call for papers in English and French for the international conference “The Circuits of Television. Histories, technologies, imaginaries”.
Organized by Anne-Katrin Weber (University of Lausanne), Markus Stauff (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) and myself, the conference will take place at the University of Lausanne from 7 to 9 May 2025.
Argument:
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.
Download the complete call for papers in PDF.
Suggested topics:
We want to invite emerging and senior scholars to contribute research that may include but is not limited to the following topics:
Media archaeological approaches to televisual circuits:
- Televisual circuits in the longue durée: ideas and fictional apparatus of interactive and bi-directional television from the 19th Century on
- Closed-circuit television in the miliary, science, industry; television as a tool for surveillance, targeting, and automation
- Feedback mechanisms and television in medicine and education
- Televisual circuits and the renewal of television historiography
Televisual Circuits and Broadcasting Television:
- Televisual scandals: deprogramming and censorship of broadcast content because of public protest
- Televisual tools and community building: “Watching ourselves on TV”
- Audience feedback: letters, surveys, and audience surveillance
- Rearticulation of liveness and flow in institutional settings
Televisual circuits and the remapping of media ecologies:
- “Closed world” thinking in the postwar era, cybernetics, and the emergence of television
- Computational circuits and their entanglement with television
- Concepts of circularity/circuits in ecology and energy flow analysis and its relation to cybernetics and television history
- Circuits in Video Art and their link to television history
Submission of proposals:
Presentations will last a maximum of 20 minutes.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words (including 2 or 3 key references)
plus a short bio (max. 150 words) to marie.sandoz@unil.ch, before June 21, 2024.
Decisions on acceptance will be announced mid-July. Travel (by train only) and hotel will be covered by the organizers.