Understanding Television and the Production of American Media-Sense
Biographical Sketch
Present: Turning to Cultural Farming in 2003, I shifted my interests from designing to de-signing and now attempt to talk back to media makers through media -- writing equally with images, sounds and words by appropriating and remixing TV/media’s language and technique into new kinds of civic, experimental and ethnographic elicitation for critically engaging our culture(s). In short, I am a pamphleteering mediaturg holding both MFA and PhD. Past: Owner and principal designer with Pencilogic (Boston, 1986-2004). Servicing a broad range of global TV efforts including: Scenery and costume design; graphic and product design; fine art and print; and environmental design for television’s creative and news-journalism industries; and receiving numerous acclamations including ten Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Type of Presentation
Individual presentation
Brief Description of Presentation
From 20 to 90 minute oral/video presentation possible. Standard A/V equipped venue necessary. Can be held in classroom, lecture hall, viewing room, or even video kiosk. Video examples available to view: www.understandingtelevision.com
Abstract of Proposal
Thinking is not a performing art, and that is why we need an Art for Thinking. Humans in a mediated world need critical methods for critical response and robust tools for replying to insidious screen communication without the bias of formal logocentric translation, and in vernacular grammars ‘mediamongers’ understand. My filters and lenses (practice & theory) for these Critical Theory media-practice projects follow Brecht, Benjamin, Eisenstein, McLuhan and Baudrillard, among others. Understanding Television is a video archive website holding hundreds of television video-essay projects. Each experimental project was appropriated from North American TV between 2003-2018. Collectively, they unveil a personal collection of the methodologies and methods I use for understanding tele-visual media, which in turn positions media production as a primary cultural actor. Hence, I re-employ common North American television by re-taking it, re-making it, re-functioning it, and then re-playing these quotidian arcades to their anonymous makers as both illumination and elicitation.
Start Date
2-24-2018 2:50 PM
End Date
2-24-2018 4:20 PM
Recommended Citation
Wilde, Holland, "Understanding Television and the Production of American Media-Sense" (2018). International Critical Media Literacy Conference. 30.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/criticalmedialiteracy/2018/2018/30
Understanding Television and the Production of American Media-Sense
Thinking is not a performing art, and that is why we need an Art for Thinking. Humans in a mediated world need critical methods for critical response and robust tools for replying to insidious screen communication without the bias of formal logocentric translation, and in vernacular grammars ‘mediamongers’ understand. My filters and lenses (practice & theory) for these Critical Theory media-practice projects follow Brecht, Benjamin, Eisenstein, McLuhan and Baudrillard, among others. Understanding Television is a video archive website holding hundreds of television video-essay projects. Each experimental project was appropriated from North American TV between 2003-2018. Collectively, they unveil a personal collection of the methodologies and methods I use for understanding tele-visual media, which in turn positions media production as a primary cultural actor. Hence, I re-employ common North American television by re-taking it, re-making it, re-functioning it, and then re-playing these quotidian arcades to their anonymous makers as both illumination and elicitation.
