A Brief History of Audiovisual Arts

In this wide-ranging and intellectually generous volume, Dario Martinelli traces the full arc of audiovisual culture - from the earliest human experiments with light and projected image to the algorithm-driven, screen-saturated world of today. The journey is surprising at every turn: cinema did not appear from nowhere, but was the culmination of centuries of tinkering, dreaming, and spectacular failure by inventors, showmen, artists, and scientists who had been wrestling with the same fundamental problem long before the word 'film' existed. Organized chronologically but alert to the messy, overlapping realities of technological history, the book moves from the camera obscura and the phantasmagoria through the birth of cinema, the rise of television, the video game revolution, the music video, and the digital transformation that has made audiovisual experience effectively coextensive with contemporary life itself. Along the way, it equips readers with the analytical tools - media, formats, genres, the semiotics of the screen - needed to understand not just what they are watching, but how and why. Written with the clarity and wit of a scholar who genuinely enjoys teaching, A Brief History of Audiovisual Arts is the essential companion for students and curious readers alike - an invitation to see the screens around us with newly informed, and newly critical, eyes.