This spring, game designers of Rust courted controversy by assigning players unchangeable, racialized avatars. Adrienne Shaw unpacks how game design helped produce some of that player outrage.
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Tags: audience studies, avatars, Cobra Club, colorblindness, Facepunch Studios, media aesthetics, MMO, racism, Representation, Runaways, Rust, social justice, video games
Posted in Current Events, Games | Comments Off on Unpacking Rust, Race, and Player Reactions to Change
Piers Britton on Mad Men's visual style, series structure, and Sixties-philiac tendencies, and how the TV series turned its tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness and a preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures into a branding strategy.
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Tags: "Person to Person", 1960s, AMC, Breaking Bad, fashion, Janie Bryant, Mad Men, matthew weiner, media aesthetics, paratexts, television, televisual style
Posted in Perspectives, TV | Comments Off on Style, Structuring Conceits, and the Paratexts of Mad Men
How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing?
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Tags: Aesthetics, Agent Carter, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Arrow, color, comics, Daredevil, Dark Knight Trilogy, DC Comics, Marvel, Marvel Comics, media aesthetics, Netflix, paratexts, The Flash, The Wire
Posted in Perspectives | 2 Comments »
Piers Britton reflects on the unacknowledged divergences in use of the term “aesthetic” within television studies, and suggests that some of the elisions are leading to unproductive argument.
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Tags: Aesthetics, Mad Men, media aesthetics, Sherlock, television
Posted in Columns, The Aesthetic Turn | 2 Comments »
In a recent episode of ABC's Shark Tank, debate over what constitutes a technology takes on industrial dimensions as the stylistics of Silicon Valley shape popular images of entrepreneurship across industrial sectors.
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Tags: ABC, CES, digital media, Dragon's Den, entrepreneurship, Mark Cuban, media aesthetics, Reviver, Shark Tank, Silicon Valley, StartUp, technology, television
Posted in Perspectives, Technology, TV | Comments Off on As Seen on Shark Tank: Tech Entrepreneurship’s Portable Aesthetics
In this latest entry in the Aesthetic Turn series, Megan Sapnar Ankerson explores how Google's aesthetic shift from "transparency" to "beauty" serves as a site for critical engagement with the aesthetics of digital artifacts.
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Tags: apps, beautiful revolution, design, Google, information aesthetics, internet, Larry Page, media aesthetics, mobile, PageRank, search engines, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Susan Sontag, touch, ubicomp, UX, web design
Posted in The Aesthetic Turn | 2 Comments »
Colin Burnett continues our Aesthetic Turn series with a call to revise our thinking about moving image intelligence beyond just language and verbal systems of thought.
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Tags: aesthetic turn, auteurism, David Belle, Discourse, District 13, film, language, Luc Besson, media aesthetics, parkour, pictorial intelligence, Pierre Morel, Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, the moving image, Tiepolo
Posted in Columns, The Aesthetic Turn | Comments Off on The Aesthetic Turn: In Search of the Pictorial Intelligence
In this latest entry in The Aesthetic Turn series, Carolyn Kane looks to color and color studies to provide a fresh and unique lens to articulate a theory of media aesthetics.
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Tags: Aristotle, color, color studies, installation art, James Turrell, Jean Baudrillard, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Josef Albers, litigation, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Heidegger, media aesthetics, Plato, Pokemon, subjectivity, Theodor Adorno, Theory of Colors, Walter Benjamin, Whitney Museum of Art
Posted in Columns, The Aesthetic Turn | 2 Comments »
In this latest post in our From Mercury to Mars series, Josh Shepperd discusses the "War of the Worlds" broadcast as a foundational subject for intellectual history and, as the subject of social research like Hadley Cantril's The Invasion from Mars, one of the events that legitimated the very study of media.
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Tags: #WOTW75, audiences, broadcasting history, CBS, Communications Act of 1934, educational media, FCC, Federal Radio Education Committee, Frank Stanton, Hadley Cantril, Herta Herzog, Mass Communication, media aesthetics, media effects, media studies, Mercury Theatre on the Air, Orson Welles, Paul Lazarsfeld, Princeton Radio Research Project, propaganda, public broadcasting, radio studies, Rockefeller Foundation, War of the Worlds, William Paley
Posted in Columns, From Mercury to Mars | Comments Off on From Mercury to Mars: War of the Worlds and the Invasion of Media Studies
In this latest entry in The Aesthetic Turn series, Kyle Conway considers the aesthetic experience of media, using translation and metaphor to turn our attention away from the object and toward our experience of media in the age of convergence.
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Tags: Aesthetics, affect, Casino Royale, chase scenes, convergence, cultural studies, Inception, James Bond, media aesthetics, media studies, Remediation, The Matrix Reoloaded, translation
Posted in The Aesthetic Turn | 4 Comments »
In this inaugural post in Antenna's new series on cultural studies and media aesthetics, "The Aesthetic Turn," Kyle Conway queries media's experiential dimensions.
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Tags: acafandom, Aesthetics, Aristotle, audiences, CCCS, cultural studies, david bordwell, encoding/decoding, media aesthetics, media studies, Nationwide, Richard Hoggart, Rudolf Arnheim, Shawn VanCour, spreadability
Posted in The Aesthetic Turn | Comments Off on The Aesthetic Turn: Cultural Studies and the Question of Aesthetic Experience
Understanding "War of the Worlds"’s neglected second act requires consideration of the contested status of character monologue and larger shifts in dominant production norms for Golden Age radio drama.
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Tags: #WOTW75, adaptation, Archibald MacLeish, Campbell Playhouse, CBS, Golden Age radio, H.G. Wells, Howard Koch, John Houseman, Katharine Seymour, Max Wylie, media aesthetics, Mercury Theater on the Air, Neil Verma, Norman Corwin, Orson Welles, radio, War of the Worlds
Posted in Columns, From Mercury to Mars | Comments Off on From Mercury to Mars: A Hard Act to Follow: War of the Worlds and the Challenges of Literary Adaptation
As more media scholars grapple with issues traditionally associated with aesthetic analysis, the need to map the history, methods, and goals of this “aesthetic turn” proves increasingly pressing.
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Tags: aesthetic turn, cultural studies, cultural turn, Elihu Katz, encoding/decoding, genre, Gordon Allport, Hadley Cantril, historical poetics, Jason Mittell, John Caldwell, John Fiske, John Hartley, Julie D'Acci, Lynn Spigel, media aesthetics, media studies, Narrative Complexity, Office of Radio Research, Paul Lazarsfeld, performance studies, Personal Influence, production studies, Psychology of Radio, radio studies, Raymond Williams, reception studies, Robert Allen, Rockefeller Foundation, Rudolf Arnheim, SCMS, semiotics, sound studies, Stuart Hall, television studies, textual analysis
Posted in Academia, Film, Industry, Perspectives, Radio, TV | 4 Comments »