Gæsteforelæsning af William Ulricchio: Television in transition – balancing future-casting and rearview-mirror perspectives
Mandag den 3. december kl. 13, lokale 43.3.29
Abstract
‘Second screens’, social networking sites, Internet access to production backlogs and global television, the threat of interactive programming … these and many other developments have combined to keep television executives awake at night. Together with larger transformations in our technological, corporate and cultural regimes, these developments have led to a small cottage industry of predictions and ‘future-casting.’ Yet, for all their diverse advice, these prognostications share a common feature: they look ahead, peering into the foggy distance to make sense of the horizon. This talk will keep an eye on the rear-view mirror, arguing that we can only know where we are going if we have a clear sense of where we are coming from. Drawing on over 135 years of ideas, expectations and forgotten deployments of the television medium, the talk will chart the deep structures of continuity - and moments of conceptual rupture - in the process, arguing that a long-term constancy of desire and an intermedial flux of application characterizes much that we think of as new. Less ‘we’ve seen it all before’ than an interrogation of the surprising continuities of cultural aspiration, the ultimate goals of the talk are to consider the nature of the medium’s change and the implications of different ways of exploring it.
About William Uricchio:
William Uricchio is professor and director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies section and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University. At MIT, Uricchio is principal investigator of the Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Game Lab (successor to the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab). His scholarly research considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices in relation to the (re-) construction of representation, knowledge and publics. He investigates media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation. He is currently completing a book on the notion of the televisual from the 19th century to the present and a study on the cultural work of algorithms.
Arrangør:
Forskningsgruppen Communication, Journalism and Social Change/Ida Willig and DREAM/Kim Schrøder