The Anticipated Image: affect and time in the news

Download files
Access & Terms of Use
open access
Copyright: Ross, Chris
Altmetric
Abstract
The news media spotlights events and concerns of the world, affording a privileged and yet passive vantage point from which to remotely observe the suffering of others. This raises manifold questions—social, ethical and political—broached by the field of 'media witnessing' in media studies discourse. The aim of this practice-led research is to engage media witnessing in live television news and photojournalism, in terms of the sense-affective dimension of media, so as to elaborate the relationship between the news and the affective politics of crisis and catastrophe. In, Latent Images and Monochromes, the affective capacity of resolution is explored, temporally and spatially, in the latencies of satellite television transmission, and the JPEG compression algorithm, respectively. Jill Bennett's 'practical aesthetics' and Hito Steyerl's 'documentary uncertainty' provide the foundation for a conceptual framework that engages the documentary mode in terms of affect and visibility. Bennett provides a contemporary aesthetics inflected by media and affect theory, which focuses on real-world events. Similarly, Steyerl argues that affect has displaced representation in contemporary aesthetics and politics. She states that affective and aesthetic processes are now the primary means through which the public are addressed, as typified by the U.S Department of Homeland Security's terror threat level chart. In theory and practice, Steyerl's 'abstract documentarism' provides an approach to the documentary that enlists the techniques and language of abstraction, such as the monochrome, to critique conditions of visibility and affective politics. The studio practice is further contextualised by the post-production video work of Alfredo Jaar, Omer Fast, and other documentarist art practices.
Persistent link to this record
Link to Publisher Version
Link to Open Access Version
Additional Link
Author(s)
Ross, Chris
Supervisor(s)
Gregory, Tim
Creator(s)
Editor(s)
Translator(s)
Curator(s)
Designer(s)
Arranger(s)
Composer(s)
Recordist(s)
Conference Proceedings Editor(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Corporate/Industry Contributor(s)
Publication Year
2016
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
Files
download public version.pdf 1.87 MB Adobe Portable Document Format
Related dataset(s)