From Page to Stage to Screen: The Live Theatre Broadcast as a New Medium

Adaptation ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Hitchman
Keyword(s):  
Work Of Art ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Physical Presence

AbstractThe live theatre broadcast has witnessed a phenomenal rise in both popularity and profile over the past decade. This article considers the live theatre broadcast as both a new medium and a form of adaptation. It examines how the medium is ontologically, economically, and culturally positioned between theatre and film, and the extent to which it is, as John Wyver puts it, a ‘hybrid form’. Analyzing the medium in terms of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, I question how the live theatre broadcast challenges the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ that Benjamin sees as vital to the ‘aura’ of the work of art. I investigate how the live theatre broadcast’s lack of ‘here’ affects audience perception, and how liveness might be seen as a condition of perception rather than of transmission. Exploring Benjamin’s suggestion that film’s celebrization of the actor acts as compensation for the actor’s lack of physical presence, I ask how this concept might inform our understanding of actors in the live theatre broadcast. Finally, the article assesses the extent to which the live theatre broadcast directs the perception of the viewer, and how this direction removes the autonomy of viewing that theatre affords.

scholarly journals Mergulhando em Profusões: Entre feiras e imagens de feiras, metodologias possíveis

ILUMINURAS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (53) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Maria Martins Cerqueira ◽  
Maria Angélica da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Great Part ◽  
The State ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intangible Heritage

Resumo: Diferente de um passado não muito distante, hoje uma expressiva parcela da sociedade é fotógrafa. Em modo muito mais rarefeito do que Benjamin anunciava no passado no seu famoso ensaio “A obra de arte na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica”, a aura fotográfica se estilhaçou. O presente artigo aborda um profuso conjunto de imagens, resultantes do registro de um outro universo também multiplicador de objetos: as feiras livres. Trata-se de um acervo resultante do Projeto de Salvaguarda do Patrimônio Imaterial em Alagoas, o qual foi realizado entre 2015-2016 e que demandou percursos por dezenas de municípios do estado. Na tentativa de buscar um instrumento metodológico de acesso a elas, o acervo foi desorganizado, embaralhado, e a seguir, procedeu-se a uma deriva visual pelas fotografias. Ao final, o artigo explora este universo através de um ensaio visual que cartografa aspectos destas feiras livres. Palavras-chave: Feira livre. Metodologia. Patrimônio imaterial. Imagem. Fotografia. DIVING INTO PROFUSIONS: POSSIBLE METHODOLOGIES BETWEEN STREET MARKETS AND ITS IMAGES Abstract: Unlike a not too distant past, nowadays a great part of the society is photographer. In a much less dense way than Benjamin announced in the past in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” the photographic aura was shattered. This article approaches a profuse set of images that are the result of the record of another universe which is also profuse: the street markets. It is a collection resulting from the Project for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage of Alagoas, which was carried out between 2015-2016 and required travelling to dozens of municipalities in the State of Alagoas. In the search of finding a methodologic instrument of access to them, the collection was disarranged, shuffled, and then it was proceeded a visual drift through the photographs. In the end, this article explores this universe through a visual essay that maps aspects of those street markets.Keywords: Street Market. Methodology. Intangible heritage. Image. Photography.

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production

2009 ◽  
pp. 2325-2336
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Cavanaugh
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
Artistic Collaboration ◽  
Electronic Distribution ◽  
Low Threshold

When Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he shone a light on the cultural changes inherent in technology’s ability to infinitely reproduce and distribute art. One of the important consequences of this development was the democratization of art’s availability, allowing the general population to experience artwork that they would otherwise be unable to access. Now technology has advanced to a point where not only is art’s reproduction available to anyone who wants it, its very production is now accessible to almost everyone, even if the prospective artist is utterly devoid of training, expertise, or even talent. With software-based artistic assistance and low-threshold electronic distribution mechanisms, we have achieved the promise of Benjamin’s blurred distinction between artist and audience. As a result, the process by which art is produced has now been democratized, resulting in legitimate questions regarding quality, taste, and the legitimacy of authorship in a human-technological artistic collaboration.

Art and Society in England and France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Two Paintings before the Public

1972 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Alan Bowness
Keyword(s):  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The State ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
The Moment ◽  
State Of Art

The primary source material for the art historian is of course the work of art, and this in itself places him in a fortunate position because the permanent relevance of the work of art is, I take it, self-evident. For the art historian, the work of art is an historical fact, pre-selected for generally accepted aesthetic reasons. But the work of art has no absolute meaning: it does not exist in a vacuum. It has both what we might call a history and a geography—the history being that record of interpretation and evaluation which accrues to the work of art from the moment of its creation down to the present day; and the geography being the particular artistic and social context of its original creation. The history can at times be very misleading: it is obvious that each generation is going to interpret the past as it wishes, and no judgment can be objective. So it is the geography that is more important, and this is extremely difficult to define. But if we are to understand the work of art, we need to enquire into the circumstances of its creation: we must ask, what did this painting or sculpture or building signify when it first appeared? Only from such specific investigations can one proceed to general propositions about the state of art at any particular moment, and perhaps also about the state of society which produced the art.

MacSong: Karaoke and the Academy

Prospects ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 627-638
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Gray
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Press ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Movie Star

When Walter Benjamin wrote this sentence in the 1930s, he had in mind both the new directions of the press, which was opening more and more spaces in which its readers could write, and the new films and newsreels, where “any man today can lay claim to being filmed” (“Work of Art,” 233) and where, rather than actors, “people … portray themselves” (234; emphasis Benjamin's). Benjamin's attitude toward this collapse of the distinction between author and public was ambivalent. Phrases such as “the phony spell of a commodity” (233), to describe the cult of the movie star, suggest his nostalgia for a time when the aura of the “original” work of art had not yet begun to decay. On the other hand, his idea that “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (226) pointed enthusiastically to the new technologies as part of a liberationist meta-narrative.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document