Los Angeles in the last two days of 1999, on the eve of "2K," is saturated with cellular phones, voice- and text-based telephone answering systems, radios, and billboard-sized television screens that constitute public media spaces. 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. Strange Days itself is less enthusiastic about the wire than Lenny and his customers. The wire's appeal is that it bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly from one consciousness to another. Lenny mentions television, but we can extend his critique to books, paintings, photographs, film, and so on. 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. 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. 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. The wire is a technological wonder that deserves Lenny's praise. feeling it." Lenny is touting a black-market device called "the wire" to a potential customer. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. "This is not like TV only better," says Lenny Nero in the futuristic film Strange Days. The following discussion distinguishes between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and applies this theoretical foundation to Claerbout‟s work. It makes critical awareness possible because it lays bare the workings of media instead of obfuscating them. (Art)works that employ reversed remediation destabilize remediation mechanisms, by making media visible instead of transparent. 4 It creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one‟s perception of the world. 1) artworks exemplify what I call „reversed remediation‟.2 This aesthetic strategy subverts Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin‟s notion of „remediation,‟ which serves a historical desire for immediacy.3 Countering Marshall McLuhan‟s fear of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium reversed remediation offers a chance to wake up the viewer. I believe that in order to „reclaim one‟s mind‟ one should be able to critically assess the influence media have on one‟s perception of the world.
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