New approaches to Art and visual culture
CHArt Nineteenth Annual Conference
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CONVERGENT PRACTICES New approaches to Art and visual culture |
Stephen Boyd Davis, Middlesex University, UK
News from Now Where?: The Digital Spaces of Television
This paper analyses television news broadcasting as a form of depiction and discusses the relationship of this form to digital technology. Reconsidering the screen as a pictorial surface allows it to be set in the context of other forms of depiction, including the classic fiction film. Its history can be traced to a set of spatial practices once common in mainstream film-making - but now almost wholly expunged there, only to survive and indeed flourish in factual television.
The relationship of these practices to digital technologies is particularly interesting. As the technologies of television and film converge, it is becoming clear that the differing spatial practices are dictated far more by genre than by technology per se. Nevertheless, in a medium such as television where technical and visual innovation are increasingly valued as goods in themselves, it is also clear that digital technology is not only the servant but frequently the master of the presentation. The configurational, non-optical spatial practices of the news broadcast picture have their counterparts in pre-Renaissance picture-making, while the emphasis on novelty of technique in digital visual genres can be usefully compared to the novelty value of perspective as a technology at the beginning of modern depiction.