28 Class sessions

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(No Transcript)
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Intro to Visual Culture
Live!
28 Class sessions
22 Guest Lecturers
Many, MANY PowerPoint slides
Starring Mark Olson, with your Host Professor
Kristine Stiles
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Keepin It Real

• Reality Television Visual Culture

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Reality TV

• Real people (real ordinary)
• Unscripted
• Ordinary / Extraordinary Situations
• Commercial
• Entertainment

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Specificity of the Televisual

• Flow
• Space of the home
• Segmented Flow
• Liveness potential

• Segmented Audiences
• Divergent Platforms
• Timeshifting

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Television Real Life

• Televisions real value is to make people
  participants in ongoing experiences. Real life
  is vastly more exciting than synthetic life, and
  this is real life drama with audience
  participation.

1969 - Television news anchor describing the
televising of the Apollo moon landing
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Real life is exciting?
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Reality TVs spectacular claim to reality
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Spectacular mode of address

• Mode of address - establishing a relationship
  between the text and an audience (preferred
  reading)
• Play of immediacy hypermediacy

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Immediacy

• Erasure of the gap between signifier signified
  / between representation and reality
• Forget the presence of the medium
• Grasping the real

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Hypermediacy

• Remind the viewer of the medium -- making us
  conscious that the reality we see is mediated
• Multiplying the levels and sites of mediation

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Big Brother
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Surveillance

• Reality TV promotes the idea that surveillance is
  a natural mode through which to observe the
  social world
• Unaware of cameras, or forget that they are
  there, yielding truth and reality

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The Confession

• Visual reality the problem of interiority
• Acting vs. Being (being real)

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Hyperreality

• The authentic fake (Umberto Eco)
• A blending of reality and representation (or
  performance identity) where there is no clear
  indication where the former stops and the latter
  begins.

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Hyperreality
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Surveillance America
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YouTube lonelygirl15