not only juxtaposed media but also embodied contradictory spatial logics. As perspectival representation came into painting, it is interesting to see, for example, a Flemish altarpiece by Arnt van Kalker, now at the Musée de Cluny in Paris, with a carved representation of the Passion at the center and painted perspectival scenes on both the inside and outside of the cabinet doors. In this altarpiece the closed doors depict on their surface a represented space with depth, but when they are opened they reveal a carved three-dimensional Passion scene that stops at the back of the cabinet. Through this interplay of the real third dimension with its perspectival representation, the Kalker alterpiece connects the older sculptural tradition with the newer tradition of perspectival representation. 我们无法详细探讨西方几个世纪视觉表征中超媒介性的复杂谱系:我们只能提供几个我们认为与当今数字超媒介性特别有共鸣的例子。有些共鸣似乎显而易见:我们注意到,欧洲大教堂及其彩色玻璃、浮雕像和碑文构成了超媒介空间的集合,既有物理空间,也有表征空间。在大教堂的宏大空间中,祭坛画提供了一种特别复杂的超媒介形式,因为它们不仅并置了各种媒介,还体现了相互矛盾的空间逻辑。随着透视画法进入绘画领域,我们可以看到一件有趣的作品,例如现藏于巴黎克吕尼博物馆的阿恩特-凡-卡尔克(Arnt van Kalker)的佛兰德斯祭坛画,其中心雕刻着耶稣受难的场景,柜门内外均绘有透视画。在这幅祭坛画中,紧闭的柜门表面描绘的是一个有深度的空间,但当柜门打开时,就会看到一个雕刻的三维耶稣受难场景,停在柜子的背面。通过这种真实三维空间与其透视表现的相互作用,卡尔克的改建作品将古老的雕塑传统与较新的透视表现传统联系了起来。
Represented and real three-dimensional spaces were also combined in many secular cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which could have upwards of 50 drawers, doors, and panels, each painted with a perspectival landscape or genre scene (see fig. 5). The pictures on the doors and drawers of these cabinets ironically duplicated the three-dimensional space that they concealed. [End Page 330] Thus, the two-dimensional pictures on the doors opened onto a fictional space, while the painted doors themselves opened on to a physical one. Something similar is happening in cyberspace today: the windowed style is beginning to play a similar game of hide and seek as two-dimensional text windows and icons conceal and then expose threedimensional graphic images and digitized video. Even the icons and folders of the conventional desktop metaphor function in two spaces: the pictorial space of the desktop and the “informational” cyberspace of the computer and the Internet. 十六和十七世纪的许多世俗橱柜也将表象和真实的三维空间结合在一起,这些橱柜可以有多达 50 多个抽屉、门和面板,每个抽屉、门和面板上都绘有透视风景或风俗场景(见图 5)。具有讽刺意味的是,这些柜子门和抽屉上的画作与它们所隐藏的三维空间相吻合。[页尾 330] 因此,柜门上的二维图片打开了一个虚构的空间,而绘制的柜门本身则打开了一个实体空间。如今,类似的情况也在网络空间中发生:窗口风格也开始玩起了类似的捉迷藏游戏,二维文本窗口和图标将三维图形图像和数字化视频隐藏起来,然后又暴露出来。即使是传统桌面隐喻的图标和文件夹也在两个空间中发挥作用:桌面的图像空间和计算机与互联网的 "信息 "网络空间。
We can also identify the logic of hypermediacy in oil painting, for example, in what Svetlana Alpers has called the Dutch “art of describing.” ^(32){ }^{32} With their fascination for mirrors, windows, maps, paintings within paintings, and written and read epistles, such artists as Gabriel Metsu, David Bailly, and especially Jan Vermeer often represented the world as a multiplicity of representations. Their paintings were not strictly multimedia; rather, they absorbed and captured multiple media and multiple forms in oil. This Dutch art has often [End Page 331] been contrasted with the paradigm of Renaissance Italian painting with its representation of a unified visual space, in which the signs of mediation were meticulously erased. We can also identify hypermediacy in individual works and individual painters throughout the period in which linear perspective and the paradigm of transparency were ascendant: for example, in Velasquez’s Las Meninas, discussed by Alpers, Foucault and, because of Foucault, many others. ^(33){ }^{33} In fact, one could argue–and this would simply be a version of a familiar poststructuralist argument–that hypermediacy was the counterpart to transparency in Western painting, an awareness of mediation whose repression guaranteed its repeated return. 我们还可以在油画中发现超媒介的逻辑,例如斯维特拉娜-阿尔佩尔斯(Svetlana Alpers)称之为荷兰的 "描述艺术"。 ^(32){ }^{32} 加布里埃尔-梅苏、戴维-贝利,尤其是扬-维米尔等艺术家对镜子、窗户、地图、画中画以及书信和阅读书信都非常着迷,他们经常将世界表现为多重表象。他们的绘画并非严格意义上的多媒体,而是在油画中吸收和捕捉多种媒体和多种形式。这种荷兰艺术常常 [尾页 331]被拿来与文艺复兴时期意大利绘画的范式进行对比,后者表现的是一个统一的视觉空间,其中的中介痕迹被一丝不苟地抹去。在线性透视和透明范式占主导地位的整个时期,我们还可以在个别作品和个别画家身上发现超中介性:例如,在维拉斯奎兹的《拉斯梅尼纳斯》中,阿尔珀斯、福柯以及其他许多人(因为福柯)都讨论过这一问题。 ^(33){ }^{33} 事实上,我们可以说,超中介性是西方绘画中与透明性相对应的,是一种中介意识,它的压抑保证了中介意识的反复回归。
However, according to Clement Greenberg’s influential formulation, it was not until modernism that this order of things was powerfully reversed and the paradigm of transparency effectively challenged. ^(34){ }^{34} In modernist art, the logic of hypermediacy could 然而,根据克莱门特-格林伯格(Clement Greenberg)颇具影响力的表述,直到现代主义才有力地扭转了这种秩序,并有效地挑战了透明范式。 ^(34){ }^{34} 在现代主义艺术中,超媒介的逻辑可以
express itself both as a fracturing of the space of the picture and as a hyper-conscious recognition or acknowledgment of the medium. Collage and photomontage in particular provide evidence of the modernist fascination with media. ^(35){ }^{35} Just as collage challenges the immediacy of perspective painting, photomontage challenges the immediacy of the photograph. When photomonteurs cut up and recombine “straight” photographs, they discredit the notion that the photograph is drawn by the “pencil of nature,” as Fox Talbot had suggested. [End Page 332] Instead, the photographs themselves become elements that human intervention has selected and arranged for artistic purposes. Photographs pasted beside and on top of each other and in the context of other media such as type, painting, or pencil-drawing create a layered effect that we also find in electronic multimedia. Looking at Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (fig. 6), we become aware of the cluttered character of the space and of the process of construction. We become hyperconscious of the medium in photomontage, precisely because straight photography is a medium with such loud historical claims to transparency. 它既表现为画面空间的分裂,也表现为对媒介的超意识认可或承认。拼贴画和摄影蒙太奇尤其证明了现代主义对媒介的迷恋。 ^(35){ }^{35} 正如拼贴画挑战透视画的直接性一样,摄影蒙太奇也挑战照片的直接性。当摄影蒙太奇师将 "直接 "的照片剪切并重新组合时,他们否定了福克斯-塔尔博特(Fox Talbot)提出的照片是由 "自然之笔 "绘制的概念。[页尾 332]相反,照片本身成了人为选择和安排的艺术元素。照片被粘贴在其他媒体(如字体、绘画或铅笔画)的旁边或上面,创造出一种分层效果,我们在电子多媒体中也能发现这种效果。在观看理查德-汉密尔顿的《究竟是什么让今天的住宅如此与众不同、如此吸引人? 图 6)时,我们会意识到空间和建造过程的杂乱无章。我们会对摄影蒙太奇中的媒介产生超常的意识,这正是因为直接摄影是一种在历史上大肆宣扬透明性的媒介。
Richard Lanham notes how well Hamilton’s piece from the 1950s suits today’s “digital rhetoric” and then asks: “Couldn’t this–collaged up as it is with clip art and advertising icons–just as well be called : ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Desktop So Different, So Appealing’?” ^(36){ }^{36} Hamilton shows that collage and photomontage are also hypertextual in the sense that to create is to rearrange existing forms. In photomontage the preexisting forms are photographs; in [End Page 333] literary hypertext they are paragraphs of prose; and in hypermedia they may be prose, graphics, animations, videos, and sounds. In all cases, the artist is defining a space through the disposition and interplay of forms that have been detached from their original context and then recombined. Like Greenberg, Lanham regards collage as “the central technique of twentieth-century visual art,” and he makes that claim because he wants to include digital design in the twentiethcentury mainstream, which has often created heterogeneous spaces and made the viewer conscious of the act of representation. ^(37){ }^{37} 理查德-兰哈姆注意到汉密尔顿 20 世纪 50 年代的作品非常适合今天的 "数字修辞",然后问道"难道这幅用剪贴画和广告图标拼贴起来的作品不能叫做:'究竟是什么让今天的桌面如此与众不同,如此吸引人'? ^(36){ }^{36} 汉密尔顿表明,拼贴画和摄影蒙太奇也是超文本的,因为创作就是重新排列现有的形式。在摄影蒙太奇中,预先存在的形式是照片;在 [End Page 333] 文学超文本中,预先存在的形式是散文段落;在超媒体中,预先存在的形式可能是散文、图形、动画、视频和声音。在所有情况下,艺术家都是通过对已脱离其原始语境、然后重新组合的形式的处置和相互作用来定义空间的。与格林伯格一样,兰哈姆将拼贴视为 "二十世纪视觉艺术的核心技术",他之所以这样说,是因为他希望将数字设计纳入二十世纪的主流,因为数字设计通常会创造出异质空间,并让观众意识到表现行为。 ^(37){ }^{37}
In the twentieth century, as indeed earlier, it is not only high art that wants to combine heterogeneous spaces. Graphic design for print, particularly for magazines and newspapers, is becoming increasingly hypermediated. Magazines like Wired or Mondo 2000 owe their conception of hypermediacy less to the World Wide Web than to the tradition of graphic design that grows out of pop art and ultimately lettrisme, photomontage, and dada. The affiliations of a newspaper like USA Today are more contemporary. The paper has been criticized for lowering print journalism to the level of television news. However, visually USA Today does not draw primarily on television: its layout resembles a multimedia computer application more than it does a television broadcast. The paper attempts to emulate in print the graphical user interface (see Figs. 7a_\underline{7 a} and b_\underline{b} ). For that matter, television itself, especially news programs, also shows the influence of the graphical user interface when it divides the screen into two or more frames and places text and numbers over and around the framed video images. 在二十世纪,其实早在二十世纪之前,并非只有高雅艺术才希望结合异质空间。平面设计,尤其是杂志和报纸的平面设计,正变得越来越超媒介化。像《连线》(Wired)或《2000 世界》(Mondo 2000)这样的杂志,它们的超媒介概念与其说是源于万维网,不如说是源于平面设计的传统,这种传统从波普艺术(Pop Art)发展而来,并最终发展为 lettrisme、照相蒙太奇(Photomontage)和达达主义(Dada)。像《今日美国》这样的报纸,其隶属关系则更为现代。有人批评该报将印刷新闻降到了电视新闻的水平。然而,从视觉上看,《今日美国》并不主要借鉴电视新闻:它的版面设计更像一个多媒体计算机应用程序,而不是电视广播。该报试图在印刷品中模仿图形用户界面(见图 7a_\underline{7 a} 和 b_\underline{b} )。在这方面,电视本身,尤其是新闻节目,也显示了图形用户界面的影响,它将屏幕分成两个或更多的框架,并在框架视频图像的上方和周围放置文字和数字。
In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and regarding it as a “real” space that lies beyond mediation. Lanham calls this the tension between looking at and looking through, and he sees it as a feature of twentieth century art in general and now digital representation in particular. ^(38){ }^{38} When the viewer confronts, for example, a collage, he oscillates between looking at the patches of paper and paint on the surface of the work and looking through to the depicted objects as if they occupied a real space beyond the surface. What characterizes modern art is an insistence that the viewer keep coming back to the surface, or in extreme cases an attempt to hold the viewer at the surface indefinitely. We 超中介逻辑以各种形式表达了将视觉空间视为中介空间与将其视为超越中介的 "真实 "空间之间的紧张关系。Lanham 将此称为 "观看 "与 "透过观看 "之间的紧张关系,他认为这是 20 世纪艺术的一个普遍特征,尤其是现在的数字表现形式。 ^(38){ }^{38} 例如,当观众面对一幅拼贴画时,他会在观看作品表面的纸张和颜料斑块与透视所描绘的对象之间摇摆不定,仿佛它们占据了表面之外的真实空间。现代艺术的特点是坚持让观者不断回到作品表面,或者在极端情况下,试图让观者无限期地停留在作品表面。我们
are making an argument here that is analogous to Lanham’s: that in the logic of hypermediacy the artist (or multimedia programmer or web designer) strives to make the [End Page 334] viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and indeed delight in that acknowledgement. She does so by multiplying spaces and media and by repeatedly redefining the visual and conceptual relationships among mediated spaces–relationships that may range from simple juxtaposition to complete absorption. 在这里,我们提出了一个与 Lanham 类似的论点:在超媒介的逻辑中,艺术家(或多媒体程序员或网页设计师)努力让 [End Page 334] 观众承认媒介是一种媒介,并为这种承认而高兴。她通过多重空间和媒介,并通过反复重新定义媒介空间之间的视觉和概念关系来实现这一目标--这种关系可能是简单的并置,也可能是完全的吸收。
Above, we identified the logic of immediacy in computer games such as Myst and Doom, but other CD ROMs operate according to our other logic and seem to revel in their nature as mediated artifacts. It should not be surprising that some of the best examples of digital hypermediacy (such as the Residents’ Freak Show, Peter Gabriel’s Xplora 1, and the Emergency Broadcast Network’s Telecommunication Breakdown) come out (however indirectly) of the world of rock music production and presentation. Initially, most rock music adhered to the logic of immediacy. However, as early as the 1960s and 1970s, as electric and electronic instruments and recording systems became more sophisticated, performers such as Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Kiss began to create elaborate, consciously artificial productions. The traditional “musical” qualities of these productions, never very complicated, became progressively less important than the visual and aural spectacle. Today the stage presentations of rock musicians like U2 are often celebrations of media and of the act of mediation, while “avant-garde” artists like Laurie Anderson, the Residents, and the Emergency Broadcast Network are creating CD-ROMs that reflect and comment upon such stage presentations with their seemingly endless repetition within the medium and multiplication across media. For example, in the number “Electronic Behavior Control System,” by the Emergency Broadcast Network, the computer screen can be tiled into numerous small windows with shifting graphics, while a central window displays digitized clips from old films and television shows (Fig. 8). This visual multiplicity is synchronized to an insistent rap-music soundtrack. At times one or another digitized character will seem to enunciate a corresponding phrase on the soundtrack, as if all these remnants of old media had come together to perform this piece of music. In a similar spirit, the Residents’ Freak Show both juxtaposes media and replaces one medium with another as it combines music with graphics and animations reminiscent of comic books and other popular forms. 上文,我们指出了《神秘世界》和《毁灭战士》等电脑游戏的即时性逻辑,但其他光盘则按照我们的另一种逻辑运作,似乎陶醉于其作为媒介艺术品的本质。数字超中介性的一些最佳范例(如 Residents 的 Freak Show、Peter Gabriel 的 Xplora 1 和紧急广播网的 Telecommunication Breakdown)来自摇滚音乐制作和展示领域(无论如何是间接的),这一点不足为奇。最初,大多数摇滚音乐都遵循即时性的逻辑。然而,早在二十世纪六七十年代,随着电子乐器和录音系统的日益成熟,爱丽丝-库珀(Alice Cooper)、大卫-鲍伊(David Bowie)和 "吻"(Kiss)等表演者开始精心制作、有意识地矫揉造作。这些作品的传统 "音乐 "特质从来都不是非常复杂的,其重要性逐渐低于视觉和听觉奇观。如今,U2 等摇滚音乐人的舞台表演往往是对媒体和中介行为的赞美,而劳里-安德森(Laurie Anderson)、"居民"(the Residents)和 "紧急广播网"(the Emergency Broadcast Network)等 "前卫 "艺术家制作的只读光盘(CD-ROM)则是对这种舞台表演的反映和评论,它们在媒体内似乎无休止地重复,在媒体间又不断繁殖。例如,在紧急广播网的作品 "电子行为控制系统 "中,电脑屏幕可以平铺成无数个小窗口,图形不断变换,而中央窗口则显示老电影和电视节目的数字化片段(图 8)。这种多重视觉效果与持续不断的说唱音乐同步。 有时,一个或另一个数字化角色似乎会在原声带中说出相应的短语,仿佛所有这些旧媒体的残余都汇聚在一起演奏这首乐曲。同样,"居民 "的 "怪诞秀 "既将媒体并置,又以另一种媒体取代另一种媒体,因为它将音乐与图形和动画结合在一起,让人联想到漫画书和其他流行形式。
As Michael Joyce reminds us, replacement is the essence of hypertext, and in a sense the whole World Wide Web is an exercise in replacement. ^(39){ }^{39} When the user clicks on an underlined phrase or an [End Page 335] iconic “anchor” on a web page, a link is activated that calls up another page. The new material usually appears in the original window and erases the previous text or graphic, although the action of clicking may instead create a separate frame within the same window or a new window laid over the first. The new page wins our attention through the erasure (interpenetration), tiling (juxtaposition), or overlapping (multiplication) of the previous page. Beyond the World Wide Web, replacement is the operative strategy of the whole windowed style. In using the standard computer desktop, we pull down [End Page 336] menus, click on icons, and drag scroll bars, all of which are devices for replacing the current visual space with another. 正如迈克尔-乔伊斯(Michael Joyce)提醒我们的那样,替换是超文本的精髓,从某种意义上说,整个万维网就是一种替换练习。 ^(39){ }^{39} 当用户点击网页上的下划线短语或 [End Page 335] 标志性 "锚点 "时,一个链接就会被激活,从而调用另一个页面。新材料通常会出现在原来的窗口中,并擦除之前的文本或图片,不过点击动作可能会在同一窗口中创建一个单独的框架,或者在第一个窗口上创建一个新窗口。新页面通过擦除(穿插)、平铺(并置)或重叠(倍增)前一页面来赢得我们的注意力。除了万维网之外,替换也是整个窗口风格的操作策略。在使用标准电脑桌面时,我们下拉 [End Page 336] 菜单、点击图标、拖动滚动条,所有这些都是将当前视觉空间替换为另一个视觉空间的手段。
Replacement is at its most radical when the new space is of a different medium–for example, when the user clicks on an underlined phrase in a web page and a graphic appears. Hypermedia CD-ROMs and windowed applications replace one medium with another all the time, confronting the user with the problem of multiple representation and challenging her to consider why one medium might [End Page 337] offer a more or less appropriate representation than another. In doing so, they are performing what we would characterize as acts of “remediation.” 当新的空间属于不同的媒介时,置换是最彻底的--例如,当用户点击网页中一个带下划线的短语时,就会出现一个图形。超媒体 CD-ROM 和窗口应用程序总是用另一种媒介替换另一种媒介,使用户面临多重表征的问题,并让用户考虑为什么一种媒介 [End Page 337] 提供的表征比另一种媒介更合适或更不合适。在这样做的过程中,它们正在进行我们称之为 "补救 "的行为。
Remediation 补救措施
In the early and mid 1990s, perhaps to a greater extent than at any time since the 1930s, Hollywood produced numerous filmed versions of classic novels–including works by Hawthorne, Wharton, and even Henry James. There has been a particular vogue for the novels of Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice twice, and Emma). Some of the adaptations are quite free, but (except for the odd Clueless) the Austen films, whose popularity swept the others aside, are historically accurate in costume and setting and very faithful to the original novels. Yet the Austen films do not contain any overt reference to the novels on which they are based: they do not acknowledge that they are adaptations. Acknowledging the novel in the film would disrupt the continuity and the illusion of immediacy that Austen’s readers expect, for they want to view the film in the same seamless way in which they read the novels. The content has been borrowed, but the medium has not been appropriated. This [End Page 338] kind of borrowing, extremely common in popular culture today, is also of course very old. An example with a long pedigree would be paintings illustrating stories from the Bible or from other literary sources, where apparently only the story content is borrowed. The contemporary entertainment industry calls such borrowing “repurposing”: to take a “property” from one medium and re-use it in another. With reuse comes a necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media. The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can compare them. 20 世纪 90 年代初期和中期,好莱坞制作了大量经典小说的电影版,其中包括霍桑、沃顿甚至亨利-詹姆斯的作品,其程度可能超过了 20 世纪 30 年代以来的任何时期。简-奥斯汀的小说(《理智与情感》、《傲慢与偏见》两部和《爱玛》)尤其受到追捧。其中一些改编作品相当自由,但(除了零星的《无厘头》外)奥斯汀电影的受欢迎程度将其他改编作品甩在了一边,这些电影在服装和场景方面都符合历史原貌,而且非常忠实于原著小说。然而,奥斯汀电影并没有公开提及它们所改编的小说:它们不承认自己是改编作品。如果在电影中承认小说,就会破坏奥斯汀读者所期待的连续性和直接性的错觉,因为他们希望以阅读小说时的相同方式天衣无缝地观看电影。内容被借用了,但媒介并没有被挪用。这种借鉴 [尾页 338]在当今流行文化中极为常见,当然也非常古老。一个历史悠久的例子是,为《圣经》或其他文学作品中的故事绘制插图的绘画,显然只借用了故事内容。当代娱乐业称这种借用为 "再利用":从一种媒体中获取 "财产",并在另一种媒体中重新使用。再利用需要重新定义,但媒体之间可能没有有意识的相互作用。只有读者或观众恰好知道两个版本,并能对其进行比较,才会发生相互影响(如果有的话)。
Marshall McLuhan remarked that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” ^(40){ }^{40} As his problematic examples suggest, McLuhan was not thinking of simple repurposing, but perhaps of a more complex kind of borrowing, in which one medium is itself incorporated or represented in another medium. Dutch painters incorporated maps, globes, inscriptions, letters, and mirrors in their works. All our examples of hypermediacy are characterized by this kind of borrowing, as is also ancient and modern ekphrasis, the literary description of works of visual art, which W. J. T. Mitchell defines as “the verbal representation of visual representation.” ^(41){ }^{41} Again, we call the representation of one medium in another “remediation,” and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending upon the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. 马歇尔-麦克卢汉说:"任何媒介的'内容'总是另一种媒介。写作的内容是演讲,正如书面文字是印刷品的内容,而印刷品是电报的内容"。 ^(40){ }^{40} 正如他那些有问题的例子所表明的那样,麦克卢汉并不是在考虑简单的重复使用,而是在考虑一种更为复杂的借用,即一种媒介本身被纳入或表现在另一种媒介中。荷兰画家在他们的作品中融入了地图、地球仪、铭文、字母和镜子。我们所有的超媒介例子都以这种借用为特征,古代和现代的 ekphrasis 也是如此,它是对视觉艺术作品的文学描述,W. J. T. Mitchell 将其定义为 "视觉表现的语言表述"。 ^(41){ }^{41} 我们再次将一种媒介在另一种媒介中的表现形式称为 "再创造",我们将论证再创造是新数字媒体的一个显著特征。这种做法初看起来似乎很深奥,但其实非常普遍,我们可以找出数字媒体对其前身进行补救的各种不同方式,这种方式取决于新媒体与旧媒体之间竞争或对抗的程度。
At one extreme, an older medium is highlighted and re-presented in digital form without apparent irony or critique. Examples include CD-ROM picture galleries (digitized paintings or photographs) and collections of literary texts on CD-ROM. There are also numerous World Wide Web sites that offer pictures or texts for users to download. In these cases, the electronic medium is not set in opposition to painting, photography, or printing; instead, the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to materials from these older media, as if the content of the older media can simply be poured into the new one. Since the electronic version justifies itself by granting [End Page 339] access to the older media, it wants to be transparent. The digital medium wants to erase itself, so that the viewer stands in the same relationship to the content as she would if she were confronting the original medium. Ideally, there should be no difference between the experience of seeing a painting in person and on the computer screen, but this is of course never so. The computer always intervenes and makes its presence felt in some way, perhaps because the viewer must click on a button or slide a bar to view a whole picture or perhaps because the digital image appears grainy or with untrue colors. Transparency, however, remains the goal. 在一个极端,一种古老的媒介被突出并以数字形式重新呈现,而没有明显的讽刺或批判。这方面的例子包括 CD-ROM 图库(数字化绘画或照片)和 CD-ROM 文学文本集。还有许多万维网网站提供图片或文本供用户下载。在这些情况下,电子媒介并不是与绘画、摄影或印刷相对立的;相反,计算机是作为一种新的手段来提供这些旧媒介的资料,就好像旧媒介的内容可以简单地注入到新媒介中一样。由于电子版本通过允许 [End Page 339] 使用旧媒介来证明自己的合理性,因此它希望自己是透明的。数字媒体希望抹去自己,使观众与内容的关系与面对原始媒体时的关系相同。理想情况下,在电脑屏幕上观看画作和在画作本人面前观看画作的体验应该是没有区别的,但事实却并非如此。电脑总是以某种方式介入并让人感觉到它的存在,也许是因为观众必须点击按钮或滑动条才能观看整幅画作,也许是因为数字图像看起来颗粒感很强或色彩不真实。然而,透明仍然是我们的目标。
Creators of other electronic remediations seem to want to emphasize the difference rather than erase it. In these cases, the electronic version is offered as an improvement 其他电子补救措施的创建者似乎希望强调差异而不是消除差异。在这些情况下,电子版本是作为一种改进而提供的
on the older version, although the new is still justified in terms of the old and seeks to remain faithful to the older medium’s character. There are, it must be noted, various degrees of fidelity. Encyclopedias on CD-ROM, such as Microsoft’s Encarta or Grolier’s Electronic Encyclopedia, offer themselves as improvements on printed encyclopedias. So they provide not only text and graphics, but also sound and video and feature electronic searching and linking capabilities. Yet, because they are presenting discrete, alphabetized articles on technical subjects, they are still recognizably in the tradition of the printed encyclopedia since the Encyclopédie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Voyager Company has published a series of “Expanded Books” on CD-ROM, an eclectic set of books originally written for printed publication including Jurassic Park and Brave New World. The Voyager interface remediates the printed book without doing much to challenge print’s assumptions about linearity and closure. Even the name “Expanded Books” indicates the priority of the older medium. Much of the current World Wide Web also remediates older forms without challenging them. Its point-and-click interface allows the developer to reorganize texts and images taken from books, magazines, film, or television, but the reorganization does not call into question the semantic character of a text or the ontological status of an image. In all these cases, the new medium does not want to efface itself entirely. Microsoft wants the buyer to understand that she has purchased not simply an encyclopedia, but an electronic and therefore improved encyclopedia. So the borrowing might be said to be translucent rather than transparent. 尽管新版本仍以旧版本为基础,并力求忠实于旧媒介的特征,但新版本仍是旧版本的合理补充。必须指出的是,忠实的程度各不相同。光盘上的百科全书,如微软的 Encarta 或 Grolier 的电子百科全书,是对印刷版百科全书的改进。因此,它们不仅提供文字和图形,还提供声音和视频,并具有电子搜索和链接功能。然而,由于它们提供的是按字母顺序排列的、关于技术主题的独立文章,因此它们仍然具有自《大百科全书》和《大英百科全书》以来的印刷版百科全书的传统。Voyager 公司出版了一系列 "扩展图书 "光盘,其中包括《侏罗纪公园》和《勇敢的新世界》等原本为印刷出版而编写的书籍。旅行者 "的界面对印刷书籍进行了改造,但并没有对印刷书籍的线性和封闭性提出太多挑战。即使是 "扩展图书 "这个名称也表明了旧媒介的优先地位。当前万维网的大部分内容也是对旧形式的补救,而没有对其提出挑战。它的点击式界面允许开发者重新组织取自书籍、杂志、电影或电视的文本和图像,但这种重新组织并不对文本的语义特征或图像的本体地位提出质疑。在所有这些情况下,新媒体并不想完全抹杀自己。微软公司希望购买者明白,她购买的不仅仅是一本百科全书,而是一本电子版的、经过改进的百科全书。因此,这种借用可以说是半透明的,而不是透明的。
The digital medium can also be more aggressive in its remediation. It can try to refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or, as we have called it, hypermediacy. This is particularly clear in the CD-ROMs discussed above, [End Page 340] such as the Emergency Broadcast Network’s Telecommunication Breakdown, in which the principal refashioned media are the recording of music on CD and its live performance on stage. This form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and the target media. In the number called “Electronic Behavior Control System,” discussed earlier, old television and movie clips are taken out of context (and therefore out of scale) and inserted absurdly into the rap music chant. This tearing out of context makes us aware of the artificiality of both the digital version and the original clip. The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and of their new, inappropriate setting. In this kind of remediation, the older media are presented in a space whose discontinuities, like those of collage and photomontage, are clearly visible. In CD-ROM multimedia the discontinuities are indicated by the window-frames themselves and by buttons, sliders, and other controls, which start or end the various media segments. The windowed style of the graphical user interface favors this kind of remediation: different programs, representing different media, can appear in each window–a word processing document in one, a digital photograph in another, digitized video in a third–while clickable tools activate and control the different programs and media. The standard graphical user interface remediates by acknowledging and controlling the discontinuities as the user moves between media. 数字媒体也可以更积极地进行补救。它可以试图完全改造旧媒介,同时仍然标示出旧媒介的存在,从而保持一种多重性或我们称之为超媒介性的感觉。这一点在上文讨论过的 CD-ROM 中尤为明显,[第 340 页完]如紧急广播网的《电讯中断》,其中主要的改造媒介是录制在 CD 上的音乐和在舞台上的现场表演。这种咄咄逼人的补救形式使源头媒体和目标媒体都陷入困境。在前面讨论过的名为 "电子行为控制系统 "的作品中,旧的电视和电影片段被断章取义(因此也不符合比例),荒诞地插入到说唱音乐的吟唱中。这种断章取义让我们意识到数字版本和原始片段的人为性。作品变成了一个马赛克,我们在其中同时意识到单个片段及其不恰当的新环境。在这种修补过程中,旧的媒体被呈现在一个空间中,其不连续性,就像拼贴画和摄影蒙太奇的不连续性一样,清晰可见。在只读光盘多媒体中,不连续性是由窗口框架本身和按钮、滑块及其他控制装置来表示的,这些按钮、滑块和控制装置用于开始或结束不同的媒体片段。图形用户界面的窗口风格有利于这种补救:代表不同媒体的不同程序可以出现在每个窗口中--文字处理文档出现在一个窗口中,数码照片出现在另一个窗口中,数字化视频出现在第三个窗口中--同时,可点击的工具可以激活和控制不同的程序和媒体。 标准图形用户界面在用户在不同媒体间移动时,通过确认和控制不连续性来进行补救。
Finally, the new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced. The new medium remains dependent upon the older one, in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways. For example, the whole genre of computer games like Myst or Doom remediate cinema, and the games are sometimes called “interactive films.” The idea is that the players become characters in a cinematic narrative. They have some control over both the narrative itself and the stylistic realization of it, in the sense that they can decide where to go and what to do in an effort to dispatch villains (in Doom) or solve puzzles (in Myst). They can also decide where to look, where to direct their graphically realized points of view, so that in 最后,新媒介可以通过试图完全吸收旧媒介来进行补救,从而将两者之间的不连续性降到最低。然而,补救行为本身确保了旧媒介无法被完全消除。新媒介仍然依赖于旧媒介,无论其依赖方式是公认的还是不为人知的。例如,《神秘世界》或《毁灭战士》等电脑游戏的整个流派都是对电影的补救,这些游戏有时被称为 "互动电影"。其理念是让玩家成为电影叙事中的角色。他们对叙事本身和叙事风格的实现都有一定的控制权,即他们可以决定去哪里、做什么,以努力打倒坏人(在《毁灭战士》中)或解开谜题(在《神秘》中)。他们还可以决定看哪里,把图形化的视角指向哪里,这样在
interactive film, the player is often both actor and director. On the World Wide Web, on the other hand, it is television rather than cinema that is remediated. There are numerous web sites that remediate the monitoring function of broadcast television. These sites present a stream of images from digital cameras aimed at various parts of the environment: pets in cages, fish in tanks, a soft drink machine, one’s office, a highway, and so on. Although these [End Page 341] point-of-view sites monitor the world for the web, they do not in general acknowledge television as the medium that they are refashioning. In fact, television and the WWW are engaged in an unacknowledged competition in which each now seeks to remediate the other. (The competition is economic as well as aesthetic; it is a struggle to determine whether broadcast television or the Internet will dominate the American and world markets.) 在互动电影中,玩家往往既是演员又是导演。而在万维网上,被改造的是电视而不是电影。有许多网站对广播电视的监控功能进行了改造。这些网站用数码相机对准环境的各个部分,呈现出一系列图像:笼子里的宠物、鱼缸里的鱼、软饮料机、个人办公室、高速公路等等。尽管这些 [End Page 341] 视角网站为网络监控着世界,但它们一般并不承认电视是它们正在改造的媒体。事实上,电视和 WWW 正在进行一场不为人知的竞争,在这场竞争中,电视和 WWW 都在试图改造对方。(这种竞争既是经济上的,也是美学上的;这是一场决定是广播电视还是互联网主宰美国和世界市场的斗争)。
Like television, film is also trying to absorb and repurpose digital technology. As we have mentioned, digital compositing and other special effects are now standard features of the Hollywood films, particularly in the “action-adventure” genre. And in most cases, the goal is to make these electronic interventions transparent. The stunt or special effect should look as “natural” as possible, as if the camera were simply capturing what really happened in the light. Computer graphics processing is rapidly taking over the animated cartoon; indeed, the takeover is already complete in Disney’s Toy Story. And here too the goal is to make the computer disappear: to make the settings, toys, and the human characters look as much as possible like live-action film. Hollywood has incorporated computer graphics at least in part in an attempt to hold off the threat that digital media might pose for the traditional, linear film. This attempt shows that remediation operates in both directions: users of older media such as film and television can seek to appropriate and refashion digital graphics, just as digital graphics artists seek to refashion film and television. 与电视一样,电影也在努力吸收和重新利用数字技术。如前所述,数字合成和其他特效已成为好莱坞电影,尤其是 "动作冒险 "类型电影的标准特征。在大多数情况下,目的是使这些电子干预透明化。特技或特效应该看起来尽可能 "自然",就好像摄影机只是捕捉到了光线下真实发生的一切。计算机图形处理技术正在迅速取代动画片;事实上,迪斯尼公司的《玩具总动员》已经完成了对计算机图形处理技术的取代。这里的目标也是让电脑消失:让场景、玩具和人类角色看起来尽可能像真人电影。好莱坞采用计算机图形技术,至少在一定程度上是为了抵御数字媒体可能对传统的线性电影构成的威胁。这种尝试表明,补救是双向的:旧媒体(如电影和电视)的用户可以寻求使用和改造数字图形,正如数字图形艺术家寻求改造电影和电视一样。
Unlike our other examples of hypermediacy, this form of aggressive remediation creates an apparently seamless space. It conceals its relationship to earlier media in the name of immediacy; it promises the user an unmediated experience, whose paradigm again is virtual reality. As we noted earlier, games like Myst and Doom are desktop virtual reality applications, and, like immersive virtual reality, they aim to inspire in the player a feeling of presence. On the other hand, like these computer games, immersive virtual reality also remediates both television and film: it depends upon the conventions and associations of the first-person point-of-view or subjective camera. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has claimed that: “Virtual Reality won’t merely replace TV. It will eat it alive.” ^(42){ }^{42} As a prediction of the success of this technology, Clarke is likely to be quite wrong, at least for the foreseeable future, but he is right in the sense that virtual reality remediates television (and film) by the strategy of incorporation. This strategy does not mean that virtual reality can obliterate the earlier visual point-of-view technologies; rather, it ensures [End Page 342] that these technologies remain at least as reference points by which the immediacy of virtual reality is measured. Paradoxically, then, remediation is as important for the logic of immediacy as it is for hypermediacy. 与其他超媒介的例子不同,这种咄咄逼人的补救形式创造了一个看似天衣无缝的空间。它以即时性的名义掩盖了与早期媒体的关系;它向用户承诺一种非中介的体验,而这种体验的范式又是虚拟现实。如前所述,《神秘》和《毁灭战士》等游戏都是桌面虚拟现实应用软件,与身临其境的虚拟现实一样,它们旨在激发玩家的临场感。另一方面,与这些电脑游戏一样,身临其境的虚拟现实也是对电视和电影的补救:它依赖于第一人称视角或主观镜头的惯例和联想。科幻小说家阿瑟-克拉克(Arthur C. Clarke)曾说:"虚拟现实不仅会取代电视。它将生吞活剥电视"。 ^(42){ }^{42} 至少在可预见的未来,克拉克对这一技术成功的预测很可能是错误的,但从虚拟现实技术通过融合策略对电视(和电影)进行补救的意义上讲,他是正确的。这种策略并不意味着虚拟现实可以抹杀早期的视觉视点技术;相反,它确保 [完 第 342 页] 这些技术至少可以作为衡量虚拟现实即时性的参照点。因此,矛盾的是,补救对于即时性逻辑和超中介性逻辑同样重要。
Mediation and Remediation 调解和补救
It is easy to see that hypermedia applications are always explicit acts of remediation: they import earlier media into a digital space in order to critique and refashion them. However, digital media that strive for transparency and immediacy (such as immersive virtual reality and virtual games) are also acts of remediation. Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in a metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the viewer’s experience: it is that which evokes an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation. Digital 不难看出,超媒体应用总是明确的补救行为:它们将早期媒体引入数字空间,以对其进行批判和改造。然而,追求透明性和即时性的数字媒体(如身临其境的虚拟现实和虚拟游戏)也是一种补救行为。超媒体和透明媒体是同一欲望的相反表现形式:超越表象的限制,实现真实的欲望。它们并非追求形而上学意义上的真实。相反,"真实 "是根据观众的体验来定义的:"真实 "是能唤起观众直接的(因此也是真实的)情感反应。透明数字应用软件通过勇敢地否认中介这一事实来寻求真实。数字
hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both these moves are strategies of remediation. ^(43){ }^{43} 超媒体通过多重中介来寻求真实,从而创造出一种充实感,一种可被当作现实的饱满体验。这两招都是补救策略。 ^(43){ }^{43}
There are two paradoxes at work here. One is that hypermedia could ever be thought of as achieving the unmediated. Consider again the music-spectacle CD-ROMs like the Emergency Broadcast Network with its surfeit of images and sounds that bombard the viewer. The idea of excess has been part of the popular music culture for decades. At first the excess was achieved simply by turning up the volume, until the sound could be felt as well as heard, but more recently, as we have noted, the stage productions of popular musicians like U2 have emphasized visual spectacle often with the acknowledgement of multiple media. The excessive, highly self-conscious video style of MTV is one result, and the music-spectacle CD-ROMs obviously remediate MTV. The excess of media becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an external reality, [End Page 343] but rather precisely because it is does not feel compelled to refer to anything outside itself. As with MTV, the viewer experiences such hypermedia not through an extended and unified gaze, but through directing her attention here and there in brief moments. The experience is one of the glance rather than the gaze, a distinction that Bryson has drawn in Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze in order to understand the semiotics of Western painting. ^(44){ }^{44} The aesthetic of the glance also makes the viewer aware of the process rather than just the product, both the process of creation and the process of viewing. For example, the Emergency Broadcast Network’s CD-ROM conveys the feeling that we are witnessing, and in a way participating in, the process of its own construction. By emphasizing process, hypermedia becomes self-justifying. With its constant references to other media and their contents, hypermedia ultimately claims our attention for itself as pure experience. In this claim, and perhaps only in this claim, hypermedia reminds us of high modern art. 这里有两个悖论。其一,超媒体被认为可以实现非中介性。再考虑一下《紧急广播网》这样的音乐大屏幕只读光盘,其大量的图像和声音轰炸着观众。几十年来,"过度 "的概念一直是流行音乐文化的一部分。起初,这种过度只是通过提高音量来实现的,直到声音不仅能被听到,还能被感觉到,但最近,正如我们所注意到的那样,U2 等流行音乐家的舞台作品强调了视觉奇观,并经常使用多种媒体。MTV 过度、高度自我意识的视频风格是其结果之一,而音乐奇观光盘显然是对 MTV 的补救。媒体的过度成为一种真实的体验,这并不是说它与外部现实相对应, [第 343 页完] 而恰恰是因为它并不觉得自己必须参照自身之外的任何事物。与 MTV 一样,观众体验这种超媒体的方式不是通过长时间的统一注视,而是通过在短暂的瞬间将注意力转移到这里或那里。布赖森在《视觉与绘画》一书中对这种体验进行了区分:这是布赖森在《视觉与绘画:凝视的逻辑》一书中为理解西方绘画的符号学而做出的区分。 ^(44){ }^{44} "一瞥 "的美学还使观众意识到创作的过程和观看的过程,而不仅仅是产品。例如,紧急广播网的只读光盘给人的感觉是,我们正在目睹并在某种程度上参与了它的制作过程。通过强调过程,超媒体变得自圆其说。 超媒体不断提及其他媒体及其内容,最终要求我们将其作为纯粹的体验来关注。超媒体的这一诉求,或许也仅仅是这一诉求,让我们想起了高雅的现代艺术。
High modern visual art was also self-justifying, as it offered the viewer a visual experience that he was not expected to validate by referring to the external world. Modern art too promised authenticity of experience, and it too emphasized process, e.g., the process of putting paint on canvas. As Greenberg described it in “Towards a New Laocoon”: 高度现代的视觉艺术也是自圆其说的,因为它为观众提供了一种视觉体验,而不指望观众通过参照外部世界来验证这种体验。现代艺术也承诺体验的真实性,也强调过程,例如将颜料涂在画布上的过程。正如格林伯格在《走向新拉奥孔》中所描述的那样:
“[Modern] [p]ainting and sculpture can become more completely nothing but what they do; like functional architecture and the machine, they look what they do.” 45 Digital hypermedia also looks what it does. On the other hand, modern art often worked by reduction and simplification rather than excess. In that sense digital hypermedia (and MTV) are more like the excessive rhetoric of early modernism than the visual practice of high modernism. The rhetoric of cyberspace is reminiscent of the manifestos of Marinetti and the [End Page 344] Futurists. Moreover, the cyberspace enthusiasts have a relationship with technologies of representation similar to the relationship that Marinetti and the Futurists had with technologies of motive power. "[现代][绘画]和雕塑可以变得更彻底,但它们所做的却什么都不是;就像功能性建筑和机器一样,它们看起来像什么,就做什么"。45 数字超媒体也是 "看起来像做什么"。另一方面,现代艺术往往通过减少和简化而非过度来实现。从这个意义上说,数字超媒体(和 MTV)更像是早期现代主义的过度修辞,而不是高度现代主义的视觉实践。网络空间的修辞让人想起马里内蒂和未来派的宣言。此外,网络空间爱好者与表现技术之间的关系类似于马里内蒂和未来主义者与动力技术之间的关系。
The second paradox is that, just as hypermedia strives for immediacy, digital technologies of immediacy always end up being remediations, even as, indeed precisely because, they appear to deny mediation. Technologies of immediacy try to improve upon media by erasing them, but they are compelled to define themselves by the standards of the media they are trying to erase. The wire, Lenny claims, “is not like TV only better”; in saying this, of course, he affirms the comparison that he denies. The wire does improve upon television, because it delivers “lived” experience, as television promises and yet fails to do. Similarly, interactive computer games such as Myst and Doom define their reality through the traditions of photography and film. Doom is regarded as authentic because it places the user in an action-adventure movie; Myst because of the near photorealism of its graphics and its cinematic use of sound and background music. In general, digital photorealism defines reality as perfected photography, and virtual reality 第二个悖论是,正如超媒体努力追求即时性一样,即时性数字技术最终总是要进行补救,即使,实际上正是因为它们似乎否定了中介性。即时性技术试图通过消除媒体来改进媒体,但却不得不以它们试图消除的媒体的标准来定义自己。莱尼声称,有线电视 "不像电视,只是更好";当然,他这样说,是肯定了他所否认的比较。窃听器确实比电视更好,因为它提供了 "活生生 "的体验,而电视却没有做到这一点。同样,《Myst》和《Doom》等交互式电脑游戏也是通过摄影和电影的传统来定义其真实性的。Doom 之所以被认为是真实的,是因为它将用户置身于动作冒险电影之中;Myst 之所以被认为是真实的,是因为它的图形近乎逼真,声音和背景音乐的使用也像电影一样。总的来说,数字逼真主义将现实定义为完美的摄影,而虚拟现实则是
defines it as first-person point-of-view cinema. 将其定义为第一人称视角电影。
It would seem, then, that all mediation is remediation. We are not of course claiming this as an a priori truth, but rather arguing that at this historical moment all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well. Our culture conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media. In the first instance we may think of something like a historical progression, of newer media remediating older ones and in particular of digital media remediating their predecessors. But we are offering a genealogy of affiliations, not a linear history, and in this genealogy, older media can also remediate newer ones. ^(46){ }^{46} Television can and does refashion itself in the image of the World Wide Web and film can and does incorporate and attempt to contain computer graphics within its own linear form. What we would not defend is [End Page 345] the notion that any one medium can function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning. 由此看来,所有媒介都是补救。当然,我们并不是说这是一个先验的真理,而是说在这个历史时刻,所有当前的媒体都在发挥着补救的作用,而补救也为我们提供了一种解释早期媒体工作的方法。我们的文化认为,每一种媒体或媒体群都是对其他媒体的回应、重新部署、竞争和改革。在第一种情况下,我们可能会认为这是一种历史的进步,新媒体对旧媒体的补救,尤其是数字媒体对其前身的补救。但是,我们提供的是一个隶属关系谱系,而不是线性历史,在这个谱系中,旧媒体也可以改造新媒体。 ^(46){ }^{46} 电视可以而且确实以万维网的形象重新塑造了自己,电影可以而且确实在自己的线性形式中融入并试图包含计算机图形。我们不会捍卫的是 [第 345 页完] 任何一种媒体都可以独立运作并建立自己独立的、纯粹的文化意义空间的观念。
We will take as our principle, then, that at our present historical and cultural moment, all mediation is remediation. This is not, however, to suggest that all of our culture’s claims of remediation are equally compelling. Nor is this to suggest that we are necessarily aware of (or could identify) all of the ways in which digital media remediate and are remediated by their predecessors. The double logic of remediation can function explicitly or implicitly, and it can be restated in a number of ways. In the remainder of the essay we will elaborate this double logic in the following senses: 因此,我们的原则是,在我们当前的历史和文化时刻,所有的调解都是补救。但这并不是说,我们文化中的所有补救主张都同样令人信服。这也不是说,我们一定意识到(或能够识别)数字媒体补救和被其前身补救的所有方式。补救的双重逻辑可以明示或暗示地发挥作用,也可以以多种方式重述。在本文的其余部分,我们将从以下几个方面阐述这种双重逻辑:
Remediation as the mediation of mediation: All mediation is remediation because each act of mediation depends upon other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting upon, reproducing and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other in order to be media in the first place. 补救是调解的调解:所有调解都是补救,因为每一种调解行为都依赖于其他调解行为。媒体不断相互评论、复制和替代,这一过程是媒体不可或缺的组成部分。媒体首先需要彼此才能成为媒体。
Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality: Although cyberspace enthusiasts and Baudrillard’s logic of simulation and simulacra might suggest otherwise, all mediations are themselves real. They are real as artifacts (but not as autonomous agents) in our mediated culture. Despite the fact that all media depend upon other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still needs to acknowledge that all media reproduce the real. Just as there is no getting rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real. 补救是中介与现实的不可分割性:尽管网络空间爱好者和鲍德里亚的模拟和仿真逻辑可能会提出相反的观点,但所有的中介本身都是真实的。在我们的媒介文化中,它们作为人工制品(但不是自主媒介)是真实的。尽管所有媒体都依赖于其他媒体的循环补救,但我们的文化仍然需要承认,所有媒体都在再现真实。正如无法摆脱中介一样,也无法摆脱真实。
Remediation as reform: The implicit and sometimes explicit goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well. 补救即改革:补救的隐含目标,有时甚至是明确的目标,就是重新塑造或改造其他媒介。此外,由于所有媒介既是现实的媒介,也是现实的媒介,因此补救也可以理解为改革现实的过程。
Remediation as the Mediation of Mediation 补救是调解中的调解
The idea of the ubiquity of remediation suggests an analogy between mediation and interpretation and between our analysis of media and the poststructuralist literary theory of the past four decades. Derrida and other poststructuralists have argued that all interpretation is reinterpretation. Just as for them, there is nothing prior to writing, so for our visual culture there is nothing prior to mediation. Any act of mediation is dependent upon another, indeed many other, acts of mediation and is therefore remediation. In his work on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson has traced out an important connection between “the linguistic turn” and what he prefers to call “mediatization.” In “Utopianism after the End of Utopia,” Jameson describes the spatialization of postmodern culture as “the process [End Page 346] whereby the traditional fine arts are mediatized: that is, they now come to consciousness of themselves as various media within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question.” ^(47){ }^{47} In other words, Jameson’s 补救的无处不在这一观点提出了中介与解释之间的类比,以及我们对媒体的分析与过去四十年后结构主义文学理论之间的类比。德里达和其他后结构主义者认为,所有的阐释都是重新阐释。对他们来说,写作之前没有任何东西,对我们的视觉文化来说,中介之前也没有任何东西。任何中介行为都依赖于另一种中介行为,甚至是许多其他中介行为,因此是一种补救。弗雷德里克-詹姆逊(Fredric Jameson)在其关于后现代主义的著作中指出了 "语言转向 "与他更喜欢称之为 "中介化 "之间的重要联系。在《乌托邦终结后的乌托邦主义》一文中,詹姆逊将后现代文化的空间化描述为 "传统美术被媒介化的过程[尾页 346]:也就是说,它们现在开始意识到自己是一个媒介系统中的各种媒介,在这个媒介系统中,它们自身的内部生产也构成了一种象征性的信息,并对有关媒介的地位表明了立场"。 ^(47){ }^{47} 换言之,詹姆逊的
mediatization of the traditional fine arts is a process of remediation, in which media (especially new media) become systematically dependent on each other and on prior media for their cultural significance. We suggest that what Jameson describes as mediatization may be true not only of postmodern, new media but also of prior visual media as well. What Jameson identifies as new and truly postmodern may be part of a genealogy of remediation, reflecting an attitude towards mediation that has become dominant today, but that has expressed itself repeatedly in the history of Western representation. 传统美术的媒介化是一个补救的过程,在这个过程中,媒体(尤其是新媒体)变得系统地相互依赖,其文化意义也依赖于先前的媒体。我们认为,詹姆逊所说的媒介化不仅适用于后现代新媒体,也适用于以前的视觉媒体。詹姆逊所认为的新的、真正的后现代可能是补救谱系的一部分,反映了当今占主导地位的对媒介化的态度,但这种态度在西方表象史上一再表现出来。
Jameson himself seems to recognize this genealogy in “Surrealism without the Unconscious”: “It is because we have had to learn that culture today is a matter of media that we have finally begun to get it through our heads that culture was always that, and that the older forms or genres, or indeed the older spiritual exercises and meditations, thoughts and expressions, were also in their very different ways media products. The intervention of the machine, the mechanization of culture, and the mediation of culture by the Consciousness Industry are now everywhere the case, and perhaps it might be interesting to explore the possibility that they were always the case throughout human history, and within even the radical difference of older, precapitalist modes of production.” ^(48){ }^{48} Jameson insists that there is something special about the mediatization of our current culture. The paradox for him is that mediatization occurs at the very historical moment when interpretation has asserted a kind of dominance. Visual media now challenge that dominance: the most powerful form of this “critical and disruptive challenge” is video, whose “total flow” threatens the physical and temporal differences that constitute linguistic meaning–even as the “available conceptualities for analyzing” media like video “have become almost exclusively linguistic in orientation.” Proclaimed by Jameson the dominant medium of our postmodern age, video simultaneously depends upon and disrupts literary and linguistic theory. What Jameson is suggesting is that literary theory, and by extension the whole current humanist enterprise, is challenged by the popular culture of visual media. [End Page 347] We could say that television, film, and now computer graphics threaten to remediate verbal text both in print and on the computer screen–indeed, to remediate them so aggressively that they may lose much of their historical significance. 詹姆逊本人在《没有无意识的超现实主义》中似乎也认识到了这一谱系:"正是因为我们不得不认识到今天的文化是一个媒体问题,我们才终于开始明白,文化从来都是这样的,古老的形式或流派,或者说古老的精神练习和冥想、思想和表达,也是以其非常不同的方式成为媒体产品的。现在,机器的介入、文化的机械化以及意识工业对文化的中介无处不在,也许我们应该探讨这样一种可能性,即在整个人类历史上,甚至在旧的、前资本主义的生产模式的根本差异中,它们始终是这样的"。 ^(48){ }^{48} 詹姆逊坚持认为,我们当前文化的媒介化有其特殊之处。对他来说,悖论在于,媒介化发生的历史时刻,正是阐释占据主导地位的时刻。现在,视觉媒体对这种主导地位提出了挑战:这种 "批判性和破坏性挑战 "的最有力形式是视频,其 "完全流动 "威胁到了构成语言意义的物理和时间差异--即使像视频这样的 "可用来分析 "媒体的 "概念""已经变得几乎完全以语言为导向"。被詹姆逊称为后现代时代主导媒介的录像同时依赖并颠覆了文学理论和语言学理论。詹姆逊的意思是,文学理论,乃至当前整个人文主义事业,都受到了视觉媒体流行文化的挑战。 [我们可以说,电视、电影以及现在的计算机制图都有可能重塑印刷品和计算机屏幕上的语言文字--事实上,重塑的力度如此之大,以至于它们可能会失去很多历史意义。
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour takes us further in understanding the relationship between the linguistic turn of literary theory and our media-obsessed culture, and he does so by calling into question the very postmodernism with which Jameson is identified. In explaining how literary theory participates in the development of modern technoscience, Latour shows us that the lesson of theory is precisely the lesson of mediation: “Whether they are called ‘semiotics,’ ‘semiology’ or ‘linguistic turns,’ the object of all these philosophies is to make discourse not a transparent intermediary that would put the human subject in contact with the natural world, but a mediator independent of nature and society alike.” ^(49){ }^{49} Latour claims that contemporary theory transforms “intermediaries” into “mediators”: theory makes it difficult to believe in language as an intermediary, as a neutral, invisible conveyor of fully present meaning either between speaker/writer and listener/reader or between subjects and objects, people and the world. Instead, language is regarded as an active and visible mediator, which fills up the space between signifying subjects and nature. In becoming a mediator rather than an intermediary, language operates just as visual media operate in their tasks of remediation. Visual media too are active mediators, not mere conveyors of meaning. For Latour, the phenomena of contemporary technoscience consist of intersections or “hybrids” of the human subject, language, and the external world of things, and these hybrids are as real as their constituents–in fact, in some sense more real because no constituent (subject, language, object) ever appears in its pure form, segregated from the other constituents. The events of our mediated culture are constituted by combinations of 布鲁诺-拉图尔(Bruno Latour)在《我们从未现代过》一书中,带领我们进一步理解文学理论的语言学转向与我们痴迷于媒体的文化之间的关系,并对詹姆逊所认同的后现代主义提出质疑。在解释文学理论如何参与现代技术科学的发展时,拉图尔告诉我们,理论的教训正是中介的教训:"无论它们被称为'符号学'、'符号学'还是'语言学转向',所有这些哲学的目标都是使话语不再是将人类主体与自然世界相联系的透明中介,而是独立于自然和社会之外的中介"。 ^(49){ }^{49} 拉图尔声称,当代理论把 "中介 "变成了 "媒介":理论让人很难相信语言是中介,是说话者/作者与听者/读者之间或主体与客体、人与世界之间完全呈现意义的中立、无形的传递者。相反,语言被视为一种积极的、可见的中介,它填补了表意主体与自然之间的空间。在成为中介而非中间人的过程中,语言的运作方式与视觉媒体的补救任务如出一辙。视觉媒体也是积极的中介,而不仅仅是意义的传递者。在拉图尔看来,当代技术科学的现象由人类主体、语言和外部事物世界的交叉点或 "混合体 "组成,而这些混合体与它们的构成要素一样真实--事实上,在某种意义上更加真实,因为没有任何构成要素(主体、语言、客体)以纯粹的形式出现,与其他构成要素分离。 我们的媒介文化事件是由以下元素组合而成的
subject, media, and objects, which again do not exist in their segregated forms. ^(50){ }^{50} Thus, there is nothing prior to or outside of the act of mediation. [End Page 348] 主体、媒介和客体,它们同样不是以各自独立的形式存在的。 ^(50){ }^{50} 因此,在中介行为之前或之外没有任何东西。[结束语]
Remediation as the Inseparability of Reality and Mediation 补救是现实与调解的不可分割性
Media function as objects within the world–within systems of linguistic, cultural, social, and economic exchange. Media are hybrids in Latour’s sense and are therefore real for the cultures that create and use them. Photography is real, functioning not just as pieces of paper that result from the photographic process, but as a network of artifacts, images, and cultural agreements about what these special images mean and do. Film is real, and again its reality is the combination of celluloid, the social meaning of celebrity, the economics of the entertainment industry, and the technologies of cameras, editing, and compositing. The reality of digital graphics and the World Wide Web is attested to by the web of economic and cultural relationships that have grown up in a few years around the products from Netscape and Microsoft. 媒体作为世界中的物体,在语言、文化、社会和经济交流体系中发挥作用。媒体是拉图尔意义上的混合体,因此对于创造和使用媒体的文化而言是真实的。摄影是真实的,它不仅是摄影过程中产生的纸片,而且是由人工制品、图像以及关于这些特殊图像的意义和作用的文化协定组成的网络。电影是真实的,同样,它的真实是赛璐珞、名人的社会意义、娱乐业的经济以及摄影机、剪辑和合成技术的结合。数字图像和万维网的现实性可以从围绕着网景公司和微软公司的产品在短短几年内发展起来的经济和文化关系网中得到证明。
Modern art played a key role in convincing our culture of the reality of mediation. In many cases, modern painting was no longer about the world but about itself. Paradoxically, by eliminating “the real” or “the world” as a referent, modernism emphasized the reality of both the act of painting and its product. Painters offered us their works as objects in the world, not as a representation of an external world. By diminishing or denying painting’s representational function, they sought to achieve an immediacy of presentation not available to traditional painting, where immediacy had been achieved by concealing signs of mediation. Modern art was often real, precisely because it refused to be realistic, and the example of modern art reminds us of the need to distinguish mediation and remediation from representation. Although the real and the representational are separated in modern art, modern art is not therefore unmediated. Modern painting achieves immediacy not by denying its mediation, but by acknowledging it. Indeed, as Cavell has noted, building on the work of Greenberg and Michael Fried, one of the defining characteristics of modernist painting is its insistence on acknowledging the conditions of its own medium. ^(51){ }^{51} 现代艺术在使我们的文化相信中介的现实性方面发挥了关键作用。在许多情况下,现代绘画不再是关于世界,而是关于它自己。矛盾的是,通过消除 "现实 "或 "世界 "作为参照物,现代主义强调了绘画行为及其产品的现实性。画家们将自己的作品作为世界中的对象,而不是外部世界的再现。通过削弱或否认绘画的再现功能,他们试图实现传统绘画所不具备的直观性,而传统绘画是通过隐藏中介痕迹来实现直观性的。现代艺术往往是真实的,正是因为它拒绝写实,现代艺术的例子提醒我们需要将中介和补救与再现区分开来。尽管在现代艺术中,真实与再现是分离的,但现代艺术并不因此而不中介。现代绘画不是通过否认中介性,而是通过承认中介性来实现直接性。事实上,正如卡维尔在格林伯格和迈克尔-弗里德的研究基础上所指出的,现代主义绘画的决定性特征之一就是坚持承认自身媒介的条件。 ^(51){ }^{51}
The reality of modernist painting extends beyond the work itself to the space of the real. As Philip Fisher has argued, " [t]he[\mathrm{t}] \mathrm{he} colonizing of this space between the surface of the canvas and the viewer has been one of the most aggressive features of the 20th century." ^(52){ }^{52} As we [End Page 349] know from a visit to any traditional museum, the space between viewer and canvas is controlled, institutionalized, and policed as a special, real kind of space, which people walk around or wait before entering. In our own time the colonization of museum space has been extended to the space between a photographer or videographer and the object of her mediating technology. When a tourist is taking a photograph or making a video, for example, we treat the line of sight between the camera and the object as if it were a real obstruction: we walk around it, bend under it, or wait until it is gone. We make these gestures not only out of politeness, but also to acknowledge the reality of the act of mediation that we are witnessing. In this case, the act of mediation functions in a system of pedestrian traffic circulation like a tree, a wire, or a traffic light (which is also an act of mediation whose reality we acknowledge). Mediations are real not only because the objects produced (photos, videos, films, paintings, CD-ROMS, etc.) circulate in the real world, but also because the act of mediation itself functions as a hybrid and is treated much like a physical object. 现代主义绘画的现实性超越了作品本身,延伸至现实空间。正如菲利普-费舍尔(Philip Fisher)所言," [t]he[\mathrm{t}] \mathrm{he} 在画布表面与观众之间的这一空间的殖民化是 20 世纪最具侵略性的特征之一"。 ^(52){ }^{52} 我们 [尾页 349]在参观任何一家传统博物馆时都会发现,观众与画布之间的空间被控制、制度化,并被视为一种特殊的、真实的空间而受到监管,人们在进入这种空间之前都要绕行或等待。在我们这个时代,博物馆空间的殖民化已经扩展到摄影师或摄像师与其中介技术对象之间的空间。例如,当游客拍照或录像时,我们会把相机和拍摄对象之间的视线当作真正的障碍物来对待:我们绕着它走,从它下面弯下腰,或者等它消失。我们做出这些举动不仅是出于礼貌,也是为了承认我们正在目睹的中介行为的真实性。在这种情况下,中介行为在行人交通循环系统中的作用就像一棵树、一根电线或一个红绿灯(这也是一种中介行为,我们承认它的真实性)。中介是真实的,这不仅是因为所产生的对象(照片、录像、电影、绘画、光盘等)在现实世界中流通,而且还因为中介行为本身作为一种混合体发挥作用,并被当作实物来对待。
Finally, even though there is nothing prior to the act of mediation, there is also a sense in which all mediation reproduces the real. Remediation is the mediation of reality because media themselves are real and because the experience of media is the subject of remediation. 最后,尽管在中介行为之前什么都没有,但在某种意义上,所有中介行为都是对现实的再现。补救是对现实的补救,因为媒介本身就是现实,也因为媒介体验是补救的主题。
Remediation as Reform 补救即改革
The word remediation is used today by educators as a euphemism for the task of bringing lagging students up to an expected level of performance. The word derives ultimately from the Latin remederi–to heal, to restore to health–and we have adopted the word to express the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another. This belief in reform is particularly strong for those who are today repurposing earlier media into digital forms. They tell us, for example, that when broadcast television becomes interactive digital television, it will motivate and liberate the viewer as never before; that virtual reality improves upon film by placing the viewer at the center of a moveable point of view; that electronic mail is more convenient and reliable than physical mail; that hypertext brings interactivity to the novel; and that digital audio and video improve upon their analog equivalents. The assumption of reform is so strong that a new medium is now expected to justify itself by improving upon a predecessor: hence the need for computer graphics to achieve full photorealism. Yet the assumption of reform has not been limited to digital media. Photography was seen as the reform of [End Page 350] illusionistic painting; the cinema as the reform of the theater (in the sense that early films were once called “photoplays”). 今天,"补救"(remediation)一词被教育工作者用来委婉地表达将落后学生的成绩提高到预期水平的任务。这个词最终来源于拉丁文 remederi--治愈,恢复健康--我们采用这个词来表达我们的文化将一种媒介视为改革或改进另一种媒介的方式。这种改革的信念对于今天那些将早期媒体转为数字形式的人来说尤为强烈。例如,他们告诉我们,当广播电视变成交互式数字电视时,它将前所未有地激励和解放观众;虚拟现实通过将观众置于可移动视点的中心而改进了电影;电子邮件比实体邮件更方便可靠;超文本为小说带来了交互性;数字音频和视频改进了其模拟等同形式。改革的假设是如此强烈,以至于人们现在期望一种新的媒介通过改进前一种媒介来证明自己的合理性:因此,计算机制图需要达到完全逼真的效果。然而,改革的假设并不局限于数字媒体。摄影被视为幻觉绘画的改革;电影被视为戏剧的改革(早期的电影曾被称为 "摄影电影")。
It is possible to claim that a new medium makes a good thing even better, but this seldom seems to be the rhetoric of remediation and is certainly not the case for digital media. Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium. (Typically, of course, users did not realize that the older medium had failed in its promise, until the new one appeared.) The rhetorical virtue of virtual reality, of videoconferencing and interactive television, and of the World Wide Web, is that each of these technologies repairs the inadequacy of the medium or media that it now supersedes. In each case that inadequacy is represented as a lack of immediacy. This seems to be generally true of the rhetoric of remediation. So photography was more immediate than painting; film than photography; television than film; and now virtual reality fulfills the promise of immediacy and supposedly ends the progression. The rhetoric of remediation favors immediacy, even though as the medium matures it offers new opportunities for hypermediacy. 可以说,新媒体使好东西变得更好,但这似乎很少成为补救的说辞,数字媒体当然也不 是这样。每一种新媒体都是合理的,因为它填补了前代媒体的不足或修复了前代媒体的缺陷,因为它实现了旧媒体未兑现的承诺。(当然,通常情况下,在新媒体出现之前,用户并没有意识到旧媒体没有兑现承诺)。虚拟现实、视频会议和互动电视以及万维网的修辞优势在于,这些技术中的每一种都弥补了它现在所取代的媒介的不足。在每一种情况下,这种不足都表现为缺乏即时性。这似乎是补救修辞的普遍真理。因此,摄影比绘画更直接;电影比摄影更直接;电视比电影更直接;而现在,虚拟现实实现了直接性的承诺,并据称结束了这种进步。尽管随着媒介的成熟,它为超媒介化提供了新的机会,但 "补救 "的修辞偏向于即时性。
Remediation can also imply reform in a social or political sense, and again this sense has emerged with particular clarity in the case of digital media. A number of American political figures have even suggested that the World Wide Web and the Internet can reform democracy by lending immediacy to the process of making decisions. When citizens are able to participate in the debate of issues and possibly even vote electronically, we may substitute direct (immediate) democracy for our representational system. Here too, as it happens, digital media promise to overcome representation. Even beyond claims for overt political reform, many cyberenthusiasts suggest that the web and computer applications are creating a digital culture that will revolutionize commerce, education, and social relationships. Thus, broadcast television is associated with the old order of hierarchical control, while interactive media move the locus of control to the individual. That digital media can reform and even save society reminds us of the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much of the twentieth century: it is a peculiarly, if not exclusively, American promise. American culture seems to believe in technology in a way that European culture, for example, may not. Throughout the twentieth century, or really since the French Revolution, salvation in Europe has been defined in political terms–finding the appropriate (radical left or radical right) political formula. Even traditional Marxists, who believed in technological progress, subordinated that progress to political change. In America, [End Page 351] however, collective (and perhaps even personal) salvation has been thought to come through technology rather than through political or even religious action. Contemporary American culture claims to have lost 补救也可能意味着社会或政治意义上的改革,同样,这种意义在数字媒体中表现得尤为明 确。美国的一些政治人物甚至提出,万维网和互联网可以改革民主,使决策过程具有即时性。当公民能够参与问题的辩论,甚至可能通过电子方式进行投票时,我们就可以用直接(即时)民主取代我们的代议制。在这方面,数字媒体也有望战胜代议制。除了公开的政治改革之外,许多网络狂热者还认为,网络和计算机应用正在创造一种数字文化,它将彻底改变商业、教育和社会关系。因此,广播电视是与等级控制的旧秩序联系在一起的,而互动媒体则将控制权转移到了个人身上。数字媒体可以改革甚至拯救社会,这让我们想起了 20 世纪大部分时间里人们对技术的承诺:这是一种独特的、甚至是美国式的承诺。美国文化似乎对技术深信不疑,而欧洲文化则不然。在整个二十世纪,或者说自法国大革命以来,欧洲的救赎一直是以政治术语来定义的--寻找适当的(激进左派或激进右派)政治方案。即使是相信技术进步的传统马克思主义者,也将技术进步从属于政治变革。然而,在美国,人们认为集体(甚至个人)的救赎是通过技术,而不是通过政治甚至宗教行动来实现的。 当代美国文化声称已经失去了
much of its naïve confidence in technology. (Certainly postmodern theory is ambivalent if not hostile to technology, but of course postmodern theory is European [largely French] in its origins and allegiances.) On the other hand, the vocal enthusiasts for cyberspace and the whole fringe of rhetorical hangers-on that has grown up around computer technology are defined by their commitment to technological salvation. What remains strong in our culture today is the conviction that technology itself progresses through reform: that technology reforms itself. In our terms, new technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier ones, while earlier technologies are struggling to maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer ones. The cyberspace enthusiasts argue that in remediating older media the new media are accomplishing social change. The gesture of reform is ingrained in American culture, and this is why American culture takes so easily to strategies of remediation. 后现代理论对技术的大部分天真自信。(当然,后现代理论即使不是敌视技术,也是矛盾的(当然,后现代理论的起源和效忠对象是欧洲人[主要是法国人])。另一方面,网络空间的狂热爱好者以及围绕计算机技术而成长起来的整个边缘修辞学附庸,都是由他们对技术救赎的承诺所决定的。今天,在我们的文化中,仍然存在着一种坚定的信念,即技术本身是通过改革而进步的:技术会自我改革。用我们的话来说,新的表征技术是通过改革或补救早期的技术来实现的,而早期的技术则是通过补救更新的技术来努力维持其合法性。网络空间爱好者认为,通过对旧媒体的改造,新媒体正在完成社会变革。改革的姿态在美国文化中根深蒂固,这也是美国文化如此容易接受补救策略的原因。
Finally, remediation is reform in the sense that media reform reality itself. As we have argued above, it is not that media merely reform the appearance of reality. Media hybrids (the affiliations of technical artifacts, rhetorical justifications, and social relationships) are as real as the objects of science. Media make reality over in the same way that all Western technologies have sought to reform reality. Thus, virtual reality reforms reality by giving us an alternative visual world and insisting on that world as the locus of presence and meaning for us. Recent proposals for “ubiquitous” or “distributed” computing would do just the opposite, but in the service of the same desire for reform. Instead of putting ourselves in the computer’s graphic world, the strategy of ubiquitous computing is to scatter computers and computational devices throughout our world: to “augment reality” with digital artifacts and so create a “distributed cyberspace.” ^(53){ }^{53} Its advocates see such a strategy “as a way to improve on the ‘flawed’ design in ordinary reality,” in which “objects are largely ‘dead’ to distinctions we care about. Television sets and stereo systems are socially insensitive: they do not turn themselves down when we talk on the phone.” ^(54){ }^{54} Latour has argued, however, that for hundreds of years we have been constructing our technologies precisely to take our cultural distinctions seriously. Although he would probably agree [End Page 352] with the enthusiasts for distributed computing that “[t]he ‘distinctions’ people care about can be viewed as virtual worlds, or . . . information webs,” these enthusiasts miss the point when they want to make a categorical distinction between distributed cyberspace and other current and past technologies. ^(55){ }^{55} For Latour, the idea of technologies that embody our cultural values or distinctions has been a feature not only of modern but of “amodern” or “premodern” societies as well. 56 _\underline{56} 最后,从媒体改革现实本身的意义上讲,补救就是改革。正如我们在上文所论证的,媒体并非仅仅改革现实的表象。媒体的混合体(技术产品、修辞理由和社会关系的关联)与科学对象一样真实。与所有西方技术试图改造现实的方式一样,媒体也改造了现实。因此,虚拟现实通过为我们提供另一个视觉世界,并坚持将这个世界作为我们存在和意义的中心,从而改造了现实。最近提出的 "无处不在 "或 "分布式 "计算的建议恰恰相反,但却服务于同样的改革愿望。无处不在的计算的策略不是将我们置于计算机的图形世界中,而是将计算机和计算设备分散在我们的世界中:用数字艺术品 "增强现实",从而创造一个 "分布式网络空间"。 ^(53){ }^{53} 它的倡导者认为这种策略 "是改进普通现实中'有缺陷'的设计的一种方法",在普通现实中,"物体在很大程度上'死'于我们所关心的区别。电视机和音响系统对社会不敏感:当我们讲电话时,它们不会自动调低音量"。 ^(54){ }^{54} 然而,拉图尔认为,数百年来,我们一直在构建我们的技术,正是为了认真对待我们的文化差异。虽然他可能会同意分布式计算爱好者的观点,即 "人们所关心的'区别'可以被视为虚拟世界,或者......信息网络",但当这些爱好者想要将分布式网络空间与其他当前和过去的技术进行绝对区分时,他们就错失了重点。 ^(55){ }^{55} 在拉图尔看来,体现我们的文化价值或区别的技术理念不仅是现代社会的特征,也是 "非现代 "或 "前现代 "社会的特征。 56 _\underline{56}
The advocates of ubiquitous computing express grandiloquently the implied goal of all advocates and practitioners of digital media: to reimagine and therefore to reform the world as a mediated (and remediated) space. Again this is not new. For hundreds of years, the remediation of reality has been built into our technologies of representation. Photography, film, and certainly television have been constructed by our culture to embody our cultural distinctions and to make those distinctions part of our reality, and digital media follow in this tradition. Nor will ubiquitous computing be the last expression of remediation as reform–as the burgeoning hype about “push media” already reminds us. 无处不在的计算的倡导者雄辩地表达了所有数字媒体倡导者和实践者的隐含目标:重新想象并因此改革作为媒介(和补救)空间的世界。这同样不是什么新鲜事。数百年来,对现实的改造已经融入了我们的表现技术。摄影、电影,当然还有电视,都是由我们的文化构建的,以体现我们的文化差异,并使这些差异成为我们现实的一部分,数字媒体也继承了这一传统。无处不在的计算也不会是作为改革的补救措施的最后一种表现形式--正如对 "推动媒体 "的热炒已经提醒我们的那样。
Remediation of the Self 自我补救
The two logics that we have identified, the desire for immediacy and the fascination with hypermediacy, have a psychological dimension that we have not yet explored (and that we will leave to others to explore more completely). Although we have concentrated on the relationship of the object to the act of representation, our two logics can also refer to the attitude of the subject toward the act of representation. The last two hundred years have witnessed a strengthening of the subject’s desire for immediacy in artistic expression and reception. Cavell notes that this desire came from a need to validate 我们所确定的两种逻辑,即对即时性的渴望和对超中介性的迷恋,具有我们尚未探讨的心理维度(我们将把这一维度留给其他人进行更全面的探讨)。尽管我们集中讨论了客体与再现行为的关系,但我们的两种逻辑也可以指主体对再现行为的态度。在过去的两百年中,主体对艺术表达和接受的直接性的渴望不断加强。卡维尔指出,这种渴望源于验证以下内容的需要
oneself: “[W]hat [traditional] painting wanted, in wanting a connection with reality, was a sense of presentness–not exactly a conviction of the world’s presence to us, but of our presence to it. At some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became isolation. The route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgement of the endless presense of self.” 57 As Cavell goes on to point [End Page 353] out, the strategy for achieving this unmediated relationship shifted with romanticism from an emphasis on the world as object (mimesis) to the viewer as subject (expression): "To speak of our subjectivity as the route back to our conviction in reality is to speak of romanticism. " ^(58){ }^{58} If the Enlightenment subject was content to stand and gaze through the window frame, the romantic subject wanted to get closer. And if in turn the romantic was convinced that it was the self’s responsibility and was within the self’s power to undertake an active search for reality, modernism went further in espousing the “endless presence of the self” to itself. 自己:"传统]绘画希望与现实建立联系,它想要的是一种存在感--确切地说,是一种世界存在于我们之中的信念,而是一种我们存在于世界之中的信念。在某一时刻,我们的意识从世界中解脱出来,我们的主观性介入了我们与世界的当下性之间。于是,我们的主观性变成了我们的存在,个体性变成了孤立性。通往对现实的信念的途径就是承认自我的无尽存在"。57 正如卡维尔继续指出的 [尾页 353],实现这种非中介关系的策略随着浪漫主义的兴起而发生了转变,从强调作为客体的世界(模仿)转向作为主体的观者(表达):"说到我们的主观性是回到我们对现实的信念的途径,这就是浪漫主义。" ^(58){ }^{58} 如果说启蒙运动的主体满足于站在窗框前凝视,那么浪漫主义的主体则希望走得更近。反过来,如果说浪漫主义坚信积极探寻现实是自我的责任,也是自我力所能及的事情,那么现代主义则更进一步,对自身推崇 "自我的无尽存在"。
In their efforts to achieve presence, creators of digital media have adopted both romantic and modernist strategies. When a subject examines a linear perspective painting, there remains a critical visual distance: the window frame separates the subject from the objects of representation by the window frame. There are, then, two ways to reduce this critical distance and so to heighten the sense of immediacy: either the subject can pass through the window into the represented world or the objects of representation can come up to or even through the window and surround the subject. Both of these strategies have been adopted by digital media. Virtual reality adopts the romanticism of the first, in that it allows the viewer to pass through Alberti’s window in an active search for reality to examine, and in some cases even to manipulate, the objects of representation. Although this move may have been implicit in illusionistic painting, straight photography, film, and television, the cyber-enthusiasts insist that something new has happened, when the move through Alberti’s window becomes explicit and operational. The second more modernist strategy has been adopted by ubiquitous computing and by hypermedia in general. The subject stays where she is, and instead the objects of representation come to her to be appreciated individually. In hypermedia applications, the objects press themselves against Alberti’s window and divide it into numerous panes or frames that compete for the subject’s attention. In ubiquitous computing, the applications embody themselves as separate machines and appliances and are distributed throughout the environment. The goal is still immediacy through contact, but now the immediacy is achieved as the subject recognizes the multiple and mediated character of the objects before her. 数字媒体的创作者们在努力实现存在感的过程中,采用了浪漫主义和现代主义的策略。当主体审视一幅线性透视画时,仍然存在一个关键的视觉距离:窗框将主体与窗框所表现的对象隔开。因此,有两种方法可以缩短这种临界距离,从而增强直接感:一是主体穿过窗户进入被表现的世界,二是被表现的对象靠近甚至穿过窗户包围主体。数字媒体采用了这两种策略。虚拟现实采用了前者的浪漫主义,即允许观众穿过阿尔贝蒂的窗户,积极寻找现实,以审视、甚至在某些情况下操纵表象对象。尽管这一举措在幻觉绘画、直拍摄影、电影和电视中可能已经隐含,但网络狂热者坚持认为,当通过阿尔贝蒂之窗的举措变得明确和可操作时,新的东西已经出现了。第二种更为现代主义的策略已被无处不在的计算机和超媒体普遍采用。主体留在原地,而表现对象则来到她身边,让她单独欣赏。在超媒体应用中,对象将自己压向阿尔贝蒂的窗口,并将其分割成许多窗格或框架,争夺主体的注意力。在无处不在的计算中,应用程序本身体现为独立的机器和设备,分布在整个环境中。 目标仍然是通过接触实现直接性,但现在的直接性是在主体认识到其面前物体的多重性和中介性时实现的。
Furthermore, the definition of the subject is similar in either case. In virtual reality the subject is defined by the perspectives that she occupies in virtual space. In this respect she is like the Enlightenment [End Page 354] subject who is also defined by the station point that he takes up in front of the canvas, or more generally by the verbal and visual point of view that he holds in his relations with the world. But in her quest for immediacy, the subject in virtual space is not satisfied with a single point of view; instead, she wants to occupy the points of view of other participants and objects in that space. She understands herself not as one unshakable point of view, but as a potentially very rapid succession of points of view, as a series of immediate experiences derived from those points of view. In the same way in the case of hypermedia, the subject is defined as a succession of relationships with various applications or media. She oscillates between media (moves from window to window, from application to application), and her subjectivity is determined by those oscillations. In the first case, the subject is assured of her existence by the ability to occupy points of view, while in the second she is assured of existence by the fact that she can enter into immediate relationships with the various media or media forms that surround her. 此外,在这两种情况下,主体的定义是相似的。在虚拟现实中,主体是由她在虚拟空间中所占据的视角来定义的。在这一点上,她就像启蒙运动时期的 [第 354 页完] 主体,后者也是由他在画布前的站立点,或者更广泛地说,由他在与世界的关系中所持有的语言和视觉观点来定义的。但是,在追求直接性的过程中,虚拟空间中的主体并不满足于单一的视角;相反,她希望占据该空间中其他参与者和对象的视角。她不是把自己理解为一个不可动摇的视点,而是把自己理解为一个可能非常迅速地连续的视点,理解为从这些视点衍生出来的一系列即时体验。同样,在超媒体的情况下,主体被定义为与各种应用程序或媒体的一系列关系。她在不同媒体之间摇摆(从一个窗口到另一个窗口,从一个应用到另一个应用),她的主体性由这些摇摆决定。在第一种情况下,主体通过占据视角的能力来确保其存在,而在第二种情况下,她通过与环绕在她周围的各种媒体或媒体形式建立直接的关系来确保其存在。
The reciprocal nature of immediacy and hypermediacy has a psychological dimension as well. The desire for immediacy would appear to be fulfilled in the first instance by the technologies that deny mediation: straight photography, live television, three-dimensional, immersive computer graphics, and so on. Yet these technologies can never satisfy that desire because, as we have seen, they never succeed in fully denying mediation. Each of them ends up defining itself with reference to other technologies, so that the viewer never reaches that blissful state in which the objects of representation themselves are felt to be self-present. Our culture tries this frontal assault on the problem of representation with almost every new technology (and repeatedly with the familiar technologies). As this strategy always fails, a contrary strategy emerges, in which the subject becomes fascinated with the act of mediation itself. ^(59){ }^{59} 即时性和超中介性的相互性也有其心理层面。对即时性的渴望似乎首先可以通过否认中介性的技术来实现:直接摄影、电视直播、三维的、身临其境的计算机图形等等。然而,这些技术永远无法满足这种愿望,因为正如我们所看到的,它们永远无法成功地完全否认中介性。它们中的每一种技术最终都是以其他技术为参照来定义自身的,因此观众永远无法达到那种幸福的境界,在这种境界中,再现对象本身被认为是自我呈现的。我们的文化几乎在每一种新技术上(以及在熟悉的技术上)都尝试了这种对再现问题的正面攻击。由于这种策略总是失败,于是出现了一种相反的策略,即主体对中介行为本身着迷。 ^(59){ }^{59}
The failure to satisfy our desire for immediacy and our resulting fascination with the process of mediation constitutes the self as part of the process of mediation. When we look at a traditional photograph or a perspective painting, we understand ourselves as the reconstituted [End Page 355] station point of the artist or the photographer. When we watch a film or a television broadcast, we understand ourselves as the changing point of view of the camera. When we put on the virtual-reality helmet, we understand ourselves as the focus of an elaborate technology for real-time, three-dimensional graphics and motion tracking. And insofar as we are mediated, we are therefore remediated, because in each case we also understand the particular medium in relation to other past and present media. When we watch the filmed adaptation of a novel, we bring to the film a notion of self appropriate to voiced prose. When we participate in virtual reality, we bring to that participation the mediations of the subject that we know from television and film. When we run a multimedia program on our desktop computer, each window containing prose, static graphics, or video offers a different mediation of the subject, and our experience is the remediation of these differences. 由于无法满足我们对即时性的渴望以及由此产生的对中介过程的迷恋,我们将自我视为中介过程的一部分。当我们观看一张传统照片或一幅透视画时,我们将自己理解为艺术家或摄影师的重构 [第 355 页完] 站点。当我们观看电影或电视广播时,我们将自己理解为摄像机不断变化的视点。当我们戴上虚拟现实头盔时,我们将自己理解为一种精心设计的实时三维图形和运动跟踪技术的焦点。只要我们被媒介化,我们就会因此被补救,因为在每一种情况下,我们都会将特定的媒介与过去和现在的其他媒介联系起来理解。当我们观看一部小说的改编电影时,我们会将一种与有声散文相适应的自我概念带入电影中。当我们参与虚拟现实时,我们会将我们从电视和电影中了解到的主体中介带入其中。当我们在桌面电脑上运行一个多媒体程序时,每一个包含散文、静态图形或视频的窗口都提供了不同的主体中介,而我们的体验就是对这些差异的补救。
This fascination with media in turn explains why the self today is both mediated and remediated. If immediacy were possible, if the self could be left alone with the objects of mediation, then media would not need to enter into the definition of self. We could then be just subjects in the world. But even if that utopian state were ever possible, a supposition that we would in any case take great pains to deny, it is certainly not available to us in today’s media-saturated environment. Media are part of our world as much as any other natural and technical objects. Whenever we engage ourselves with visual (or verbal) media, we become aware not only of the objects of representation but also of the media themselves. Instead of trying to be in the presence of the objects of representation, the subject now defines immediacy as being in the presence of media. In this remediation of the self, the fascination with media functions as the sublimation of the initial desire for immediacy, the desire to be present to oneself. 这种对媒体的迷恋反过来又解释了为什么今天的自我既是中介的又是补救的。如果直接性是可能的,如果自我可以与中介对象独处,那么媒体就不需要进入自我的定义。这样,我们就可以只是世界的主体。但是,即使这种乌托邦式的状态是可能的(我们无论如何都会极力否认这种假设),在当今媒体饱和的环境中,我们也肯定无法实现。媒体是我们世界的一部分,就像其他自然和技术物品一样。每当我们接触视觉(或语言)媒体时,我们不仅会意识到表象对象,也会意识到媒体本身。现在,主体不再试图置身于表征对象之中,而是将直接性定义为置身于媒体之中。在这种对自我的修复中,对媒体的迷恋是对最初的直接性欲望的升华,是对自我存在的渴望。
Networks of Remediation 补救网络
Although our analysis of remediation may appear to have been largely formal, we have throughout assumed the material bases of remediation. When artists and technicians fashion the apparatus for a new medium, they do so with reference to previous media, borrowing and adapting as many materials and techniques as possible. Thus, Gutenberg and the first generation of printers borrowed the letterforms and layout from manuscript technology and constructed the printed book as the “manuscript only better.” ^(60){ }^{60} After winning their battle of remediation, printers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth [End Page 356] century moved away from the manuscript model by simplifying letterforms and regularizing the layout. In the case of photography, Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers, justified his invention because of his dissatisfaction with a contemporary device for making accurate perspective drawings by hand, and the name “camera” was his remediation for the camera obscura. ^(61){ }^{61} The first generations of film technicians and 尽管我们对补救的分析似乎主要是形式上的,但我们自始至终都在假设补救的物质基 础。当艺术家和技术人员为一种新媒介设计设备时,他们会参考以前的媒介,尽可能多地借用和改造材料和技术。因此,古腾堡和第一代印刷商借鉴了手稿技术中的字形和版式,并将印刷书籍构建为 "更好的手稿"。 ^(60){ }^{60} 15 世纪末和 16 世纪初 [尾页 356] 的印刷商在打赢了补救战之后,通过简化字形和规范版式摆脱了手稿模式。在摄影方面,先驱之一福克斯-塔尔博特(Fox Talbot)为自己的发明辩解,因为他对当代一种手工绘制精确透视图的设备感到不满,而 "照相机 "这一名称正是他对暗箱照相机的补救。 ^(61){ }^{61} 第一代电影技术人员和
producers remediated both photography and the practices of stage plays. The inventors of television remediated the vacuum tube from a device for modulating radio transmissions into a device for transmitting images. In computer graphics, paint programs borrowed techniques and names from manual painting practices. The first generation of World Wide Web designers have remediated graphic design as it was practiced for printed newspapers and magazines, which have now themselves remediated the graphic design of the World Wide Web. 制片人对摄影和舞台剧进行了改造。电视机的发明者将真空管从调制无线电传输的设备改造成传输图像的设备。在计算机制图领域,绘画程序借用了手工绘画的技术和名称。第一代万维网设计者对印刷报纸和杂志的平面设计进行了改造,而印刷报纸和杂志也对万维网的平面设计进行了改造。
The remediation of material practice is inseparable from the remediation of social arrangements. The new practitioners want to claim the status of the practitioners of the earlier medium. Film stars wanted to be seen as artists, as skilled as stage actors. Film directors wanted to be regarded as auteurs, as “authors” of their films. Makers of television dramas still want their work to be accorded the status of dramatic film (stage drama now being nearly moribund). Computer gamemakers hope that their interactive products will someday achieve the status of first-run films; there is even an attempt to lure film stars to play in these narrative computer productions. And although photography remediates painting, it was a more complex historical case. In their rivalry with painting, some photographers (such as Henry Peach Robinson) sought to be regarded as artists, while “straight” photographers (such as Lewis Hine, Edward Weston, and August Sander) promoted themselves not as artists, but rather as social historians or even natural scientists. Their internal disagreements were both over the material basis of their medium and over the social and formal nature of the remediation that photography undertook. Whatever their differences, in each of these cases, the remediation of the social and the remediation of the material go hand in hand. 物质实践的补救与社会安排的补救密不可分。新的从业者希望获得早期媒介从业者的地位。电影明星希望被视为艺术家,像舞台演员一样技艺精湛。电影导演希望被视为电影的 "作者"。电视剧制作者仍然希望他们的作品能获得戏剧电影的地位(舞台剧现在几乎奄奄一息)。电脑游戏制作者希望他们的互动产品有朝一日能获得首映电影的地位;甚至有人试图吸引电影明星在这些电脑叙事作品中扮演角色。尽管摄影对绘画进行了补救,但它的历史情况更为复杂。在与绘画的竞争中,一些摄影师(如亨利-佩奇-罗宾逊)力图被视为艺术家,而 "正统 "摄影师(如刘易斯-海因、爱德华-韦斯顿和奥古斯特-桑德)则不是以艺术家的身份,而是以社会史学家甚至自然科学家的身份宣传自己。他们的内部分歧既在于其媒介的物质基础,也在于摄影所进行的补救的社会和形式性质。无论分歧如何,在这些案例中,对社会的补救和对物质的补救都是相辅相成的。
The social and material aspects of remediation bring with them economic remediation as well. In some senses, this aspect of the rivalry and refashioning among media has already been explicitly recognized. Each new medium has had to find its economic place, either by replacing or by supplementing what is already available, while workers in the new medium have sought to justify their economic [End Page 357] success according to the new medium’s status. Thus, web designers command higher salaries than technical writers and older graphic designers, and they justify their value by arguing that digital media can not only replace printed documents, but vastly improve upon them. For web designers, then, the economic aspect of remediation is tied up with its social and material aspects. Similarly, the entertainment industry’s understanding of remediation as repurposing reveals the inseparability of the economic from the social and material. As we noted earlier, the entertainment industry defines repurposing as pouring a familiar mediated content into another mediated form: a comic book series is repurposed as a live-action movie, a televised cartoon, a video game, and a set of action toys. Although the goal is primarily economic–not to replace the earlier forms, to which the company may well own the rights, but rather to spread the content over as many markets as possible–repurposing works as remediation insofar as its economic ends are made possible only by material and social means. 社会和物质方面的补救也带来了经济方面的补救。从某种意义上说,媒体之间的竞争和改造在这方面已经得到了明确的承认。每一种新媒体都必须找到自己的经济地位,要么取代现有的媒体,要么补充现有的媒体,而新媒体的工作人员则根据新媒体的地位来证明自己的经济[第 357 页完]成功。因此,与技术撰稿人和老一代平面设计师相比,网页设计师的薪水更高,他们认为数字媒体不仅可以取代印刷文件,而且还能极大地改进印刷文件,从而证明了自己的价值。因此,对于网页设计师来说,经济方面的补救是与其社会和物质方面联系在一起的。同样,娱乐业将补救理解为重新利用,也揭示了经济与社会和物质的不可分割性。如前所述,娱乐业将再利用定义为将熟悉的媒介内容转化为另一种媒介形式:漫画系列被再利用为真人电影、电视动画片、视频游戏和动作玩具。尽管目的主要是经济上的,而不是取代先前的形式(公司很可能拥有这些形式的版权),而是将内容传播到尽可能多的市场上,但由于其经济目的只有通过物质和社会手段才能实现,因此再利用是一种补救措施。
These material, social, and economic aspects of remediation enter into Latour’s network of relationships, to which we have already appealed in characterizing media as hybrids. Although it is possible to examine each aspect separately, we believe that remediation is a concept that applies to media in their simultaneous character as objects, as social relationships, and as formal structures. A change in the formal character of a medium (for example, the invention of linear perspective in painting) may also change its economic value and its status as a viewed object. In fact, it is artificial to characterize this change as if it were a matter of cause and effect. In the case of linear perspective, the role and status of the artist and the social uses of their creations had already been changing in the fourteenth century, even as artists were experimenting with perspective techniques. ^(62){ }^{62} It 补救的这些物质、社会和经济方面进入了拉图尔的关系网络,我们在将媒体定性为混合体时已经引用了拉图尔的关系网络。尽管我们可以对每个方面进行单独研究,但我们认为 "补救 "这一概念同时适用于作为物品、社会关系和形式结构的媒介。媒介形式特征的改变(例如绘画中线性透视法的发明)也可能改变其经济价值及其作为观赏对象的地位。事实上,将这种变化描述为因果关系是不恰当的。就线性透视而言,艺术家的角色和地位及其创作的社会用途在 14 世纪就已经发生了变化,甚至在艺术家们尝试透视技术的时候也是如此。 ^(62){ }^{62} 它
would then be fair to say that the refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture. Remediation in one dimension of media hybrids always seems both to suggest and to be suggested by remediations in other dimensions. 因此,可以公平地说,在我们的文化中,关系网络的重塑就是媒介的定义。媒体混合体某一维度的补救似乎总是暗示着其他维度的补救,同时也被其他维度的补救所暗示。
Acknowledgments 致谢
We wish to thank the following readers for their valuable comments and criticisms: Anne Balsamo, Hugh Crawford, Terry Harpold, Michael Joyce, Richard Lanham, Blake Leland, and Anne Wysocki. We also wish to thank James J. Bono and Kathy Onofrio for their help in the accelerated printing process. 感谢以下读者提出的宝贵意见和批评:Anne Balsamo、Hugh Crawford、Terry Harpold、Michael Joyce、Richard Lanham、Blake Leland 和 Anne Wysocki。我们还要感谢 James J. Bono 和 Kathy Onofrio 在加速印刷过程中提供的帮助。
Georgia Institute of Technology 佐治亚理工学院
Jay David Bolter is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is jointly appointed in the College of Computing, and is the author of Storyspace, a program for creating hypertexts for individual use and World Wide Web publication. His work with computers led to the publication of Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill, 1984), a book that was widely reviewed and translated into several foreign languages. Bolter’s second book, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (L. Erlbaum, 1991), examined the computer as a new medium for symbolic communication. He is now working on the use and the cultural significance of the World Wide Web and other textual and visual electronic environments. He is also collaborating with Richard Grusin on a book-length project of which the essay in this issue will be a part. 杰伊-戴维-博尔特(Jay David Bolter)是佐治亚理工学院文学、传播与文化学院教授。他是 Storyspace 的作者,Storyspace 是一个用于创建超文本供个人使用和在万维网上发布的程序。他在计算机方面的工作促成了《图灵的人类》一书的出版:计算机时代的西方文化》(Chapel Hill,1984 年)一书受到广泛好评,并被翻译成多国语言。博尔特的第二部著作《书写空间》(Writing Space:L.Erlbaum,1991 年),该书将计算机视为一种新的符号交流媒介。他目前正在研究万维网及其他文本和视觉电子环境的使用和文化意义。他还与理查德-格鲁辛(Richard Grusin)合作撰写长篇著作,本期文章将是其中的一部分。
Richard Grusin is Chair and Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke University Press, 1991) and several articles on the American Transcendentalists. His previous essays in Configurations include “What Is an Electronic Author?” (Fall 1994) and “Representing Yellowstone: Photography, Loss, and Fidelity to Nature” (Fall 1995). He is currently completing a book entitled The Reproduction of Nature: Cultural Origins of the National Parks. His most recent work concerns the historical and cultural antecedents of postmodern theories and technologies of representation. Presently he is collaborating with Jay David Bolter on a book-length project of which the essay in this issue will be a part. 理查德-格鲁辛是佐治亚理工学院文学、传播与文化学院院长兼副教授。他著有《超验诠释学》(Transcendentalist Hermeneutics)一书:Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible》(杜克大学出版社,1991 年)以及多篇关于美国超验主义者的文章。他以前在《配置》上发表的文章包括《什么是电子作者?摄影、损失和忠于自然"(1995 年秋)。他目前正在完成一本名为《自然的再现》的书:国家公园的文化起源》一书。他最近的工作涉及后现代理论和表现技术的历史和文化前因。目前,他正与杰伊-戴维-博尔特(Jay David Bolter)合作撰写长篇著作,本期文章将是其中的一部分。
Notes 说明
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 146. "尼采、家谱、历史》,收录于《语言、反记忆、实践》:唐纳德-F-布沙尔(Donald F. Bouchard)主编(纽约州伊萨卡:康奈尔大学出版社,1977 年)。Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 146.
In tracing the ways in which attempts to deny mediation reemerge as a fascination with media, we are not trying to posit an “essence” of mediation or an “origin” or “identity” at the heart of all media. Nor are we arguing that the available media technologies are autonomous agents or that they necessarily determine how a culture represents the world to itself. In these ways, we are indebted to Foucault. But where Foucault was concerned with relations of power, our proposed genealogy is defined by the formal relations within and among media as well as by relations of cultural power and prestige. 在追溯否认媒介化的企图如何重新成为对媒介的迷恋时,我们并不是要假设媒介化的 "本质 "或所有媒介的核心 "起源 "或 "特性"。我们也不是说现有的媒体技术是自主的媒介,或者它们必然决定了一种文化如何向自己呈现世界。在这些方面,我们都要感谢福柯。不过,福柯关注的是权力关系,而我们提出的谱系则是由媒体内部和媒体之间的形式关系以及文化权力和声望关系所决定的。
Larry F. Hodges, Barbara O. Rothbaum, et al., “Presence as the Defining Factor in a VR Application,” GVU Technical Report #94-06 (Atlanta, Ga.: Graphics Visualization and Usability Center, 1994). Larry F. Hodges, Barbara O. Rothbaum, et al., "Presence as the Defining Factor in a VR Application," GVU Technical Report #94-06 (Atlanta, Ga.: Graphics Visualization and Usability Center, 1994).
Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 46. Howard Rheingold,《虚拟现实》(纽约:Simon & Schuster,1991 年),第 46 页。
However, a number of recent theorists including N. Katherine Hayles in "The Materiality of 然而,包括 N. 凯瑟琳-海尔斯(N. Katherine Hayles)在 "物质的物质性 "一书中在内的一些新近理论家认为
Informatics," Configurations 1 (1993): 147-170, and Anne Balsamo “The Virtual Body in Cyberspace,” in Research in Philosophy and Technology, ed. J. Rothschild (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1993), pp. 119-139, have argued that virtual reality is not a technology that can deliver lived or embodied experience. Informatics," Configurations 1 (1993):147-170, and Anne Balsamo "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace," in Research in Philosophy and Technology, ed. J. Rothschild (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1993), pp.J. Rothschild (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1993), pp.
5. Jaron Lanier quoted in Steve Ditlea, “Another World: Inside Artificial Reality,” PC Computing 2:11 (1989): 97. 5.Steve Ditlea 所引用的 Jaron Lanier,"另一个世界:Inside Artificial Reality," PC Computing 2:11 (1989):97.
6. Meredith Bricken, “Virtual Worlds: No Interface to Design,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 372. 6.Meredith Bricken, "Virtual Worlds: No Interface to Design," in Cyberspace:First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), p. 372.Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 372.
7. See, for example, S. K. Card, G. G. Robertson, and J. D. Macinlay, “The Information Visualizer: An Information Workspace,” in Proceedings of CHI’ 91 (New York: ACM, 1991), pp. 181-188. 7.例如,见 S. K. Card、G. G. Robertson 和 J. D. Macinlay,"The Information Visualizer:An Information Workspace," in Proceedings of CHI' 91 (New York: ACM, 1991), pp.
8. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 27. 8.埃尔温-帕诺夫斯基:《作为符号形式的透视》,克里斯托弗-S-伍德译(纽约:Zone Books, 1991 年),第 27 页。Christopher S. Wood(纽约:Zone Books,1991 年),第 27 页。
9. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3-23. Also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 69-82. Unlike Jay, Samuel Edgerton not only documents a connection between the mathematization of space and linear perspective, but seems to accept it as true. See The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 9.马丁-杰伊,"Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1988), pp.另见马丁-杰伊,《低垂的眼睛:二十世纪法国思想中对视觉的诋毁》(伯克利:加州大学出版社,1993 年),第 69-82 页。与杰伊不同,塞缪尔-埃杰顿不仅记录了空间数学化与线性透视之间的联系,而且似乎将其视为事实。见《文艺复兴时期线性透视的再发现》(纽约:基本书局,1975 年)。
10. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19-68. Also, Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), Chapter 6. See, too, William M. Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973). 10.布鲁诺-拉图尔,"Drawing Things Together," in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990), pp.Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp.此外,布鲁诺-拉图尔,《行动中的科学》:How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), Chapter 6.另见 William M. Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973)。
11. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture. The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 55. 11.莱昂-巴蒂斯塔-阿尔贝蒂,《论绘画与雕塑》。De Pictura 和 De Statua 的拉丁文本》,Cecil Grayson 编辑(伦敦:Phaidon 出版社,1972 年),第 55 页。Cecil Grayson(伦敦:Phaidon,1972 年),第 55 页。
12. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 92. On the concept of erasure, see also Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 12.Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting:The Logic of the Gaze》(纽黑文:耶鲁大学出版社,1983 年),第 92 页。关于擦除的概念,另见 Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art:博物馆文化中的现代美国艺术》(纽约:牛津大学出版社,1991 年)。
13. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 42, 70-72, ff. 13.Martin Kemp, The Science of Art:Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), pp.
14. For a revisionist view of the relationship of photography and Western art, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). 14.关于摄影与西方艺术关系的修正主义观点,见 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer:On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990)。
15. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Classic Essays in Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Islands Books, 1980), p. 239. 15.安德烈-巴赞:《摄影图像的本体论》,收录于《摄影经典论文集》,艾伦-特拉滕伯格编(纽黑文,康涅狄格州:利特岛书店,1980 年),第 239 页。Alan Trachtenberg(New Haven, Conn.: Leete's Islands Books, 1980),第 239 页。
16. In fact, photography was often regarded as going too far in the direction of concealing the artist by eliminating him altogether. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of course, this question was extensively debated: was photography an art; did it make painting and painters unnecessary, and so on? See Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography (above, n. 15), pp. vii-xiii. 16.事实上,摄影常常被认为是在掩盖艺术家的方向上走得太远,把艺术家完全抹杀了。当然,在 19 世纪和 20 世纪初,这个问题曾引起过广泛的争论:摄影是否是一种艺术;摄影是否使绘画和画家变得没有必要,等等。见 Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography(上文,注 15),pp.vi-xiii。
17. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of the Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 23. 17.Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed:对电影本体论的思考》(马萨诸塞州剑桥:哈佛大学出版社,1979 年),第 23 页。
18. A similar argument could be made for television, especially for the “live” coverage of news and sporting events, which promises immediacy through its real-time presentation. Stanley Cavell has described what he calls the “monitoring” function of television: see “The Fact of Television,” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John G. Hanhardt (Layton, Utah: G. M. Smith, Peregrine Smith Books, 1986). The case for immediacy in film is complicated by the intervention of the director and the editor, but film is still experienced as immediate during the time of its showing–an immediacy that greatly troubled Christian Metz, for example, in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). 18.电视也可以提出类似的论点,尤其是对新闻和体育赛事的 "现场 "报道,它通过实时呈现来保证即时性。斯坦利-卡维尔(Stanley Cavell)描述了他所谓的电视的 "监控 "功能:见《电视的事实》(The Fact of Television),收录于《录像文化批判性研究》(Video Culture:A Critical Investigation》,John G. Hanhardt 编辑(Lean 出版社)。John G. Hanhardt (Layton, Utah: G. M. Smith, Peregrine Smith Books, 1986)。导演和剪辑师的介入使电影的即时性变得复杂,但电影在放映期间仍被体验为即时性--这种即时性极大地困扰着克里斯蒂安-梅兹(Christian Metz),例如在《虚构的符号》(The Imaginary Signifier)一书中:精神分析与电影》(布卢明顿:印第安纳大学出版社,1977 年)一书中就对这种即时性深感不安。
19. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image” (above, n. 15), p. 240. 19.巴金:《摄影图像的本体论》(上文,第 15 页),第 240 页。
20. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 161. 20.William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye:The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 161.
21. See James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven V. Feiner, John F. Hughes, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 229-283. 21.见 James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven V. Feiner, John F. Hughes, Computer Graphics:Principles and Practice (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp.
22. See James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Kemp, The Science of Art (above, n. 13); Margaret A. Hagen, Varieties of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 22.见 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Kemp, The Science of Art (above, n. 13); Margaret A. Hagen, Varieties of Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)。
23. Foley and van Dam, Computer Graphics (above, n. 21), pp. 563-604 and pp. 721814. 23.Foley 和 van Dam,《计算机图形学》(上文,第 21 节),第 563-604 页和第 721814 页。
24. In computer graphics, as in classic representational painting or photography, it is typically visible signs of agency that are effaced; this is unlike an abstract American artist like Rauschenberg, who makes the act of erasure that which must be effaced; see Fisher, Making and Effacing Art (above, n. 12), pp. 98-99. 在计算机制图中,如同在经典的具象绘画或摄影中一样,被抹去的通常是可见的代理痕迹;这与劳申伯格这样的美国抽象艺术家不同,他将抹去行为作为必须抹去的行为;见 Fisher, Making and Effacing Art(上文,第 12 页),第 98-99 页。
25. As Fox Talbot did in his book The Pencil of Nature: see Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983), p. 50. 25.正如福克斯-塔尔博特在他的《自然之笔》一书中所做的那样:见 Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts:19 世纪的摄影技术》(纽约:R. R. Bowker,1983 年),第 50 页。
26. Rheingold, Virtual Reality (above, n. 4), p. 75. 26.Rheingold, Virtual Reality(上文,第 4 节),第 75 页。
27. Theorists in the second half of the twentieth century have consistently denied that an image is a more direct presentation of the world than is written or spoken language. Their approach has generally been to textualize the image and therefore to take it into the discourse of poststructuralism–a strategy apparent in works as diverse as Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), and in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). More recently, in Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Vision and Painting (above, n. 12), Norman Bryson has given us an overtly semiotic account of painting. In Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), W. J. T. Mitchell attempts to break down the dichotomy between words and images by arguing for a hybrid, the “imagetext,” but his picture theory finally assimilates images to words more than the reverse. Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes (above, n. 9) has shown how almost all the influential French theoreticians of the twentieth century have sought to surround and subdue the image by means of text. 27.二十世纪下半叶的理论家们一直否认图像比书面或口头语言更直接地呈现世界。他们的方法通常是将图像文本化,从而将其纳入后结构主义的话语中--这一策略在雅克-德里达的《语法学》(巴尔的摩:约翰-霍普金斯大学出版社,1976 年)和纳尔逊-古德曼的《艺术语言》(Languages of Art:An Approach to a Theory of Symbols》(印第安纳波利斯和纽约:Bobbs-Merrill,1968 年)。最近,在《文字与图像》(Word and Image:在《文字与图像:旧政体时期的法国绘画》(剑桥:剑桥大学出版社,1981 年)和《视觉与绘画》(上文,注 12)中,诺曼-布赖森对绘画进行了公开的符号学阐述。在《图像理论》(Picture Theory)(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1994 年)一书中,W. J. T. Mitchell 试图打破文字与图像的二分法,提出了一种混合体--"图像文本",但他的图像理论最终将图像与文字同化,而不是相反。马丁-杰伊(Martin Jay)在《低垂的眼睛》(Downcast Eyes)(上文,第 9 节)一书中指出,二十世纪几乎所有有影响力的法国理论家都试图通过文字来包围和征服图像。
28. In some theorists the embarrassment becomes acute. The “punctum” in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) is precisely that element in a photograph that threatens to become immediate, to pull the viewer into the photograph itself. Meanwhile, Christian Metz in the Imaginary Signifier (above, n. 18) seems appalled at the thought that the “apparatus” of the cinema can lull the viewer into a hypnotic state of apparently unmediated experience. In his analysis of the pernicious reality effect of 28.在一些理论家那里,这种尴尬变得尖锐起来。罗兰-巴特(Roland Barthes)的《露西达相机》(Camera Lucida)(纽约:希尔与王出版社,1981 年)中的 "punctum "正是照片中的元素,它有可能成为直接元素,将观者拉入照片本身。与此同时,克里斯蒂安-梅兹(Christian Metz)在《想象的符号》(Imaginary Signifier)一书(见上文,第 18 节)中似乎对电影 "机器 "能让观众进入一种显然未经中介的体验的催眠状态感到震惊。他在分析电影的有害现实效果时说
cinema, Metz relied on his reading of Lacan’s mirror stage and his theory of the Imaginary, in which the individual posits a reality (a sense of wholeness and integration) for the image that he sees in the mirror. In Lacan’s view, the desire for this reality (which we are calling immediacy) can thus lead to paranoia or worse. 梅兹在电影中依据的是他对拉康的镜像阶段及其想象理论的解读,在这一理论中,个人为自己在镜子中看到的形象假定了一种现实(整体感和融合感)。在拉康看来,对这种现实的渴望(我们称之为直接性)会导致偏执狂或更严重的后果。
29. See, for example, E. H. Gombrich’s Image and the Eye (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1982), and Margaret Hagen’s Varieties of Realism (above, n. 22) and The Perception of Pictures, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). 例如,参见 E. H. Gombrich 的《图像与眼睛》(牛津:Phaidon 出版社,1982 年),以及 Margaret Hagen 的《现实主义的变体》(上文,第 22 节)和《图像的感知》,第 1 卷和第 2 卷(纽约:学术出版社,1980 年)。
30. William Mitchell, Reconfigured Eye (above, n. 20), p. 8. 30.威廉-米切尔,《重塑的眼睛》(上文,第 20 页),第 8 页。
31. Bob Cotten and Richard Oliver, Understanding Hypermedia (London: Phaidon Press, 1992) p. 8. 31.Bob Cotten 和 Richard Oliver,《理解超媒体》(伦敦:Phaidon 出版社,1992 年)第 8 页。
32. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). 32.Svetlana Alpers,《描述的艺术:十七世纪的荷兰艺术》(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1983 年):十七世纪的荷兰艺术》(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1983 年)。
33. Ibid., pp. 69-70; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Press, 1971), pp. 3-16. 33.同上,第 69-70 页;Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Press, 1971), pp.
34. As Clement Greenberg puts it in his essay “Modernist Painting”: “Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting–the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment–were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly. Manet’s painting became the first Modernist ones by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the surfaces on which they were painted.” (Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973], pp. 68-69). 34.正如克莱门特-格林伯格在《现代主义绘画》一文中所说:"写实主义、幻觉主义艺术将媒介分解,用艺术来掩盖艺术。现代主义用艺术唤起人们对艺术的关注。构成绘画媒介的限制--平面、支架的形状、颜料的特性--被旧大师们视为只能含蓄或间接承认的负面因素。而现代主义绘画则将这些限制因素视为可以公开承认的积极因素。马奈的绘画因其坦率地揭示了画作的表面而成为第一批现代主义绘画"。(克莱门特-格林伯格,"现代主义绘画",载于《新艺术》:新艺术:评论选集》,格雷戈里-巴特科克主编[纽约:纽约艺术出版社],第 21 页。Gregory Battcock [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973], pp.)
35. Greenberg sees collage as an expression of the tension between the modernist emphasis on the surface of the painting and the inherited tradition of three-dimensional representation (“Collage,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brien [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], vol. 1, pp. 70-74). When Braque and Picasso took to pasting scraps of newspaper and wallpaper onto their canvases, they created a hypermediated experience in which the viewer oscillates between seeing the pasted objects as objects and seeing them as part of the painted scene. The viewer is constantly reminded of the materials, the surface, and the mediated character of this space. 格林伯格认为拼贴画表达了现代主义对绘画表面的强调与继承的三维表现传统之间的紧张关系("拼贴画",见《克莱门特-格林伯格:拼贴",见《克莱门特-格林伯格:散文与评论集》,约翰-奥布莱恩编[芝加哥,1986 年],第 3 页。John O'Brien [芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1986 年],第 1 卷,第 70-74 页)。当布拉克和毕加索开始在画布上粘贴报纸和墙纸碎片时,他们创造了一种超媒介体验,观众在将粘贴物视为物体和将其视为绘画场景的一部分之间摇摆不定。观众不断被提醒注意材料、表面和这一空间的中介特征。
36. Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 40. 36.Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word:民主、技术与艺术》(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1993 年),第 40 页。
37. Ibid., pp. 40-41. 37.同上,第 40-41 页。
38. Ibid., 3-28 and 31-52. 38.同上,3-28 和 31-52。
39. As Joyce puts it: “Text reproduces itself; hypertext replaces itself.” (Private Communication). 39.正如乔伊斯所说"文本自我复制;超文本自我取代"。(私人通信)。
40. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: 40.马歇尔-麦克卢汉,《理解媒体》:The Extensions of Man》(纽约:
McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 23-24. McGraw-Hill, 1964 年),第 23-24 页。
41. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (above, n. 27), pp. 151, 152. 41.W. J. T. Mitchell,《图画理论》(上文,第 27 页),第 151 和 152 页。
42. Rheingold, Virtual Reality (above, n. 4), back cover. 42.Rheingold, Virtual Reality(上文,第 4 节),封底。
43. The logic of remediation we describe here is similar to Derrida’s account of mimesis in 43.我们在此描述的补救逻辑类似于德里达在《赝品》(Mimesis)一书中对赝品的描述。
“Economimesis,” where mimesis is defined not ontologically or objectively in terms of the "经济拟态",在这里,拟态不是从本体论或客观的角度来定义的,而是从 "经济 "的角度来定义的。
resemblance of a representation to its object but rather intersubjectively in terms of the reproduction of the feeling of imitation or resemblance in the perceiving subject. “Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms. . . . ‘True’ mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.” Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11 (1981): 3-25; p. 9. 这不是指表象与其对象的相似性,而是指在感知主体中再现模仿或相似的感觉。这里的 "模仿 "不是一物对另一物的再现,不是两个生命之间的相似或认同关系,不是艺术产品对自然产品的再现。它不是两个产品的关系,而是两个产物的关系。也是两种自由的关系。. . .真正的'拟态'是两个生产主体之间的关系,而不是两个生产物之间的关系"。雅克-德里达,"Economimesis",Diacritics 11 (1981):3-25; p. 9.
44. Bryson, Vision and Painting (above, n. 12). 44.布赖森,《视觉与绘画》(上文,第 12 节)。
45. Greenberg, “Towards a New Laocoon,” (above, n. 35), p. 34. Greenberg’s account of modernism has been challenged by many critics, among them T. J. Clark, who criticizes Greenberg for not recognizing what Clark sees as modernism’s essential qualities of negation and ideological critique; “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 203220. Clark’s argument is refuted by Michael Fried, who sees Clark as subscribing to a kind of essentialism that Greenberg, too, endorses. For Fried, modernism is not about “the irreducible essence of all painting,” but rather “those conventions which, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing [a] work’s identity as painting”; p. 227, Michael Fried “How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark,” in The Politics of Interpretation, pp. 221-238. As we argue below, remediation is not the irreducible essence either of digital media or of mediation generally, but rather at our particular historical moment, remediation is one of the conventions at work in establishing the identity of new digital media. 45.Greenberg, "Towards a New Laocoon," (above, n. 35), p. 34.格林伯格对现代主义的论述受到许多批评家的质疑,其中包括 T. J. 克拉克,他批评格林伯格没有认识到克拉克所认为的现代主义的基本特质,即否定和意识形态批判;"克莱门特-格林伯格的艺术理论",载于《阐释的政治学》,W. J. T. Mitchell 编(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1983 年),第 34 页。W. J. T. Mitchell(芝加哥:芝加哥大学出版社,1983 年),第 203220 页。迈克尔-弗里德驳斥了克拉克的论点,他认为克拉克赞同格林伯格也赞同的一种本质主义。在弗里德看来,现代主义并不涉及 "所有绘画不可还原的本质",而是 "那些在特定时刻能够确立作品绘画身份的惯例";第 227 页,迈克尔-弗里德《现代主义是如何运作的》:A Response to T. J. Clark," in The Politics of Interpretation, pp.正如我们在下文所论证的,补救并非数字媒体或一般中介不可还原的本质,而是在我们特定的历史时刻,补救是确立新数字媒体身份的惯例之一。
46. It is in this sense of older media remediating newer ones that our notion of remediation can be distinguished from the Hegelian concept of sublation (“Aufhebung”), in which prior historical formations (like pagan religions) are sublated or incorporated by newer formations (like Christianity). But as Slavoj Zizek points out, the interesting move in thinking about Hegelian sublation is to look at those moments when the newer formation is still “in its becoming,” when it is perceived as something of a scandal. It is in part the attempt to understand remediation at such a historical moment that we are endeavoring in this essay. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 284-285, n. 34. 46.正是在这种旧媒介补救新媒介的意义上,我们的补救概念可以与黑格尔的潜移默化("Aufhebung")概念区分开来,在潜移默化中,先前的历史形态(如异教)被新的形态(如基督教)升华或融入。但正如斯拉沃伊-齐泽克(Slavoj Zizek)所指出的那样,思考黑格尔的 "潜移默化 "的有趣之处在于,当新的形式仍处于 "成为中 "时,当它被视为某种丑闻时,我们就应该关注这些时刻。我们在这篇文章中所做的部分努力,正是试图在这样的历史时刻理解补救。斯拉沃伊-齐泽克,《与否定者同行》:Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp.
47. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 162. 47.Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism:或晚期资本主义的文化逻辑》(北卡罗来纳州达勒姆:杜克大学出版社,1991 年),第 162 页。
48. Ibid., p. 68. 48.同上,第 68 页。
49. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 62. 49.布鲁诺-拉图尔,《我们从未现代过》,Catherine Porter 译(剑桥,马萨诸塞州:哈佛大学出版社,1993 年),第 62 页。Catherine Porter(马萨诸塞州剑桥:哈佛大学出版社,1993 年),第 62 页。
50. Prior to We Have Never Been Modern, Latour’s fullest account of the heterogeneous network that links together humans, language, and the external world is in Science in Action (above, n. 10). 50.在《我们从未现代过》之前,拉图尔在《行动中的科学》(Science in Action)一书中对人类、语言和外部世界之间的异质网络进行了最全面的阐述(上文,第 10 节)。
51. For Cavell on modernist painting and acknowledgment, see “The Fact of Television” (above, n. 18), 108-118. The relations among Cavell, Fried, and Greenberg are complex. See, for example, note 45 for Fried’s Cavell-inspired criticism of Greenberg and T. J. Clark. 51.关于卡维尔对现代主义绘画和承认的看法,见《电视的事实》(The Fact of Television)(上文,注 18),108-118 页。卡维尔、弗里德和格林伯格之间的关系错综复杂。例如,弗里德在卡维尔的启发下对格林伯格和 T. J. 克拉克的批评,见注 45。
52. Fisher, Making and Effacing Art (above, n. 12), p. 37. 52.Fisher, Making and Effacing Art(上文,n.12),第 37 页。
53. See Wendy A. Kellogg, John M. Carroll, and John T. Richards, “Making Reality a Cyberspace” in Michael Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 411-433. 53.见 Wendy A. Kellogg, John M. Carroll, and John T. Richards, "Making Reality a Cyberspace" in Michael Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace:First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp.
54. Ibid., p. 418. 54.同上,第 418 页。
55. Ibid. 55.同上。
56. See Bruno Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. W. E. Bijker and J. Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 225-258. 56.见布鲁诺-拉图尔:《缺失的大众在哪里?The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts," in Shaping Technology/Building Society:社会技术变革研究》,W.E. Bijker 和罗杰斯出版社。W. E. Bijker and J. Law (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp.
57. Cavell, The World Viewed (above, n. 17), p. 22. 57.Cavell, The World Viewed(上文,注 17),第 22 页。
58. Ibid., p. 22. 58.同上,第 22 页。
59. This psychological economy of remediation, in which the desire for immediacy cannot be fulfilled by transparent media, and must therefore be supplemented by technologies of hypermediacy, is analogous to the Lacanian critique of desire. Zizek provides this concise formulation of Lacan’s critique: “Desire is constituted by ‘symbolic castration,’ the original loss of the thing; the void of this loss is filled out by objét petit a, the fantasy object; this loss occurs on account of our being ‘embedded’ in the symbolic universe which derails the ‘natural’ circuit of our needs”; Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative (above, n. 46) p. 3. 59.在这种补救性的心理经济中,对即时性的渴望无法通过透明媒体来满足,因此必须通过超媒介技术来补充,这类似于拉康对欲望的批判。齐泽克对拉康的批判进行了简洁的表述:"欲望是由'象征性阉割'构成的,即事物的原初丧失;这种丧失的空白由 objét petit a(幻想对象)填补;这种丧失的发生是因为我们被'嵌入'到象征性的宇宙中,而象征性的宇宙使我们需求的'自然'回路出轨";齐泽克,《与否定者同行》(上文,注 46),第 3 页。
60. For this early history, see, for example, S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (New York: Criterion Books, 1959).61. Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography (above, n. 15), p. 27; Kemp, The Science of Art (above, n. 13), p. 200. 60.关于这一早期历史,可参阅 S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (New York: Criterion Books, 1959)。Trachtenberg, Classic Essays in Photography(上文,第 15 页),第 27 页;Kemp, The Science of Art(上文,第 13 页),第 200 页。
62. For a study of these painters, see John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). 62.有关这些画家的研究,见 John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1987)。