Abstracts and bios of the participants can be found at http://tiny.cc/OperationalTV-Abstracts 

Overshadowed by its broadcast instantiation, the tele-visual image has a rich history as a medium of organizational/institutional decision-taking. The instantaneity, recordability and manipulability of video has been harnessed in factories, in hospitals, and in court rooms. Each of these organizational contexts highlights specific aspects of the operational value of images. The most visible example of all might be the use of video images in sports to support (or replace) referees’ work. Here, time-critical decision-taking happens in front of a knowledgeable audience that has access to the same (and sometimes more) visual technologies as the experts. Taking the ongoing men’s football World Cup and its introduction of a new “semi-automated offside technology” as a starting point, the workshop discusses the modes of knowledge, of visuality and of spectatorship that emerge in such operational use of media. It intentionally connects and compares the popular and public use of operational images in sports with more specialized and ‘hidden’ examples in industrial, scientific, and medical contexts.

Organizers: 

Markus Stauff (ASCA Cross-Media Seminar, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) 

Carlos d’Andréa (UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

Anne-Katrin Weber (University Basel, Switzerland)

Thursday, 1 December

15:00-15:10     Welcome

15:10-16:00     Aurora Hoel (Norwegian University of Science and Technology):
Technical images as adaptive mediators 

16:00-16:50     Anne-Katrin Weber (University Basel):
Televisual Mission Control, ca. 1969 

17:15-19:00     Panel Discussion on historical and conceptual aspects of image-based decision taking in sports

Jonathan Finn (Wilfrid Laurier University)
Dylan Mulvin (London School of Economics)
Chair: Markus Stauff

Friday, 2 December

15:00-15:50     Sebastian Scholz (Free University Amsterdam):
On Epistemic Images

16:00-16:50     Victoria E. Johnson (UC Irvine):
Beyond the Club. Videogame-graphics and the Reimagination of Golf Culture 

17:15-19:00     Panel Discussion on the public use of operational images at the men’s FIFA World Cup 2022 – Politics and Epistemologies

Márcio Telles (Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná)
Vidya Subramanian (Jindal Global Law School)
… and all workshop participants
Chair: Carlos d’Andréa

The event will be ‘hybrid’: In person at the University of Amsterdam and online via Zoom. Registration for on- and offline participation: www.tiny.cc/OperationalTV