Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation

The concepts of Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Remediation is considered a canon of modern storytelling, as well a media for the digital age. Classically, these three principles work as semi-exclusive criteria for describing new and interdisciplinary media.

• Immediacy is the concept of media able to transcend the bounds of its medium, based off the lack of media perception. While (debatably) unobtainable, immediacy lends itself to the realism seem in computer generated imagery for cinema, photography, and soundscape audio. 
• Hypermediacy is the undeniable presence of media in storytelling and consumptive process. The audience is unable to experience immediacy in the hypermediated setting
• Remediation is the process of one media approximating another, either through hypermediacy, immediacy or some other process. 

These three terms are assumed to be inversely related, the more immediacy is conformed to, the less hyermediate it is considered. Remediation can be a product of either hypermediacy or immediacy, depending on its implementation. 

Yet how does this relate to an exceedingly mediated situations, that are also perceived as hyper-real? The concept of interdisciplinary experiential performance art is not new, but its prescience in the mainstream art culture has just emerged. 

This genera is most closely explained by a 1919 essay, The Uncanny, and a 1938 manuscript, The Theater and its Double. The Uncanny is "the opposite of the familiar",  a hyper-real state created by the juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible identities. The Theater and its Double focuses on the visceral nature of theater as a transcendental spoken-acted medium. These two concepts work to create a state of perception more real than the standard, conceptual, human experience. 

Then She Fell using a two-way mirror 

Yet these projects rely on the intense presence of media. They do not seek to emulate real-life, but instead to create an encompassing reality distinct from our own. One could claim the presence of hypermediated reality, as the world becomes inexplicably linked to its medium of presentation. Yet this would be inaccurate, as from the audience's perspective the illusion instantly overpowers the media.

Sleep No More, audience in white masks

Many have compared this form of theater to alternate reality games, yet it exists as something distinctly different, and something currently unnamed.

(lack of) Subtlety in Lighting

Subtlety is perhaps the most forgotten element of lighting in the modern theater. Today with professional theater companies one style of lighting dominates the visual scene. It is agressive lighting designed to force a scene with strong, vibrant colors and hard directional angles. This style of lighting is undoubtably a hybridization of the entertainment lighting that evolv

ed with rock and roll crossed with the Jesus Christ Superstar to Wicked transition that took

over Broadway three and a half decades ago. With the advent of computerized control decks, moving lights, digital projectors, dichroic color mixing, and later LED fixtures, lighting designers embraced an over-the-top, intensity driven style designed to overpower the audience. This style of design can only be described as replacement lighting, where the natural emotions created by a production are forced out by a combination of sound and lighting.

Don't get me wrong, there is most certainly a place for elaborate, intense and overpowering lighting. The last scene of Next to Normal where the entire stage became engulfed in blinding light (created by over 300 250watt incandescent bulbs) was exactly what that produced needed at that moment, but not every scene, not every song needs to remind us of Oprah or CSI. What I am talking to is the tendency to homogenize the emotional response of an audience by locking down focus and creating a sensory overload. This is not theater.