Professor Doron Galili (Stockholm) will discuss the emergence of television in conversation with Professor William Uricchio (MIT). 

Drawing on the research that informed Professor Doron Galili’s recent book, Seeing by Electricity, which traced the history of television from the initial ideas regarding moving images transmission in the 1870s until the launch of broadcast services in the 1930s, this event will examine the historical formation of the very terms that came to distinguish television from film. As a case study, Galili’s book takes early ideas, experiments, and narratives about transmitting motion picture films by television. Though considered to be a modern-era instance of “remediation,” the possibility of transmitting film electrically has been entertained since the earliest days of cinema. Looking at early films that depict such intermedial configuration and reading early commentators’ utopian and dystopian views about the possible ramifications to cinema, Galili  argues that the boundaries between different manifestations of moving image media were in fact never ontologically settled.

Doron Galili is Researcher in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He is the author of Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020) and coeditor of Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Indiana University Press, 2018).

William Uricchio is a media historian and professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT where he is founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. His Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media Within Communities, Across Disciplines, and With Algorithms, co-authored with Kat Cizek, is forthcoming with MIT Press.

If you would like to receive a zoom invitation,  please email Professor Sarah Keller.  Participants will be able to ask questions and join the conversation after the initial presentation and dialogue.