Adaptation as a remix
What do we mean by the term adaptation?
The action or process of adapting or being adapted.
A film, television drama, or stage play that has been adapted from a written work.
The process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/adaptation
In what way do adaptations feature as a prominent aspect of modern art?
Art nowadays I believe is mainly all created because of the art from the past. In order to get inspiration for artwork I think it's mainly influenced by art that was created in the past.
What happens when a work is moved across formats (eg from book to film)
I think that if a film that is based off a book comes out it makes the book really popular and will make people read the book as well as watch the film because not all films go along the exact same storyline as the book.
Defining Adaptations - Critical Perspectives
Adaptation: the transfer of a work from one medium to another.
“Adaptations are everywhere today: on the television and movie screen, on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic books, in your nearest theme park and video arcade”
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation
I find this quote really true and has definitely made me think about the most recent things I have seen on TV and in the cinema and what I have seen in a theme park. The most recent film I have seen that I can think of off the top of my head that has been adapted from a book is The Girl on the Train. I read the book and watched the film and the book was different but the film was based off the book.
“New intertextual forms [are] engendered by emerging technologies—mashups, remixes, reboots, samplings, remodelings, transformations—[that] further develop the impulse to adapt and appropriate”
Eckart Voigts, “Memes and Recombinant Appropriation: Remix, Mashup, Parody
Both of theses quotes are from theorists and are talking about different things. The first one is talking about the adaptation of products whereas the other quote is talking about other routes.
Adaptation as Dominant Mode
How do you explain the large numbers of works based on pre-existing work?
I'm not sure if I understand the question in the correct way but I am understand it as explaining the large numbers of works based on pre-existing work as people are finding the work from the past very inspirational and just feel like it needs a bit more updating.
Why do you think that adaptations are the dominant product in today's media market?
I think because so many people have done it so people are just going along with what everyone else is doing, I'm thinking back to the Culture of the Copy from last week but again I'm not sure if I've interpreted it right again.
The many faces of Batman
How do different adaptations of the same thing account for changing contexts and new audiences?
I guess by changing it to different audiences it is just moving the characters with the time. If the face of Batman still looked the same as it did 20 years ago for example the younger generation wouldn't be as connected with the character.
Adaptation in art
This was shown to me as taking a piece of artwork and slightly inverting them, fir example the Banksy street art. Banksy is an artist that makes a lot of controversial pieces of art using political and world problems in his artwork and creates the work all over the country and world.
Nostalgia
There is no real example of nostalgia as it is all individual and personal to every individual but I would describe it to me as a memory that brings back happy memories of experiences in my life. To others it could be something that reminds you of something, romanticisation for example, Gameboys, Vinyls
Theorising Nostalgia
“...nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
We then spoke about the Keep Calm and Carry On poster which actually was originally a War Time poster in preparation for the war in 1939. The poster was created in order to raise moral during the war to the British public. 2.45 million copies of the poster were printed but it wasn't until 2000 when the poster became popular and well known. It was then mass produced again in 2008.
“It is important to record that the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise, one connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’ – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940–41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one which Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy spotted in his 2004 book After Empire, the Blitz and the Victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by ‘the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’. ‘1940’ and ‘1945’ were ‘obsessive repetitions’, ‘anxious and melancholic’, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its Empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began.”
Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia, 2016
What is Nostalgia?
A sentimentality or romanticism for the past and its characteristics.
We were talking about the new and the old Disney movies, a lot of them are being recreated recently because Walt Disney wanted new versions of the films to be made every 10 years. The new Lion King is coming out soon so I watched the trailer because I haven't seen it yet. I was pleasantly surprised because it reminds me exactly like the old film just not as animated but where does the nostalgia come into the new film? It's the same with the new Beauty and the Beast film because it again is pretty much the same as the older version.
Hauntology
“Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past. . . . Does then the ‘historical’ person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, at once they ‘return’ and make their apparitional debut. Derrida has been pleased to call this dual movement of return and inauguration a ‘hauntology’, a coinage that suggests a spectrally deferred non-origin within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity”
Buse and Scott, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History,11
This is explaining what hauntology is, ghosts of the present but not being in the present
So what is Hauntology?
The present is haunted by the past
The ghost of the past in the present
Non origin
Ghost of the past haunting the present
Hauntology describes a historical and ontological disjunction of the present by spectres of the past.
Hauntology incorporates the notion of non-origin in which the present is neither present nor past.
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