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Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic through which to reconsider entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema sought to displace the moving image from its established situation within the cinematic theatre so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship. While existing scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European practices of the 1970s, this study explores its earlier emergence within mid-‘60s New York alongside the rise of Minimalist aesthetics and compositional revolution inaugurated by John Cage. The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2) to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and performance stage (chapter 4), before the incorporation of real-time video feedback begins to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse institutions of televisual culture (chapter 5).

Marshall McLuhan is best known as a media theorist but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan’s work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan’s entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan’s own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan’s influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan’s ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art.

The book explores, analyzes, and critiques the ubiquitous, confounding, and powerful ways in which automated processes derived from binary computer logic have infiltrated contemporary life. Roboprocesses are automated models intended to evaluate, enhance profitability or efficiency, audit, or standardize human behavior. Based on evaluation protocols or formulaic scripts for interaction and judgment mobilized by commercial and state bureaucracies in their dealings with customers and citizens, roboprocesses shape human experience and action, create categories and thus identities and hierarchies, define reality, and mold future action. Authors examine how algorithms are applied to such diverse processes and arenas as standardized testing protocols mandated by No Child Left Behind, audits, social media, felony convictions, the mortgage crisis, pig farming, deportations of minors, international indicators, and surveillance. In each of these examples, roboprocesses take on a life of their own, mandating the collection of data in certain predetermined kinds of ways that in turn shape how outcomes are imagined and produced.

He leaped from his chair, ripped off his microphone, and lunged at his ex-wife. Security guards rushed to intercept him. The audience screamed, then cheered. Were producers concerned? Not at all. They were getting what they wanted: the money shot. From “classy” shows like Oprah to “trashy” shows like Jerry Springer, the key to a talk show's success is what the book calls the money shot—moments when guests lose control and express joy, sorrow, rage, or remorse on camera. In this new work, it takes us behind the scenes of daytime television talk shows, a genre focused on “real” stories told by “ordinary” people. Drawing on extensive interviews with producers and guests, attendance of dozens of live tapings around the country, and more than a year's experience working on two nationally televised shows, the book shows us how producers elicit dramatic performances from guests, why guests agree to participate, and the supporting roles played by studio audiences and experts. The book traces the career of the money shot, examining how producers make stars and experts out of ordinary people, in the process reproducing old forms of cultural hierarchy and class inequality even while seeming to challenge them. It argues that the daytime talk show does give voice to people normally excluded from the media spotlight, but it lets them speak only in certain ways and under certain rules and conditions. The book asks not just what talk shows can tell us about mass media, but also what they reveal about American culture more generally.

Situated at the intersection of a number of competing discourses and perspectives, closed captioning offers a key location for exploring the rhetoric of disability in the age of digital media. Reading Sounds offers the first extended study of closed captioning from a humanistic perspective. Instead of treating closed captioning as a legal requirement, a technical problem, or a matter of simple transcription, this book considers how captioning can be a potent source of meaning in rhetorical analysis. Reading Sounds positions closed captioning as a significant variable in multimodal analysis, questions narrow definitions that reduce captioning to the mere “display” of text on the screen, broadens current treatments of quality captioning, and explores captioning as a complex rhetorical and interpretative practice. This book argues that captioners not only select which sounds are significant, and hence which sounds are worthy of being captioned, but also rhetorically invent words for sounds. Drawing on a number of examples from a range of popular movies and television shows, Reading Sounds develops a rhetorical sensitivity to the interactions among sounds, captions, contexts, constraints, writers, and readers.

Mr. Wizard's World. Bill Nye the Science Guy. NPR's Science Friday: these popular television and radio programs broadcast science into the homes of millions of viewers and listeners. But these modern series owe much of their success to the pioneering efforts of early-twentieth-century science shows like Adventures in Science and “Our Friend the Atom.” This book is the fascinating history of the evolution of popular science in the first decades of the broadcasting era. The book transports readers to the early days of radio, when the new medium allowed innovative and optimistic scientists the opportunity to broadcast serious and dignified presentations over the airwaves. But the exponential growth of listenership in the 1920s, from thousands to millions, and the networks' recognition that each listener represented a potential consumer, turned science on the radio into an opportunity to entertain, not just educate. This book chronicles the efforts of science popularizers, from 1923 until the mid-1950s, as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science's idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, the book rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, the book raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.