Remediation: Medium inside Medium

"Remediation is a defining characteristic of new media." (Bolter, 2000: pp.45). Bolter talks of how mediums constantly remediate each other, as technology moves on mediums adapt by using old mediums to 'evolve' from.
This happens all the time in our lives, take a popular film that you have saw, for example the recent release of Alan Taylor's 'Thor: The Dark World'. This film was remediated from a Marvel comic book series of the same name. The words and images may not match exactly, although it is definitely following the printed comic's storyline.




If we take a closer look at one subject and analyse it for remediation we can truely see the process at work. 'Transformers' started as toy vehicles that transformed into robots, toy company 'Hasbro' bought the rights to these toys and then went on to co-produce a television cartoon from them. As the cartoon grew in popularity Hasbro wanted to release new toys for the fans to buy, their way of introducing a mass batch of new toys was to have a feature length theatrical film release that killed off most of the current characters and introduce a whole new set to the audience. Transformers went on as a television cartoon although had many generations of it. As technology progressed computers were used to create the cartoons instead of them being hand drawn, this was seen in 'Transformers: Beast Wars'. Technology kept improving as did the quality of the new generations series of Transformers cartoons.

In 2007 'Transformers' made an entirely new step into 'live action' film. The story, that had been revamped already many times, was again revamped and a new breed of transformers, taking heavy influence from the previous cartoons took shape. Actors were used and state of the art sfx teams made these Transformers come to life. Bolter stated that "The new medium remains dependant on the older one" (Bolter, 2000: pp.47) and in the case of Transformers this can be seen to be very true.

Mediums taking influence from other mediums for remediation is one thing, although we can also see some mediums in their current fields taking a greater influence and actually incorporating content into it's own form to create something new. This can be seen in music videos and is called 'visible remediation'. An example being 'Linkin Park's music video for their track called 'Iridescent'. It takes clips from 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' (2011) and uses them very obviously throughout the music video.