Refractions: (tele)vision and the (trans)formation and (trans)mission of the culture landscape

Abstract

The manner in which landscapes are technologically transmitted and taken up elsewhere is often treated as an unproblematic, literal transfer of artefacts and philosophies. But interpreting any vestige of culture taken from television requires recognising selections and transformations taking place in the act of reception. Traditional notions of centres and margins are refuted when the televisual is properly acknowledged, explicated here through Heidegger's presentation of technology as a mode of revealing. Within the televisual landscape, infotainment programmes promote a required level of expertise for structuring and maintaining the domestic garden, and are explored here through Gadamer's consideration of the role of the 'expert'. Playing with the idea of refraction, as it might stand for the transformative character of transmission and reception through television of the culture of landscape, I recognise that television too has its landscape and is itself a culture.