Opera as Hypermedium: Meaning-Making, Immediacy, and the Politics of Perception Tereza Havelková

Abstract

‘In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as multiplicity.’ It is appropriate that Tereza Havelková’s theoretically rich monograph begins not with her own words, but instead with a quotation whose presence foreshadows the multiplicity of viewpoints—the theoretical hypermediacy, even—that characterizes much of the volume. In this case, it is with a lengthy epigraph written by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, whose concept of hypermediacy underpins Havelková’s study. Hypermediacy is a self-consciously presentational mode of representation that foregrounds its own multiplicity. As Bolter and Grusin explain, it is characterized by a mode of complex seeing, ‘in which representation is conceived not as a window on to the world, but rather as “windowed” itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media’ (Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 33–4)). Hypermediacy is distinguished by heterogeneity and fragmentation. Its opposite is ‘transparent immediacy’, which Havelková describes as ‘the desire to obscure the medium and the act of mediation’ (p. 2) leading to the perception of direct communication. These concepts, whose corollaries Havelková finds in Greg Giesekam’s categories of ‘intermedial’ (aligning with hypermedia) and ‘multimedia’ (with transparent immediacy) provide Havelková with the primary critical tools for her analysis (p. 5). While transparent immediacy has long been understood as the dominant mode through which contemporary art and performance are perceived, and hypermediacy as a secondary form, Havelková argues for a reorientation of the two modes of perception for analysing the hypermedial operas that make up her object of study.