New media remediation
As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message” (or the “massage”). In remediated works that use appropriated material to create something new, this is certainly the case. By adding links to a work, there are, as Landow said “certain major effects” (Hypertext 2.0, 76); by adding visuals and audio, the message becomes reliant on the medium and less reliant on alphabetic text, or, in the case of this Flash piece, not reliant at all. Through music, visuals, and audio clips of representational passages from “The Masque of the Red Death”, the story is re-presented while preserving, ideally, the same meaning—just through a different medium.
DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller) says “Dj-ing is writing, writing is DJ-ing” (57) and “The Masque of the Red Death” is certainly a remix of a traditional story. To create the Flash narrative, I appropriated representational text from Poe’s “original” story (see Print remediation) that would create a spooky, fragmented audio piece to lay over a musical score (composed by Patrick S. Vickers). I then Google-image searched for specific images from the text, such as “gates of iron”, as well as doing a search for “The Masque of the Red Death”. The images are used without permission, and without citations—a rather grey area and one of the main issues in appropriated materials in remediation. Poe’s text of course is in the public domain, and using other people’s work, unless it’s through creative commons or with permissions, falls under Fair Use so long as it is made into something entirely your own or for satirical purposes. Although I did Photoshop the images, and distort them to an extent in the Flash piece, I think my use of them, although not satirical, could be arguable if it weren’t for the protection under “student use”. The size and coloring for the piece was meant to echo the squares from the hypertext version, as well as provide the same dizzying, claustrophobic feeling, found in both the original text and the hypertext version.
As Anne Wysocki says, all texts are new media and any text “doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts” (15). The idea of remediating texts is to preserve the integrity of the original work while presenting the narrative in a different way, using the tools of technology to enhance or replace textual cues. The music here, I feel, does much of the work that the alphabetic text description does in the print version—emotion and narrative. The sound of the voice is often more intimate than the written word and the reverberating tone of the deep voice provides the impending fear of the narrative, often contrasting with the masquerade images. The images were meant to move through one another in a way that supported the linear narrative, but provided that same disoriented feeling that I was going for in the hypertext.
Poe says in “The American Drama”, “the great adversary of Invention is Imitation” (1). I often wonder what he would think of the technological capabilities available today, the Internet as a tool of mass communication and distribution of “free” texts and information. He saw imitative art as stationary. With all of the cultural appropriation and remediation of his own art, I wonder if he would feel we were stagnated culturally by continuing to mimic him. Remediation is a form of imitation, while the use of other art forms in the process can express the new author’s own message as well as playing off the original. In many of his stories, he seems to be making statements about mass-culture and its effect on the individual. “The Man in the Crowd” and “The Man that was Used Up” seem to warn of becoming immersed in mass consumerism, mass technology—lost in the crowd and unrecognizable.
Remediation is only one aspect of electronic composition. Although it is fun and challenging to remediate existing texts for an electronic medium, it is important to remember that texts don’t function independent of their medium. For the medium to truly be the message, the author ideally would have composed for that medium specifically. Jerome McGann says, “electronic texts have a special virtue that paper-based texts do not have: They can be designed for complex interactive transformations” (81). To create metaphor and narrative with images and audio is far easier in original electronic composition. To take an existing text from someone else and transform their words with links and fragmentation, or visuals and music, is more challenging—particularly when you are concerned with preserving the original authorial intent. But just as we need to preserve the originality of classic texts by archiving them online, we also need the freedom to use available materials combined with new media to create new art for a new medium and a new audience.