10.18.2010

Media Geography - Los Angeles as Moving Picture

Media geography, I won't try to explain it, being a lay person, I will let the Journal Aether do that here...

Aether offers a forum that examines the geography of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation. It is our goal to provide a space for contributions to current issues surrounding these media, beginning with constructions of space & place, cultural landscapes, society, and identity.

What took me to the journal was knowledge that Ken Hillis, a professor from the University of North Carolina had a paper accepted for publication. Now Hillis is one of the smartest persons I have ever met, sometimes I have him use more words to explain his theories and it clicks. (Why use a whole paragraph when six words will save time and space.)

The article is fascinating and thought provoking, especially if your idea of geography involved maps and topography.

Los Angeles as Moving Picture
Ken Hillis
University of North Carolina

Abstract

In a city synonymous with film and media, it is not striking that visual representations-the moving image of film and T.V., the television program set in Los Angeles, the L.A. Film in which the city itself acts as a character-arguably serve collectively as the city's principal form of mimetic "monument" and memory maker. There are many such monuments, and I turn to a abbreviated discussion of a few L.A. films to indicate how technology of moving images as a form of inscription memorializes, politicizes and naturalizes the city as a "text" as itself a representation. The supremacy of Cartesian space and a related disembodied public sphere is reflected in these films' deployment of a conceptually disembodied masculine eye, often figured literally by the use of a bird's-eye point of view.

Published in AETHER, The Journal of Media Geography You can read the full article here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Fascinating article!