Past event
Vitreous Visions: Histories of Glass as a Media Objects Departmental Seminar with Dr Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal (St Andrews)
This paper is part of a project that I am developing on the understudied history of glass as a media material. The project connects nineteenth-century media practices to contemporary film, television, and digital media cultures and links to debates in the history of science, race, class, and digital cultures. I examine materiality of glass (such as with lens making practices) and its impact on Europe's nineteenth- and twentieth-century lantern and film industries and their representation of class; the racial and colonial connotations of glass as the surface for background matte paintings in twentieth century film production; the lead-based television glass as an embodiment of anxieties surrounding the brain-addling capabilities of the medium; and the continued relevance of glass in imagining the modern (digital) screen, as signifier of transparency and — ironically — of immateriality. Via these individual instances of glass in media making, the project seeks to highlight that glass and the elements that it is made of, have been significant in materially and metaphorically shaping film and other visual media cultures.