Visualising the Reef: Creating a sense of planet through natural history television on the ABC
Blue Humanities Lab | Public seminar series
| Start | 17 November 2022, 12:00pm |
|---|---|
| End | 17 November 2022, 2:00pm |
In December 2020 the ABC ran a themed season of programs titled ‘Your Planet’. The highlight of this series was Reef Live, a two-night media event built on the promise of showing actuality footage of coral spawning on primetime TV: television and nature coming together to reveal the renewal of life. This paper explores how this television event mediated the reef and provoked a sense of planet in audiences. Rather than critique the representational strategies of the program, the focus is on how a planetary perspective was crafted via two very different strategies: immersive underwater images offering an experience of co-present intimacy with coral, and vast aerial views of the ocean streaked with a white slick. Big optics and visual immersion offer very different senses of planet. However, their effect is the same: to disrupt place bound anthropocentric points of view with a sense of planetary inhabitation and connectedness to earth.
