Re-staging the Spectacular: Digital Displays Inside and Outside the Home

This talk addresses the ways in which contemporary digital display technologies, traversing and confounding the social and personal boundaries of work and leisure, domestic and public space, and intimacy and self-display, will frame the experience and meanings of moving images consumed inside and outside the home.  Examining the transition from cathode ray tube to flat panel displays after 2005, the talk will analyze the marketing efforts of TV set manufacturers to position the new domestic digital display devices within a long tradition of the public celebration of the technological sublime.  Recent promotional efforts by Sony and LG have their roots in the so-called "spectacular," arresting in scale and technological prowess, originating in the first 24-sheet billboards at the Paris and Chicago World's Fair expositions at the end of the nineteenth century.  By the first decade of the twentieth century the term was used to designate the large scale animated incandescent public displays in entertainment business districts, reaching an apogee in the 1930s elaborate kinetic neon constructions of designer Douglas Leigh in New York's Time Square.  The contemporary marketing constructions of the flat panel display also evoke NBC network head Pat Weaver's appropriation of the spectacular term in the 1950s as commercial television sought its position in the    domestic sphere and the national economy.  This talk will examine the effects of the proliferation of flat-panel displays, from hand-held devices and domestic television receivers to spectacular public billboards, upon the textual forms, viewing protocols, and industry practices of electronic moving images consumption.

Speaker: William Boddy, Baruch College