Visual
"Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected."- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
For my example of visual space, I wanted to use Disney's Fantasia 2000 as a way of remediating Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue into a new medium. In this animation, we can see how a team of artists interpret the original piece of music. What's fascinating about visual space, is that it can allow for many different interpretations to be made about the original score. However, it can be very challenging to attempt to remediate sound as a visual form. How would one use images, shapes, and other visual features to help represent something that we normally only associate with listening to? For these animators, they decided to create a story about how people struggle to maintain or obtain jobs within a difficult economy while simultaneously animating alongside with the music. Would everyone interpret Gershwin's music in this particular way? Definitely not, but the visuals provide us a way to follow along with the music and see how the score can be represented by utilizing visual images. While there can certainly be numerous different ways to represent Rhapsody in Blue, this one stuck out to me the most.
Even though the Disney version of Rhapsody in Blue provides for a very fun and exciting perspective on Gershwin's original piece, I wanted to find out what was his original intent for the song. I was able to find out that Gershwin intended for the piece to challenge the original idea that jazz music had to be played in a way that people could dance to it. Even though Disney's interpretation of the song doesn't bring this idea in a direct manner, we as an audience can see that the fast paced jazz music is set as background sound for people's everyday lives.
Although, one main issue that comes along with visual culture is that we, as people, tend to only view what attracts to us. While there is many stunning visuals in the Rhapsody in Blue animation, it could possibly distract people from the amazing score in the background. This also brings up another issue where normally the two mediums of visual and sound may be competing for the attention of the audience and some may actually overlap each other in some parts of the animation.