Our assignment has been issued for television art and it requires us to discuss and address television as it is now in 2018. While I began this semester focusing on the construction of an adbreak, I think i’ve veered my ideas towards discussing the content of what’s on tv these days.

This is particulary directed at the normalisation of violence towards women on primetime television. In my observations on television, crime dramas are still a popular genre, however narratives in these shows are all too often spurred the graphic violence or death of a woman and focus on how the men who exist around it cope, or in other words “female characters being victimized in order to further the plot of their male significant others”. A short list of television shows that use this narrative could include Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones, Law and Order, CSI, House of Cards etc. Whilst those are the big name shows that are accountable for using this trope, during my television observation exercise I noted that graphic violence was being shown on prime time television on Free To Air tv in Australia.

I noticed this at the dinner table at a family dinner with members of my extended family, including my young cousins. As we happily ate and conversed, Law and Order SVU blared in the background, an obtrusive guest to the dinner contributing the gurgled screams of female murder victims to the conversation.

No one batted an eyelid.

This got me thinking about the physical object of a television itself; a moving image in a shiny black frame. A frame that we have no autonomy over what fills it.  We literally allow a corporation, or a small group of television programmers to infiltrate our lounge rooms, bedrooms, with images of whatever they think will sell, and these images are too often violent. This is what I plan to discuss in my video art assessment