Remediation, Empathy, Creative Exegesis: The Potential of Hypermedia for Generation of New Ways of Interpretation in Art and Life
Abstrakt
The submitted article aims to examine and illuminate the creative interpretative method of
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin presented in their shared work Remediation. The further focus is then to show how the three main cultural instruments in their understanding help to engage the viewer's/interpreter's creative and empathetic faculties, for example, in an interpretation of an artwork. Their three main instruments are immediacy and hypermediacy, which fall under the overarching process of remediation. The article analyses the use of immediate artistic elements in the first-person shooter Half-Life, as an example of an immersive medium. Then it considers the signs of hypermediacy in The Backrooms and in the use of
VHS medium and its filters. The discussion of remediation takes place within these two main arguments, as it occurs concurrently with the world building that uses immediacy and/or hypermediacy. The conclusion then focuses on how these processes influence our empathy and engagement with a work of art and offers a short pragmatic recommendation based on
Frank O'Hara's approach to art and life.