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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts
Adopting an innovative and theoretical approach, Greek Tragedy and
the Digital is an original study of the encounter between Greek
tragedy and digital media in contemporary performance. It
challenges Greek tragedy conventions through the contemporary
arsenal of sound masks, avatars, live code poetry, new media art
and digital cognitive experimentations. These technological
innovations in performances of Greek tragedy shed new light on
contemporary transformations and adaptations of classical myths,
while raising emerging questions about how augmented reality works
within interactive and immersive environments. Drawing on
cutting-edge productions and theoretical debates on performance and
the digital, this collection considers issues including
performativity, liveness, immersion, intermediality, aesthetics,
technological fragmentation, conventions of the chorus, theatre as
hypermedia and reception theory in relation to Greek tragedy. Case
studies include Kzryztof Warlikowski, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci,
Katie Mitchell, Georges Lavaudant, The Wooster Group, Labex
Arts-H2H, Akram Khan, Urland & Crew, Medea Electronique, Robert
Wilson, Klaus Obermaier, Guy Cassiers, Luca di Fusco, Ivo Van Hove,
Avra Sidiropoulou and Jay Scheib. This is an incisive,
interdisciplinary study that serves as a practice model for
conceptualizing the ways in which Greek tragedy encounters digital
culture in contemporary performance.
On March 15, 2011, Donald Trump changed television forever. The
Comedy Central Roast of Trump was the first major live broadcast to
place a hashtag in the corner of the screen to encourage real-time
reactions on Twitter, generating more than 25,000 tweets and making
the broadcast the most-watched Roast in Comedy Central history. The
#trumproast initiative personified the media and tech industries'
utopian vision for a multiscreen and communal live TV experience.
In Social TV: Multiscreen Content and Ephemeral Culture, author
Cory Barker reveals how the US television industry promised-but
failed to deliver-a social media revolution in the 2010s to combat
the imminent threat of on-demand streaming video. Barker examines
the rise and fall of Social TV across press coverage, corporate
documents, and an array of digital ephemera. He demonstrates that,
despite the talk of disruption, the movement merely aimed to
exploit social media to reinforce the value of live TV in the
modern attention economy. Case studies from broadcast networks to
tech start-ups uncover a persistent focus on community that aimed
to monetize consumer behavior in a transitionary industry period.
To trace these unfulfilled promises and flopped ideas, Barker draws
upon a unique mix of personal Social TV experiences and curated
archives of material that were intentionally marginalized amid
pivots to the next big thing. Yet in placing this now-forgotten
material in recent historical context, Social TV shows how the era
altered how the industry pursues audiences. Multiscreen campaigns
have shifted away from a focus on live TV and toward all-day
"content" streams. The legacy of Social TV, then, is the further
embedding of media and promotional material onto every screen and
into every moment of life.
Hollywood Independent dissects the Mirisch Company, one of the most
successful employers of the package-unit system of film production,
producing classic films like The Apartment (1960), West Side Story
(1961), The Great Escape (1963) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
as irresistible talent packages. Whilst they helped make the names
of a new generation of stars including Steve McQueen and Shirley
MacLaine, as well as banking on the reputations of established
auteurs like Billy Wilder, they were also pioneers in dealing with
controversial new themes with films about race (In the Heat of the
Night), gender (Some Like it Hot) and sexuality (The Children's
Hour), devising new ways of working with film franchises (The
Magnificent Seven, The Pink Panther and In the Heat of the Night
spun off 7 Mirisch sequels between them) and cinematic cycles,
investing in adaptations of bestsellers and Broadway hits,
exploiting frozen funds abroad and exploring so-called runaway
productions. The Mirisch Company bridges the gap between the end of
the studio system by about 1960 and the emergence of a new cinema
in the mid-1970s, dominated by the Movie Brats.
Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly
Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a
transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked
experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel,
lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this
book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the
rebellious, feminist Punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s,
tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their
performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick,
Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie
Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful,
deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist
femininity, creating a new "Punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital
aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture,
Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of
these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries
worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless
influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s
and 2000s.
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