Abstract
In this paper, we look at three audiovisual staging strategies deployed by science television programs which contribute to the popularization of neuroscientific research. In three exemplary case studies we describe how the aesthetic staging of audiovisual images can shape the bodily, affective and cognitive processes of spectators. We assume that what becomes graspable as the meaning of a scientific argument is the result of spectators following and understanding the explanations given, while being highly emotionally engaged through the aesthetic composition. We have identified three levels that commonly shape the understanding process of spectators in science TV: (1) the explanatory dimension, the rhetorical and dramaturgical structure at the center of which stands a depicted brain scan that is described by a scientist. (2) the orchestration of the spectator’s feelings by deploying an array of aesthetic strategies common to fictional films. (3) the way audiovisual images direct the spectator’s process of thinking and understanding by using multimodal metaphors. What is experienced in these television formats as the meaning construction of scientific evidence is not the visualization of the brain itself and its explanation, but something that emerges through the audiovisual staging and the accompanying speech: a multimodal gesture of supposed proof, creating the felt impression of evidence and credibility.
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Notes
- 1.
As Heinemann explains: “In the past decades, imaging techniques especially have been established in various scientific disciplines, but in hardly any cases are the popularity of the discipline as well as its scientific advancement so closely tied to the deployment of imaging methods as in the neurosciences.” (translated by the authors) (Original quote: “Insbesondere bildgebende Verfahren haben sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten in verschiedenen Wissenschaften etabliert, doch in kaum einem Fall sind die Popularität der Disziplin sowie der wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisfortschritt so eng mit den Methoden der Bildgebung verbunden wie in den Neurowissenschaften.”, Heinemann 2012: 92).
- 2.
The German term “bildgebende Verfahren” highlights the aspect that these techniques actually “give an image” rather than simply take an image.
- 3.
Wibke Larink states that traditionally, two kinds of images are distinguished: images that are created by human beings and images that are produced by machines or apparatuses. The latter — images produced by apparatuses in scientific contexts — is often referred to as more credible and authentic (Larink 2011: 441).
- 4.
We only refer to some examples of science television programs that we have exploratively worked on to identify the compositional patterns and strategies that seem to be recurrent and relevant for the genre. The next step would be corpus-based analyses of these strategies in a broad spectrum of programs to deepen and prove the findings.
- 5.
We understand evidence in the sense Gottfried Boehm (2010) grasps the imagistic force of ‘showing’ as an intertwining of figure-ground constellations, of a complexity and denseness of appearance (“Erscheinungsdichte”, p. 30), and of a temporality of an event, a consummation, to be part of and to experience an event and how it develops, culminating in an act of uncovering (“an einem sich vollziehenden Geschehen teilhaben, einer Enthüllung”, p. 31).
- 6.
“We assume that film images organize the perceptive processes of spectators dynamically, as they unfold temporally during the film reception. While, for example, in one scene strong tensions and attentional foci are addressed, in a subsequent scene the suspense is relieved after a few minutes. From this perspective, film can be analyzed not only on the level of narrative plot and character constellation, but as complex affective dramaturgy, in other words, as a temporal course that the spectators experientially go through. Furthermore, within the development of a scene, audio-visual images unfold as movement patterns structuring dynamically the process of watching. The way a scene unrolls in complex aesthetic figures of soundscapes, light changing, montage sequences, or camera work reveals a certain dimension of movement that realizes itself only in the perception of the spectator” (Scherer et al. 2014: 2081–2082).
- 7.
Note that these aesthetic strategies are not conceived of as being part of a Regelpoetik, an aesthetic norm, a genre convention or poetic rule, instead they are to be experienced as felt qualities, affects and embodied processes of meaning making. Thus, they are part of the history of moving image culture as a history of experience, perception and feeling. To identify these patterns and strategies is a way to describe the historic and cultural specificity of a genre, a format, etc.: to grasp an activity that is bound to the spectator going through a film perceptively over time, a creative act or practice constructing the film by perceiving it, the poesis of the film-seeing and film-hearing (Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2017).
- 8.
The access is based on the interdisciplinary concept expressive movement and multimodal metaphor, and thus on how meaning making becomes graspable in audiovisual images. It departs from a both linguistic and film and media studies perspective to reconstruct processes of affect modulation and meaning construction via movement patterns and metaphors that develop over time. In this concept, the embodied act of seeing and hearing film images is center stage, thus metaphors that are reconstructed are presumed to emerge from the actual experience of the viewers (Kappelhoff and Müller 2011; Schmitt et al. 2014; Müller and Schmitt 2015; Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2015, 2017). For a methodological outline see especially Müller and Schmitt 2015.
- 9.
We understand audiovisual images as ‘movement images’ with regard to Deleuze. Movement-images address different dimensions of cinematic movement, be they perceptive, affective or actionistic aspects (among others) (Deleuze 1986).
- 10.
This common metaphor refers, for example, to the widely discussed computational theory of mind (e.g. Pinker 1997).
- 11.
All translations by the authors.
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Media
2001: A Space Oddyssey (Stanley Kubrick, UK/US 1968).
Das automatische Gehirn (Francesca D’Amicis, Petra Höfer, Freddie Röckenhaus, GER 2011, WDR).
Horizon (Episode The Secret You, Seas. 46, Ep. 2, Dan Walker, UK 2009, BBC 2).
Through the Wormhole (Episode Is There a Sixth Sense?, Seas. 2, Ep. 5), Lori McCreary et al, US 2011, Discovery Channel).
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Brückner, R., Greifenstein, S. (2019). The Audiovisual Process of Creating Evidence – Science Television Imagining the Brain. In: Görgen, A., Nunez, G.A., Fangerau, H. (eds) Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90677-5_13
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