For me, the Slow TV sample we watched before class yesterday hit just the right itch. I liked it so much that I sat with it in the background for another few hours following class. Two things:
1) This reminds me of a Youtube channel I saw a few months ago called Illegal Freedom. Essentially, this guy films his train hopping adventures around Europe, and the effect is similar to this Slow TV train ride: a really long video of scenery.
2) I find this kind of video useful as background noise. I know many people use television as background noise to their other activities, and while sitcoms offer a simple, formulaic narrative that makes absentee-viewing a likely activity, Slow TV offers us more relaxing affordances, namely beautiful scenery and radio chatter.
I love that you incorporated slow tv into your background viewing, Jesse. It had struck me, watching a bit of that Norwregian clip, that watching it on my laptop was entirely the wrong way to go about it. If TV has long been called a medium of distraction, then slow TV is perhaps its most perfect expression: content meant to be kept running in the background of a life, as distant as it's possible to get from material that asks for concentration, presence, attention. Because of which, I wonder if even TV is the right medium for this kind of material. I know I for one would prefer it blow up -- a projection on a wall, something like an installation but in your own house. Environments you can dip in and out of...
ReplyDeleteit's Tania. Blogger sucks.
DeleteThis reminds me of my friend's post, in which he complains about the prevalence of quality TV shows in today's screen: they try so hard to be complex, and even brain mangling. Once the audience is distracted (which happens a lot in TV viewing), he/she may not be able to follow the plot and thus cannot enjoy the show fully. In a time when audiences are likely to see sitcoms as something quotidian and unsophisticated, which sometimes entails negative meanings, while they don't want much quality TV shows as they impose pressure rather than being a supposed-to-be relaxing viewing experience -- which becomes more prominent during the quarantine, slow TV can somehow be seen as an alternative that bridges the gap, as it can be an intellectually stimulating, philosophically provoking topic for study, or just simply one of the background elements of daily life?
ReplyDeleteBesides I am trying to place slow TV within the context of the rising of minimalism but not yet think it through ...
Hi Jesse, thanks for your post. Tania, your question about the projection environment for slow TV gets at something I've found difficult to name in what was my completely enrapt response to the example shared in class. While I'm not sure we can only say that "distraction" is the operative mode of engagement with slow TV (I found myself watching it, engrossed), I think your desire to watch the video as an installation signals something more akin to TV's distant cousin in video art. Barring the example of Andy Warhol's "Empire" I brought up in an early post, as did Tara in class, I wonder if the habits of engagement we have with extended works of video art in the gallery (interrupted, time-bound, non-sequential, partially distracted, and, yes, typically in a larger projection form) primes a kind of appreciation or engagement with slow TV. Certainly watching the train ride from Bergen to Oslo I was reminded of something like Phillipe Parreno's video "June 8, 1968," which recreates from a train's POV the journey of RFK's body from New York to DC.
ReplyDeleteBasically, I wonder how we can place slow TV within the larger frame of gallery viewing habits and the general public's increasing familiarity and experience with video art. Christian Marclay's "The Clock," something like the ultimate duration piece was, after all, so popular.
The point about “distraction” reminds me of Margaret Morse’s “The Ontology of Everyday Distraction,” in which she analyses the experience of walking in the mall, driving in a car, and watching TV. When I was reading that article, I wondered what’s the difference between driving in a private car and taking a train with pre-determined routes. The obvious answer is that the former is much more individualised, but what exactly is at stake when we talk about the difference between car and train?
ReplyDeleteI actually went on that train in Norway from Oslo to Bergen two years ago and the slow TV makes me very nostalgia of that experience. When I planned my trip, I was told that the train line was one of the most iconic in Norway (or even in Europe) and an epitome of the Norwegian natural sceneries. Singling out a route to be the representative of Norwegian culture, the train line is no longer a private trip that each traveller put on their itineraries. Rather, it becomes a carrier of the more public image of the country.
To a certain extent, wouldn’t the train experience resemble television viewing too? It offers a site for everyday distraction, but not in a sense that is completely individualised (as Morse indicates in her article). Rather, with pre-made contents and schedules, each television channel (like each train route) feeds us with both publicised messages and a sense of individual choice.
After coming back to this post and reading the comments, I the word "attention" keeps banging around my head. From Yayu's anecdote about missing elements of quality television to Tania and Anastasia's discourse around galleries and projection, attention plays a vital role in theorizing television's effects. Slow TV changes the attentional expectations of its auidence. Where legacy American television centers around compartmentalizing and focusing its audience's attention between advertisements and programming, Slow TV releases the reins. It lets us better choose where and how to attend the entertainment.
ReplyDeleteThe concept “attention” definitely plays a central role in making sense of slow TV, but to be honest, I had the opposite experience: I felt like Norwegian train required me to pay so much more extra attention compared to normal paced TV. It is a kind of content you need to actively choose to pay attention to, otherwise you won’t be watching it at all.
ReplyDelete