Augmented Human: How Technology Is Shaping the New Reality by Helen Papagiannis

Author:Helen Papagiannis [Papagiannis, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2017-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

Remediation and Transcending the Old

Each medium borrows from the medium before it. Bolter and Gruisin call this remediation. AR remediates film and special effects, and the medium after AR will also remediate AR. (We don’t know what that medium is yet, and let’s not worry about it for now, but my guess, if you are curious, is an extension of AR that melds the human brain and computing to even more directly experience and feel the world with all of our senses more wholly integrated and synthesized.) The challenge of remediation is that when a medium is new it typically replicates the qualities of the prior medium. The danger of this is that the new medium focuses on the characteristics of the older medium rather than building on what is truly new.

So, how do we drive the medium forward without replicating what has come before? “Wet clay.” Lots of it. This is not only an excellent time for artists of all types to be involved, it’s a critical time and we need to begin now. A new medium’s expressive language doesn’t develop overnight; film’s long history of stylistic development is an excellent example of this. “When Edison was making his early films in the 1890s, he had most of the technology needed to make a Hollywood feature film,” said Ken Perlin, of the NYU Media Research Lab.11 “It took decades to work out over the shoulder shots, two-shots, and editing. It’s not about technology.”

Here’s a question I often ask about AR: “Does the technology drive the storytelling, or does storytelling drive the technology?” I believe AR requires both. In the first wave of AR, technology led heavily, but now in this second wave we are seeing a shift toward the importance of experience design driven by compelling storytelling. This requires building off of the unique characteristics of AR as a medium, where the technology can influence the storytelling. In this wet clay period, we also have the ability to influence how the technology develops by defining the types of stories that we want to tell and building those capabilities into the technology.

Media theorist Steven Holtzman argues that approaches of repurposing “don’t exploit the special qualities” of a medium, and that “it’s those unique qualities that will ultimately define entirely new languages of expression.”12 He describes repurposing as a “transitional step” that permits “a secure footing on unfamiliar terrain.” However, Holtzman urges that we must “transcend the old” to discover the new, for, “like a road sign, repurposing is a marker indicating that profound change is around the bend.”13 And profound change is in fact just around the bend for AR, particularly as we bear witness to the emergence of this second wave. We can describe the first wave of AR as a “transitional step” in which we saw techniques like two-dimensional (2-D) video being layered atop paper in AR, such as in augmented books and newspapers (an example of a previous media form seen within a new format). The second

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