The possibilities of a digital aesthetic
Dr. Karen Lury, University of Glasgow
This paper will address two aspects relating to a possible ‘aesthetics’ of digital television.
Firstly, I will discuss the effects of digital broadcasting. The proliferation of channels has enabled broadcasters (in some contexts) to abandon or disrupt the conventional narrative structure of television programming, so that programming is now no longer required to ‘fit’ a pre-organised schedule, but is now designed to ‘fill’ a schedule. This ‘freedom’ allows both for an ‘extension of’ and a ‘playing with’ television narratives. I am thinking here of the ‘live’ streaming of shows such as Big Brother (Endemol, 2000-) and the ‘interactive’ features of facilities such as Sky Sports’ ‘Player-cam’. Whilst the narrative structure in this kind of programming revisits, or develops experiences already common to pre-digital television – namely, boredom and anticipation – ironically both types of narrative have been re-imagined as ‘high art’ projects featuring ‘celebrity’ footballers. I am thinking here of Sam Taylor Wood’s ‘video portrait’ of a sleeping David Beckham and Douglas Gordon’s Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait (2006). Yet the real commercial end-game of such narratives is, I will suggest, ‘ITV Play’, where the commercial broadcaster’s imperative to engineer the exchange of money for time is firstly stripped bare and secondly, operates as a context in which the experiential qualities of anticipation and boredom can be played out (and pushed on and on and on).
Secondly, I will also address the effects of the digital production of television programming, investigating formal qualities such as image and sound as well the way in which ‘control’ – the power of the image in relation to the power over the image – is made explicit in several recent programmes. To review this contest, I will explore the nature of apparently benign ‘digital environments’ such as that constructed by the children’s programme Lazy Town (Lazy Town Productions, 2004-), as well as the more controversial use of digital compositing and CGI in historical documentaries such as the BBC’s Auschwitz (2005)and the Discovery Channel’s Virtual History: the plot to Kill Hitler (2004).
The Long and the Short of Convergence Aesthetics
Max Dawson, Northwestern University