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 TV Standing Seminar is supported by the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis ASCA.
Stay tuned for our next seminar series in spring 2025!
For online participation, please register here: https://forms.office.com/e/PL6C3XTfFu
Past presentations:
7 November 2024: Maximilian Brockhaus (University of Vienna), Broadcasting and Building Minds: From radio to television in Austrian and European Schools (1924-1955)
11 October 2024: Ira Wagman (Carleton University), Scenes of Television Instruction in 1950s Montreal
2 May 2024: Yvonne Zimmermann (Philipps-Universität Marburg), Films that Work Harder / The Power of Flow
21 February 2024, John Wyver (University of Westminster), Useful television in Britain in the interval of uncertainty, 1928-1939
21 November 2023: Renée Winter (University of Vienna), Working on the Self – Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Uses of Video
5 September 2023: Hannah Spaulding (University of Liverpool), The Control Center of the Home”: Surveillance, Useful Television, and American Postwar Domesticity.
3 May 2023: Susan Murray (New York University), How to See Where You Can’t Look’: Vision and Early CCTV