Spectacular Television

In terms of visual impact, television has often been regarded as inferior to cinema. It has been characterised as sound-led and consumed by a distracted audience. Today, it is tempting to see the rise of HD television as ushering in a new era of spectacular television. Yet since its earliest days, the medium has been epitomised by spectacle and offered its viewers diverse forms of visual pleasure. Looking at the early promotion of television and the launch of colour broadcasting, Spectacular Television traces a history of television as spectacular attraction, from its launch to the contemporary age of surround sound, digital effects and HD screens. In focusing on the spectacle of nature, landscape, and even our own bodies on television via explorations of popular television dramas, documentary series and factual entertainment, and ambitious natural history television, Helen Wheatley answers the questions: what is televisual pleasure, and how has television defined its own brand of spectacular aesthetics?

In terms of visual impact, television has often been regarded as inferior to cinema. It has been characterised as sound-led and consumed by a distracted audience. Today, it is tempting to see the rise of HD television as ushering in a new era of spectacular television. Yet since its earliest days, the medium has been epitomised by spectacle and offered its viewers diverse forms of visual pleasure. Looking at the early promotion of television and the launch of colour broadcasting, Spectacular Television traces a history of television as spectacular attraction, from its launch to the contemporary age of surround sound, digital effects and HD screens. In focusing on the spectacle of nature, landscape, and even our own bodies on television via explorations of popular television dramas, documentary series and factual entertainment, and ambitious natural history television, Helen Wheatley answers the questions: what is televisual pleasure, and how has television defined its own brand of spectacular aesthetics?

In this prequel to Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (1998), his acclaimed book about the post-industrial city as a site of theming, branding and simulated spaces, sociologist John Hannigan travels back in time to the 1950s. Unfairly stereotyped as ‘the tranquillized decade’, America at mid-century hosted an escalating proliferation and conjunction of ‘spectacular’ events, spaces, and technologies. Spectacularization was collectively defined by five features. It reflected and legitimated a dramatic increase in scale from the local/regional to the national. It was mediated by the increasingly popular medium of television. It exploited middle-class tension between comfortable conformity and desire for safe adventure. It celebrated technological progress, boosterism and military power. It was orchestrated and marketed by a constellation, sometimes a coalition, of entrepreneurs and dream merchants, most prominently Walt Disney. In this wide-ranging odyssey across mid-century America, Hannigan visits leisure parks (Cypress Gardens), parades (Tournament of Roses), mega-events (Squaw Valley Olympics, Century 21 Exposition), architectural styles (desert modernism), innovations (underwater photography, circular film projection) and everyday wonders (chemistry sets). Collectively, these fashioned the ‘spectacular gaze’, a prism through which Americans in the 1950s were acculturated to and conscripted into a vision of a progressive, technology-based future. Rise of the Spectacular will appeal to architects, landscape designers, geographers, sociologists, historians, and leisure/tourism researchers, as well as non-academic readers who are by a fascinating era in history.

Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world. Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.

Providing video companionship for isolated housewives, afternoon babysitting for children, and nonstop evening entertainment for the whole family, television revolutionized American society in the post–World War II years. Helping the first TV generation make sense of the new medium was the mission of Jack Gould, television critic of The New York Times from 1947 to 1972. In columns noteworthy for crisp writing, pointed insights, and fair judgment, he highlighted both the untapped possibilities and the imminent perils of television, becoming "the conscience of the industry" for many people. In this book, historian Lewis L. Gould, Jack Gould’s son, collects over seventy of his father’s best columns. Grouped topically, they cover a wide range of issues, including the Golden Age of television drama, McCarthy-era blacklisting, the rise and fall of Edward R. Murrow, quiz show scandals, children’s programming, and the impact of television on American life and of television criticism on the medium itself. Lewis Gould also supplies a brief biography of his father that assesses his influence on the evolution of television, as well as prefaces to each section.

This interdisciplinary study of history programming identifies and examines different genres employed by producers and tracks their commissioning, production, marketing and distribution histories. With comparative references to other European nations and North America, the authors focus on British history programming over the last two decades and analyse the relationship between the academy and media professionals. They outline and discuss often-competing discourses about how to 'do' history and the underlying assumptions about who watches history programmes. History on Television considers recent changes in the media landscape, which have affected to a great degree how history in general, and whose history in particular, appears onscreen.

An examination of telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. "Telepresence” allows us to feel present—through vision, hearing, and even touch—at a remote location by means of real-time communication technology. Networked devices such as video cameras and telerobots extend our corporeal agency into distant spaces. In Here/There, Kris Paulsen examines telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. Paulsen traces an arc of increasing interactivity, as video screens became spaces for communication and physical, tactile intervention. She explores the work of artists who took up these technological tools and questioned the aesthetic, social, and ethical stakes of media that allow us to manipulate and affect far-off environments and other people—to touch, metaphorically and literally, those who cannot touch us back. Paulsen examines 1970s video artworks by Vito Acconci and Joan Jonas, live satellite performance projects by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and CCTV installations by Chris Burden. These early works, she argues, can help us make sense of the expansion of our senses by technologies that privilege real time over real space and model strategies for engagement and interaction with mediated others. They establish a political, aesthetic, and technological history for later works using cable TV infrastructures and the World Wide Web, including telerobotic works by Ken Goldberg and Wafaa Bilal and artworks about military drones by Trevor Paglen, Omar Fast, Hito Steyerl, and others. These works become a meeting place for here and there.

"On-point historical photographs combined with strong narration bring the story of the Berlin Wall to life. Kids will learn about the partition of Berlin after WWII, the cold war tensions between the US and the USSR that led to the building of the wall, and the anti-communist pressures that led it to fall. The fall of the wall would become a symbol of democracy and freedom. Readers will understand the significance behind this event through text and clips of the event itself via the Capstone 4D augmented reality app"--