The medium of television is responsible for a huge accumulation of redundant objects: old TV sets and VTRs (and the tables to put them on), superseded production equipment and software, videotape and film that is no longer useable. This raises various questions, from practical to historiographical and methodological ones. What are we to do with this accumulation of objects, many of which are not easily recycled?
Several weeks ago I came across an interesting piece in The Guardian featuring the work of Jason Shulman, a photographer who condenses entire films into a single image by shooting them in one ultra-long exposure. By using this technique Shulman produces haunting images of these films that could quite easily be mistaken for some of the later, more abstract paintings of William Turner.
What Students Want to Write About (Final Project) I have been absent from CST for too long. The reason for my absence has been entirely due to my commitment to work and students undergoing their ‘Final Year Project’. In January I was given the honour and task of guiding 150 BATAR (BA Television and Radio) final-year students through their last, and arguably most important, Theory Essay.
The end of my university career approaches as a result of my (reluctant) acceptance of voluntary redundancy. I will finish in November 2017 after 25 years of teaching media at the University of Waikato. There is a bigger picture; by leaving in November, my colleagues will not have to go through a demeaning process of re-applying for their jobs. But they will also be hard pressed to cover all our courses and satisfy student demands.
I don’t have much time for WikiLeaks or its narcissist-in-chief. Anyone surprised by their revelations (consider, you know, the history of the US government domestically and internationally since, oh, 1776) or his conduct (q.v. Julian Assange v. Swedish Prosecution Authority) is naive in the extreme.
Previous blog posts by my Adapt colleague, Professor James Bennett, on our social media research project have focused on ‘Social Media in the Television Workplace’ and social media’s impact on the production of live TV. This post shifts our focus from The Voice, as a ‘shiny floor show’ with social production by a discrete digital unit, to draw on our subsequent ethnographic observations of Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch gallery
The perfect set for every home I love going to archives. From my first visits, I knew that this was going to be the most exciting part of my research. As a researcher of television history, I initially expected to spend my time just at the BFI and the BBC Written Archive, but as my research veered towards the material history of the television set I had to be a little more creative.
I guess we have all had the experience of pointing a remote device at the wrong point of focus, and wondered why nothing was appearing on the screen. Or having sat on the TV remote accidentally, to create mayhem on the screen. That might be the only times we have become more aware of our dependence on the remote.
I’m in Colombia, doing some research on a plaque unveiled by Prince Charles in Cartagena two years ago that briefly commemorated a British fleet trying to starve the inhabitants into submission and make the United Kingdom an occupying power in South America. The plaque lasted just a few hours before being “transformed” by an activist engineer, then removed by the municipal government, following mass Twitter protests.
Much has been written about the way in which social media has reinvigorated live television, particularly from the perspective of the audience (for example, Liz Evans, Sheryl Wilson, or Inge Sø renson). But much less is known, or written, about how the liveness of social media has affected the production of a range of forms of live television that have made increasing use of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, Instagram and
