[Discussion] CFP: Television, Aesthetics and Reality (Portugal) (2/15/05; 6/30/05-7/1/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Call for papers

"Television, Aesthetics and Reality"

Venue: Dept=BA de L=EDnguas e Culturas, University of Aveiro

Proposed dates: 30th June & 1st July 2005
----------------------
"Wherever explorers go in the future accompanied
by television cameras, they will be actors,
making their nebulous exits and entrances for the
benefit of multiplanetary audiences.  Nowhere
will there ever again be pure events (if ever
there were); everything hereafter will be
stage-managed for cosmic Nielsons, in the
interest of national or universal establishments."

                   Robert L. Shayon, Saturday
Review, on coverage of the 1969 moon landing

---------------------------------

Few would doubt that television was the most
influential medium of the second half of the
twentieth century and shows signs of continuing
as such in this century, a major producer of and
conduit for what is popularly called culture of
the masses.  By no means have all of its genres
or productions received recognition as art forms
and those that have have received it belatedly
and grudgingly.  There is no programme, news
format or advertisement which is not mediated to
us through a murky mixture of business practices,
generic suppositions or cultural imperatives.  We
need to be constantly vigilant with respect to
the conventions and aesthetic considerations
which make the televisual compelling, appealing
or merely intelligible to us.  This conference
proposes to reflect upon television's packaging
of reality in various national and international
contexts, whether it be in current affairs,
narrative entertainment or in the presentation of
life-styles.  We recognise the theorization of
television on a scale running from dismissals of
it as essentially a crass advertising medium to
defences of it as richly innovative and
democratic, and believe that these views should
be under constant analysis and revision.

   Accordingly, we propose to treat the Conference
theme in three related sub-sections:


1. 'Showing Reality' - Structuring the Public World

   Television's representation of the news is known
to possess enormous political importance.
Media-driven perceptions of events often
determine government agendas and election
campaigns are primarily fought out on television.
Western voter apathy has led politicians to
consider whether future votes should not be cast
on-line by people sitting at a television screen.
In addition to the rise of 24-hour news channels
and consequent ubiquity of television news, there
has been an increased importance ascribed to
documentary film and programme-making.  Some have
argued that polemical documentaries now do the
job in pluralist societies that party ideologies
used to do, but have now abandoned in an era of
centrist politics and global market economics.
It is no secret that multinational media empires
exist and possess an influence of dubious
democratic accountability.  It is not always
clear how these empires and organisations serve
the interests of their viewing publics, and we
can never be complacent in our assumptions about
their priorities.  This section seeks to continue
the scrutiny of television representations of
actuality, the way new technologies are being
used and how television current affairs seem to
shape and enforce homogeneity and consensus.


2. 'Reality Shows' - The Private as Public

   Whereas once it was customary to see traumatic
or intimate happenings in "reconstruction", now
it is possible to watch people being murdered in
convenience store robberies on closed-circuit
television footage, played over and over again in
crime "reality shows".  Events such as this are a
logical development, on the one hand,  from the
cinema-v=E9rit=E9 styles of the sixties and seventies
and the "fly-on-the-wall" documentaries that
appeared shortly afterwards and, on the other,
from the increasing deregulation of media
industries which has permitted each product to
establish its own market, and that market to
become global. Shows in this vein have ushered in
a "reality aesthetic", which cop shows and even
sitcoms ape, by the employment of low-tech
camcorder technology, and have thus extended the
stylization of the real by a new fragmented,
pixellated grubbiness.  The focus of this section
is the interpenetration of performance and
"authenticity", and the extent to which
television, often requiring simulations of one
kind or another, is happy to blur the distinction
between them.  The forms under review in this
section would be not only the reality shows
themselves but their implicit generic cousins,
television drama, soaps, comedy, talent and game
shows, sports coverage and musical entertainment.


3. 'Real People' - Generating Television Personality

In Chayevsky and Lumet's film Network (1976), a
demented messianic newsreader is told of an
important message he must disseminate by a
shadowy God-like media tycoon.  The newsreader
asks why he has been chosen, to which the tycoon
replies "Because you are on television, dummy!"
Not only are we reminded that the medium is
greater than those who live by it, but also that
this hierarchy may be somewhat opaque to
television celebrities themselves, caught up in a
logic of simulation that dilutes the significance
of realities other than those that can be
accessed televisually. The subtitle of this
section takes up the term given to people who
make their livings by appearing on the box -
entertainers, anchors, presenters, talk-show
hosts, interviewers, journalists, pundits,
weather-persons.  Who are these people?  How did
they get there? How do they speak?  What do they
look like?  But the phrase also has a more
abstract signification.  Television confines and
packages human personality perhaps even more
drastically than it shapes stories and interprets
news, to the extent that personality itself has
become its principal subject as well as object.
Is there a point at which the articulation of
reality as personality will become exhausted or
is it endlessly self-renewable?  This section
looks at television's role in creating "celebrity
culture" and its strategy of extending a limited
share in it to the masses.


It is therefore proposed to hold a two-day
conference on "Television, Aesthetics and
Reality" at the Department of Languages and
Cultures, University of Aveiro, Portugal and we
accordingly invite abstracts (maximum of 250
words) for papers of up to 20 minutes duration in
one of the above-mentioned subsections, to be
received before 15th February 2005.  Papers (and
abstracts) must be presented in either English or
Portuguese; notification of acceptance will be
made by the end of March 2005.  The names of
keynote speakers will be announced shortly.

The conference enrolment fee is 80 euros.
Payment can be made by bank transfer to
"Universidade de Aveiro", account n=BA 00 35 0123
00097701930 10 or by cheque made out to
"Universidade de Aveiro" and sent to the
organiser (can be negotiated for foreign
participants):

Prof. A.D. Barker
Department of Languages and Cultures,
University of Aveiro,
3810-193 Aveiro,
Portugal.

E-mail: abarker@dlc.ua.pt
Dept. fax:  00 351 234 370940
Dept. tel:  00 351 234 370358
Dept. e-mail: sec@dlc.ua.pt

--=20
**************************************************
             David Callahan (callahan@mail.ua.pt)
    00     Departamento de L=EDnguas e Culturas
    [_]<    Universidade de Aveiro, 3810-193
    /|\     Aveiro, Portugal
              Ph/Fax: +351-234-426854





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