A Wilderness of Mirrors : Reality TV, Fake News, and Surveillance in the Trump Era

This project is a multimedia investigation of reality television, fake news, and surveillance in contemporary American culture. Since the television first became a staple of the American living room, news broadcasting, politics, and celebrity have merged into one, ultimately, I argue, incurring clickbait, fake news, and the political climate we see today. For the last half century, media theorists Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Hito Steyerl, Sigfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt, Andy Warhol, and Guy Debord (to name a few) have theorized extensively on the ways in which political ideology makes itself manifest through media culture, with special focus on its dangerous effects on the vulnerable, constantly consuming public. In this work, I inquire: how do these media overlap to create the climate we know today, and how are they simultaneously celebrated and disguised? As a double major in art history and cinema studies, this independent project has challenged and pushed my knowledge in both media studies and contemporary art theory, inspiring tremendous passion for resolving these questions through my current academic scholarship