26/05/23, 6:54 p.m.

Useful Television Standing Seminar --> 3 mai 2023, 5pm (CEST) / 10am (EST)
Anne-Katrin Weber <annekatrin.weber@unibas.ch>
Mar 4/04/2023 11:29 AM
Para: Markus Stauff <m.stauff@uva.nl>

Online Presentation - 3 May 2023 - Susan Murray - "'How to See Where You Can’t Look:' Vision and Early CCTV"

Useful Television
Standing Seminar

We are pleased to invite you to the first event of our seminar!

Online presentation

May 3rd at 5pm (CEST) / 10am (EST)

Prof. Susan Murray (New York University)

"'How to See Where You Can’t Look': Vision and Early CCTV"

approximate duration : 1h30

https://outlook.office.com/mail/id/AAQkADRhZTkxNjkzLWQ0OTUtNGJhZC05M2U5LTBkZjcyNjI3MjM0MQAQAAYPphmYS7lOiiPvXXytUmI%3D Página 1 de 3
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The Zoom link will be provided later.

In preparation of the seminar, you are invited to read:

Susan Murray, ‘The New Surgical Amphitheater: Color Television and Medical
Education in Postwar America’,  Technology and Culture 61, no. 3 (2020): 772–
97, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2020.0073.

About the Useful Television Standing Seminar

In 2022, we  (Anne-Katrin Weber and Markus Stauff)  hosted two workshops (in Basel
and Amsterdam respectively) to discuss historical and conceptual questions related to
contexts in which television gets applied as a useful tool, rather than a mass medium.
The examples ranged from medical, military and industrial applications of television
technology to its operational use in sports. We partly built on older debates in film
studies (e.g. non-theatrical cinema; useful film) and wanted to bring television into this
debate.

We think that looking at useful television allows both, to broaden and to complicate our
understanding of what media do and how they do it, and to see hidden (and complex)
processes of mediation in practices that normally are not perceived as media practices.
TV’s features that differentiate it from film and photography made it attractive for
different contexts of use. In TV for example, the recording function was a later
development and the transmission of ephemeral images created specific potentials and
risks for its usefulness; for TV the transition from analog to digital was less the drama of
losing indexicality and rather a re-organization of access to the image. Not least, the
boundaries but also interrelations between the mostly domestic mass medium of TV
and its useful application in institutional contexts might be more complex. Between the
monitoring of nuclear experiments and Jane Fonda’s Aerobic videos, television’s useful
images, to us, seem an open and exciting field to map out.

To tackle this task, we would like to invite you to a regular online seminar that would
allow for an international and interdisciplinary discussion of such questions. For the
moment we plan to hold two or three meetings per semester for which we invite guest
speakers, discuss the participants’ work in process or new and old publications that

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seem of relevance. 

At the end of the first meeting, we would like to discuss together how to proceed.

We are very happy to have Susan Murray open the dialogue with a presentation on the
history of closed-circuit TV.

Biography: Susan Murray

Susan Murray  is a media studies scholar and historian

who uses television as an entry point to analyze post-war
era technology, culture, design, aesthetics, and industry.
A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, her research has also been
supported by the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies,
the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the American
Association of University Women. She is the author
ofBright Signals: A History of Color Television  (Duke
University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019
Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award by the Society for
Cinema and Media Studies and the 2019 Michael Nelson
Book Prize by the International Association for Media and
History, and  Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early
Television and Broadcast Stardom. Her work has
appeared in journals such as Public Culture, Screen, The
Journal of Visual Culture, and Technology and Culture.

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