Description

Susan Murray (NYU) and Fred Turner (Stanford) will be introduced by Rebecca Cleman (EAI) and Nick Mirzoeff (NYU) as they present on television utopias of the 1970s and their continued relevance to our current political, cultural, and technological landscape.

Susan Murray: TV Utopias and Media Ecologies
The state of network television and cable regulation at the start of the 1970s is essential context for our understanding of what was at stake at the 1974 Open Circuits conference. In particular, broadcast television’s failure to live up to its public interest mandate and the sudden availability of public access cable channels and affordable portable video cameras intersected with new theories of the media and a push for participatory democracy in media. In this talk, I will connect the 1974 conference, some of the writing in The New Television anthology, and our contemporary situation back to this history and its industrial, artistic, and theoretical framing.

Fred Turner: New Television, New Democracy
In 1974, one world was fading away and another was being born. For years the dream that cybernetic feedback systems and electronic media would birth global peace had fueled the work of artists like Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik. But now the Bronx was burning and the Vietnam War was lost. This talk will argue that even as cybernetic utopianism faded, it gave rise to a new, pluralist vision of video art and American democracy, a vision centered on questions of difference, identity and the power of seeing and being seen.

If you have any accessibility needs or questions about our access plans for this event, please contact cstrange@eai.org. We can accommodate requests for ASL interpretation up to two weeks prior to October 17. This event will have HEPA filters on-site, provided by Artists in Resistance NYC. Accommodations are supported by NYU Center for Disability Studies.