Since spring 2023, The Useful Television Standing Seminar (organized by Anne-Katrin Weber, University of Lausanne, and Markus Stauff, University of Amsterdam) aims to facilitate the exchange between scholars interested in television’s application as a useful tool, rather than a mass medium. The examples range from military and industrial applications of television technology to its operational use in medicine, science, or sports. We partly build on older debates in film studies (e.g. non-theatrical cinema; useful film) and want to bring television into this debate. Looking at useful television requires to broaden and to complicate our understanding of what media do and how they do it. Additionally, it contributes to an alternative genealogy of “digital media”. The seminar organizes two or three meetings per semester for which we invite guest speakers, discuss the participants’ work in progress or new and old publications that seem of relevance.

The Useful Television Standing Seminar, Autumn 2025

For online participation, please register here: https://forms.office.com/e/wiRndwb1eQ

9 December 2025, 17h CET 

Guilherme Machado: Digital simulation of work: from training technology to the imagined future of actual workplaces via television

Guilherme Machado is a Junior Lecturer and postdoc researcher at the University of Lausanne’s department of Film History and Aesthetics. His research deals with the visual culture of labor and the epistemological implications of visual technologies used to control the production and circulation of labor-related knowledges. He co-edited a volume on Tacit Cinematic Knowledge. Approaches and Practices and published on the role of media in vocational training.