Television has been conceived as a mass medium that broadcasts a linear program flow to a wide and anonymous domestic audience. Occasionally, the medium is praised for its power of dissemination; more often, it is criticized for centralized transmission of indiscriminate content to distracted or passive viewers.  Television, in this perspective, lacks any kind of direct feedback mechanism. 

In this conference, we want to rethink television history and theory by focusing on the medium’s circuits and multiple loops. This shift in perspective brings to our attention television’s technological flexibility and interrelations with other media, as well as its sprawling, often hidden, cultural, industrial, and political productivity. Taking as a starting point the Circuits of Television, this conference also aims to inquire the much-overlooked connection between the history of computing, cybernetics, video art, ecology and system theory – where circuits and feedback loops are key concepts – and television’s historiography. Television’s constant shape shifting (e.g. through video and remote control, through satellite and cable) generates new apparatuses and new imaginaries of circuits’ applicability across these different domains. In short, past and present ideas, practices, and apparatuses of television encompass multiple loops.

This international and bilingual (French/English) conference is part of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) sponsored research project on Operational TV. Audiovisual Closed-Circuits from the Military to the Classroom, 1930s-1990s led at the University of Lausanne by Anne-Katrin Weber, and co-organized with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. The keynote will be given by Prof. Kit Hugues (Colorado State University) whose recent monograph Television at Work. Industrial Media and American Labor (2020) explores how American businesses appropriated television as a “workplace medium” supporting industrial efficiency, ideological orientation, and corporate expansion. 

Full program: https://wp.unil.ch/collectif-televisuel/recherches/operative-tv/les-circuits-de-la-television/

For online participation enroll by mail to m.stauff@uva.nl.