Nya bildregimer och reality-tv

This research project sets out to identify how contemporary reality television programs engage with the cultural implications of emergent image technologies and applications of machine vision – from police body cameras, surveillance drones, and facial recognition systems to deep-fake AI imagery. Intertwining two quite distinct disciplinary strands, media theory and popular culture studies, it observes how current changes in the function and very conception of visual mediation are negotiated within the genre of reality tv. Machine vision processes are notoriously hard to observe and grasp, since they are rooted in computational processing and their operations are distributed across networks that span the globe. But, as the project seeks to demonstrate, television has developed strategies to visualize the pervasive implications of our reformed visual culture. Reality TV is particularly effective in allowing broad publics to engage with aesthetic representations and narratives of the new visual technologies. Hence, reality TV proves to be a privileged site for the negotiation of the societal changes brought about by the recent transformations in the mediascape. By analyzing the formal and narrative treatment of a selection of exemplary reality shows, as well as viewers’ responses to them, the project aims at shedding light on how mass media informs and habituates viewers about life in our new regime of the image.