Cybernetics of Influence: Set Design in the Age of Television

Description

This talk considers “influence” as an atmospheric notion of media that binds mind and society at the onset of the Cold War and the rise of television. Influence, in this context, does not entail a one-way traffic but a structure of interdependence, relying on a new notion of set design that orchestrates a system of responses and reactions that produces resonances and dissonances, signal and noise. Situated in the early era of the People’s Republic (1949-) in the decade between the ideological campaign of Thought Reform (1951-1952) and the Great Leap Forward (1958- 1962) movement, I examine how the “cool media” of television (McLuhan) reconfigures set design through a new set of technological and human assembly. With this framework, I return to the site of television production, not as the origin of signal dissemination, but the node where issues of transmission, amplification, and reception inform and shape the very production process. Probing the influencing machinery and aesthetics of television in connection with other media, my talk highlights the tension intrinsic to influence caught between a climatic regime of power and aesthetic operations of resonances, between spatial-temporal axes of enclosure and porosity, stasis and motion.

Speaker

Weihong Bao is Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies and an Associate Professor of Film and Media & East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley. She has published widely on comparative media history and theory, media and environment, early cinema, war and modernity, affect theory, propaganda theory and practice, and Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions. Her book Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) received an honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize in 2016. Her more recent work explores the relationship between medium and environment, by engaging intellectual history, political theory, cultural anthropology, and comparative media theory. On this subject she has co-edited two special issues on “Media/Climates" (Representations) and "Medium/Environment" (Critical Inquiry); she is also completing a new book, “Background Matters: Set Design Thinking and The Art of Environment.”