A Media History of Aerial Advertising

Chercheur principal / principal investigator: Ghislain Thibault (2021-2025)

Résumé (anglais):

“Look Up!: A Media History of Aerial Advertising: 1903-1993” is a SSHRC-funded research project (and book project) that aims to explore key case studies in the history of aerial advertising in order to examine the social and political responses to the introduction of media technologies in the sky. Aerial media can be defined as technologies that utilize the sky as screen, support or medium to communicate visible symbols either by scrolling through, projecting on, dropping from, hovering in or drawing over it. Examples include smoke signals, pyrotechnics, airborne propaganda leaflets, skywriting, hauled advertisement banners on beachfront and, more recently, choreographed drone lightshows. This project reconstructs and analyze five case studies in the recent history of aerial advertising, from the early 20th century until now, to document and examine how social and political groups have intervened when mediated communication entered skyscapes and what representations of technology and nature have been articulated through these debates. It focuses particularly on skywriting and blimp advertising.

The relevance of the project to understand society’s conflicting relationship with media is twofold. First, the sky has taken up a social, political and ecological significance in the recent years, as its transformation into a commodified space of transportation and telecommunications has intensified. The history of aerial media tells us is that such technologization of the sky is far from being met with indifference. In part because it has long been a source of poetic contemplation, symbolic interpretation, and daydreaming, the sky has often been defended as a space worthy of being preserved as “natural.” As they have been imagined, proposed, developed or implemented over time, aerial media have also been the objects for the articulation of our desires and fears regarding both technology and nature. Second, social meanings, imaginaries, speculative discourses generally have little space in comparison grand discourse of technological innovation. What works, what exists, what materializes, in short, successes, are the center front of technological innovation. The role of this research project is in part to mobilize the interdisciplinary contributions by scholars in science and technology, media studies, history of technology in order to demonstrate the analytic value of looking at the way that observers create and negotiate, through discourse, the boundaries between nature and technology and idealized versions of their future. Answering both these issues, the main objective of this research project is to write a history of aerial media as a site from which to witness a number of questions that arise when technological systems meet natural environments: how is the notion of the sky as “natural space” defined, debated and defended in the context of aerial communication? What are the key social, scientific and political debates regarding the sky as a site of technological innovation? What technological fears, social hopes or utopian desires are being articulated through the discourses on aerial media?