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 Television Standing Seminar, Autumn 2025

For online participation, please register here: https://forms.office.com/e/wiRndwb1eQ

Marie Sandoz: Television at the Swiss Stock Market. Data Flow and Money Flow in the Electronic Age

20 November 2025, 17h CET 

Marie Sandoz is a Post-Doc researcher in the SNSF-funded five-year research project Operative TV: Audiovisual Closed-Circuits from the Military to the Classroom (1930s-1990s) at the University of Lausanne. Her work focuses on the media history of infrastructures, logistics, photography and public service television. Her latest publications deal with the history of satellite communication or “vertical images”.

Guilherme Machado: Digital simulation of work: from training technology to the imagined future of actual workplaces via television

9 December 2025, 17h CET 

Guilherme Machado is a Junior Lecturer and postdoc researcher at the University of Lausanne’s department of Film History and Aesthetics. His research deals with the visual culture of labor and the epistemological implications of visual technologies used to control the production and circulation of labor-related knowledges. He co-edited a volume on Tacit Cinematic Knowledge. Approaches and Practices and published on the role of media in vocational training.

Michael Darroch: Toronto’s 1960s TV Campus: Crisis Planning for 20th Century New Media Education   

21 January 2026, 17h CET  

Michael Darroch is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. He co-edited Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban with Janine Marchessault (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), an interdisciplinary collection that situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies. Funded research projects through the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have included archival explorations of neglected members of the Toronto School, and more recently (2019) Edgy Media: On Borders, Migrations, Media Studies and Media Arts which facilitated the 4th iteration of the international touring exhibition Feedback: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts;  Sensing Borders: Mapping, Media and Migration (2020-2025); and Distributed Networks: Media Archaeologies of Educational TV and Communication Studies in Canada, 1945-1975 (2021-26).