Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics

Description

Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices - through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building. Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.

Carol Vernallis teaches in the music department at Stanford University, USA. She is the author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013) and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013). Holly Rogers is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and editor of Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014) and The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017). Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Programme Convener of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and is co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of Navigating with the Blackstar: The Mediality of David Bowie (special issue of Celebrity Studies, 2019) and David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom (2019).

Vernallis (Stanford), Perrott (Univ. of Waikato, New Zealand), and Rogers (Univ. of London, UK) have produced a unique collection on the emergence of transmedia artists/directors, who combine traditional legacy tech with acclivitous digital, world, and assemblage narratives ... Together these essays serve as an introductory, thought-provoking compendium of processes/approaches to post-film intermedia production. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. * CHOICE * Building upon ground breaking books by two of the editors, this rich and varied collection threatens to inaugurate a new wave of scrutiny to address the new modes of electronic audiovisual aesthetics. Previous writing about 'transmedia' has often been theoretically limited and deviled by shallow analysis. This book provides a much needed remedy. Vernallis, Rogers and Perrott have assembled an essential collection covering the diversity of contemporary interrelated media fields and creative practices. It poses acute questions about existing categories of understanding and analysis while offering new directions for thinking about current pervasive audiovisual culture. * K.J. Donnelly, Professor of Film and Film Music, University of Southampton, UK, and author of Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks (Bloomsbury, 2015) * Today, we live in a thoroughly transmedia age. Audiovisual expression extends over movies, television series, music videos and commercials; not to mention the way it influences such other realms as designer clothing and toys. This splendid volume takes up the full range of creativity across media today, ranging from studies of how commercial pressures shape media products all the way to celebrations of 'color magic' and 'audiovisual bliss' in new media productions. * Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA * How do you create a 'style' when you work across media as diversified as film, television, fashion design, opera, commercials, virtual reality and immersive environments? Rather than transmedial auteurist styles, should we talk of a new, intensified aesthetics characterizing the whole of transmedial production today? These are the kind of key questions that this shimmering volume addresses through a series of incisive, illuminating texts. * Martine Beugnet, Professor in Visual Studies, University of Paris 7 Diderot, France *