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Interactive television
Understanding new audiovisual media 8
Such interactivity can already be found in television, in different ways, for instance when viewers send SMS, which can be promptly received. This is an emblematic example of a non-linear language: the viewer can decide to read the messages or to follow the program or still, if he/she is able to do it, do both simultaneously. There exists other propositions of interactivities, which are even more sophisticated, mostly developed in the United States, in Nordic countries and in Great Britain and that some people name cross-media, since they mix several media such as television, IT and telephony. In the show Masterplace, the viewer can chose the events that the competitors have to go through; in Thunderyard, chapters and broadcasting order are chosen by each…
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Audiovisual extensions
Understanding new audiovisual media 2
Marshall McLuhan, who became famous after the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), proposes very interesting theories, but also a great number of inventive sentences and paradoxical ideas, which gave him great media coverage in a very short time. Forinstance: “Look behind without turning back, you are in an acoustic space”, or “We live in a global village”. According to McLuhan, the world got out of the Gutenberg galaxy and entered the Marconi galaxy, which means, it went from the printed media to reach the pictorial media, a picture connected to electronics. Thanks to new information transmission systems, during the 60s, the world has become a global village in which someone living in Paris can know what…
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El efecto Shakespeare
DEFENSA DE SHAKESPEARE Y ATAQUE /1
Se dice que Shakespeare es el autor acerca del que más se ha escrito y probablemente es cierto. Aunque he leído muchos libros dedicados a él, cada vez que veo uno nuevo, siento deseos de leerlo. No creo que me canse nunca. Por lo general, fatiga dar vueltas y vueltas a un mismo asunto, pero Shakespeare siempre es nuevo, o al menos siempre es interesante. Además, es un autor que hace interesantes a quienes hablan de él. Shakespeare podría servir como ejemplo contrario al principio de incertidumbre de Heisenberg que asegura que el observador modifica lo observado, pues en su caso es lo observado (sus obras) lo que modifica al observador (el lector).…
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Why the Seventh Art?
UNDERSTANDING NEW AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA /1
“Audiovisual media” is a term, which, arbitrarily, includes diverse elements such as fictions, documentaries, TV programs, art-videos and many other contents which can be viewed on a computer screen or a mobile phone. This is quite an arbitrary grouping, since a theatre play or a conference both come under the audiovisual field. For a great part of the 20th century, cinema was the dominating audiovisual media, even though from the fifties on, he had to compete with television. One of the first theorists in this field, Ricciotto Canudo, maintains that cinema is not just an artistic media, but definitely the “Seventh Art”, which he perceives as the only true outcome of all classical arts: painting, sculpture, poetry, dance and music. This…
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Cinema and other media
Understanding new audiovisual media 3
When it began, cinema depended too much on theatre and did not make the most of all the possibilities it could offer as a new medium: to direct a film was just like shooting a theatre play. The camera’s point of view was that of a spectator in a seat, it could even be said that the reception was more passive since attention did not divert once while still noticing everything that was happening before it. Little by little, directors discovered that cinema had no reason to copy theatre and that a camera could move even though actors did not. Another great advantage of cinema compared to theatre concerns the settings. Each scene can take place in a different location: in a street,…
