Between Participation and Control: A Long History of CCTV
b'Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has become synonymous with surveillance society and the widespread use of media technologies for contemporary regimes of power and control. Considered from the perspective of television\\u2019s long history, however, closed-circuit systems are multifaceted, and include, but are not limited to sorting and surveillance. During the media\\u2019s experimental phase in the 1920s and 1930s, closed-circuit systems were an essential feature of its public display, shaping its identity as a new technology for instantaneous communication. With the emergence of activist video practices in the 1970s, closed-circuit TV became a core feature for alternative experiments such as the Videofreex\\u2019 Lanesville TV, where it offered access to community-based media making. This use of CCTV as a tool for participatory media took place simultaneously with the rise of CCTV as a surveillance technology, which had been promoted under the label of \\u201cindustrial television\\u201d already from the early 1950s on. Based on war-driven technological developments, industrial TV implemented televisual monitoring in industrial, educational, and military spheres decades before the global spread of surveillance cameras in public space.\\n\\nThis talk by Anne-Katrin Weber explores the politics of CCTV as they unfold in different institutional and ideological settings. Examining television\\u2019s history beyond broadcasting and programs, it focuses on television\\u2019s multiple applications and meanings in public space \\u2013 from the early presentation of television at World\\u2019s Fairs to community-based initiatives \\u2013 and thus highlights the adaptability of closed-circuit technologies, which accommodate to, and underpin variable contexts of media participation as well as of surveillance and control.\\n\\nAnne-Katrin Weber is a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is a visiting scholar at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. Her research examines the history of television outside broadcasting institutions. Currently preparing her first monograph titled Television on Display: Visual Culture and Technopolitics in Europe and the USA, 1928-1939, she is the editor of La t\\xe9l\\xe9vision du t\\xe9l\\xe9phonoscope \\xe0 Youtube: pour une arch\\xe9ologie de l\\u2019audiovision (with Mireille Berton, Antipodes, 2009) and an issue of View: Journal of European Television History and Culture (\\u201cArchaeologies of Tele-Visions and \\u2013Realities,\\u201d with Andreas Fickers, 2015).'