Trailers and previews of American television shows

A Research on the Productivity of Cultural Objects

The aim of Enrica Picarelli's research project is to investigate how the promotional campaigns of high-budget movies and television shows, based on the transmedial circulation of trailers and previews, create a form of immaterial economy that extracts value from virtual, that is yet-to-come, productions. In this sense, trailers are engaged as a source of production, rather than the determinate and determined outcome of a process of production.

The project analyses the ways in which the productivity of cultural objects unfolds and how it responds to processes of communication that are triggered by affective transmission. The project adopts a transdisciplinary approach that weaves together digital media studies, the sociology of communication and production studies to offer an innovative approach to cultural processes that brings together the production and receiving layers of the communication circuit. The outcome of the project may equally result in the publication of a book and/or a series of essays.

The first outcomes of this project have been submitted and accepted for publication on the journal Transformations (forthcoming in 2013) and as a chapter in the anthology Besides the Screen: The Distribution, Exhibition and Consumption of Moving Images, edited by Virginia Crisp and Gabriel Menotti for OpenBook Publishers (forthcoming 2014).

Das Projekt wird im Rahmen des Innovations-Inkubators der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg gefördert durch den Europäischen Fond für Regionalentwicklung (EFRE) und das Land Niedersachsen.