Critical writing

Project:

"The expanding possibilities of digitalisation and the Internet have favoured a process of transformation in the media sector, in which corporations have been forced to reposition themselves in an age of uncertainty, while speculations continue to be made on the future of "media convergence". ....Defying traditional approaches in media studies, Internet TV expands horizons in terms of participation, personalization and de-institutionalisation...."
Excerpt from 'Television's swansong? Television and the Internet: Swansong TV by Toni Roig Telo, Director of the Audio-visual Communications programme (University of Catalonia, Spain)
Full article (Spanish language) here

"While looking over the TV swansong project descriptions I was struck by how often the television nostalgia of the British artists was inspired by American culture (The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, Andy Kaufman, Star Trek, the '68 Elvis Comeback Special, ER, etc.). It is this sense of a mediated global sensus communis that reminded me of the Richard Butler story. What does it mean when violent racists, who dream of seceding from the United States into a fortified enclave in the Rocky Mountains, find solace in the class parables of '70s British television? And what does it mean when English kids, growing up in the flatlands of Lincolnshire, fantasize over the image of the American south portrayed in The Dukes of Hazzard: an image, compounded from equal parts of Erskine Caldwell, Lil' Abner, and Smokey and the Bandit, that effectively remaps the violence of the post-Jim Crow South as a quaint comedy of bumbling sheriffs and back-woods hunks careening improbably around the dirt roads of “Hicksville" in an expensive '69 Dodge Charger?"

Excerpt from Internet Killed the Video Star: Art, Audience and Interaction in TV swansong by US writer & academic Grant Kester. Essay originally published in the TV swansong book (Ed. Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope, ARTicle Press 2002)