TRACES OF PRESENCE; Culture's dESIRE FOR IMMEDIACY 

The practices of contemporary media constitute a lens through which we can view the history of remediation. What we wish to highlight from the past is what resonates with the twin preoccupations of contemporary media: the transparent presentation of the real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media themselves. (Pg: 21)

In order to create a sense of presence, virtual reality should come as close as possible to our daily visual experience. 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: slow frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colors, bland lighting, and system crashes. (Pg: 22)

These earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of the aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity. all of which are strategies also at work in digital technology. As Albrecht Diirer noted, and as Panofsky (1991) reminded us in Perspective as Symbolic Form (27), perspective means a "seeing through," and, like the interface designers of today, students of linear perspective promised immediacy through transparency. They trusted in linear perspective to achieve transparency because by mathematizing space, it used the "right" technique to measure the world. Martin Jay and others have argued for a close connection between Albertian perspective and Descartes's spatial mathematics. For Jay (1988), "Cartesian perspectivalism" constituted a peculiar way of seeing that dominated Western culture from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth by allowing the Cartesian subject to control space from a single vantage point. (Pg: 24)

Contemporary literary and cultural theorists would deny that linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, or computer graphics could ever achieve unmediated presentation.' For such theorists, the desire for immediacy through visual representation has become a somewhat embarrassing (because under-theorized traditions). Outside the circles of theory, however, the discourse of the immediate has been and remains culturally compelling. Even within the academic community, among art historians and perceptual psychologists, linear perspective is still regarded as having some claim to being natural. (See, for example, Gombrich 1982; Hagen 1980, 1986.) Meanwhile, computer graphics experts, computer users, and the vast audiences for popular film and television continue to assume that unmediated presentation is the ultimate goal of 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.

It is important to note that the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is the same thing as what it represents. Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups, and our quick survey cannot do justice to this variety. (Pg: 30)

One reason that this style has not been exhausted is that it functions as a cultural counterbalance to the desire for immediacy in digital technology. As a counterbalance hypermediacy is more complicated and various. In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicity. If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not asa window on to the world, but rather as "windowed" itself-with windows that open on to other representations or other media. (Pg: 33)

According to Clement Greenberg's influential formulation, it was not until modernism that the cultural dominance of the paradigm of transparency was effectively challenged.' In modernist art, the logic of hypermediacy could express itself both as a fracturing of the space of the picture and as a hyperconscious recognition or acknowledgment of the medium. Collage and photomontage in particular provide evidence of the modernist fascination with the reality of media. (Pg: 38) 

Although this quote is directly referring to modern visual art works, we can see here how there is a certain desire for exposure or say, transparency -- like in simulcasts of opera and mass sporting events, the audience will desire more than just the 'art'... or just the 'performance' but rather the apparatus needs to be constructed in front of us (I'm thinking about the backstage cast and crew interviews, the setting of the stage during intermission and also the various outreach programmes that the institutions offer).

The logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a "rear space that lies beyond mediation. Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between looking at and looking through. (Pg: 41)

Source:-

Bolter, J. David, Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding new media (mit Press, 2000).