All Eyes on Space: Television and the Architecture of Distant Sight

All Eyes on Space examines television as a form of modern architecture--and how its material conditions have shaped contemporary ideas of space, place, and distance. Analog television was more than a novel way of transmitting images and sounds for commercial entertainment; it brought with it new ways of producing and perceiving space itself. With this innovative study, Samuel Dodd explores the history of television’s physical architecture, attributing its technological momentum to modern design and construction. As Dodd explains, television’s delivery of easy and endless imagery was only possible because of a concerted building boom, starting in the 1940s, of newly designed stations, studios, towers, cables, and screens. The resulting television architectures positioned US social policy throughout the world, a policy that merged expansionist politics with neoliberal logics to shore up American power in areas regarded as both soft and hard, cold and hot. All Eyes on Space offers the first architectural history of American television during the second half of the twentieth century, considering both the physical building necessary to support screen-based society and its new spatial relations. It explains how television became an intractable architecture, built up not only by media corporations and producers but also architects, engineers, developers, and other builders.

Sam Dodd is an assistant professor of art history and criticism in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the modern built environment, emphasizing the intersections between architecture and the visual arts, studies of popular culture, and the history of media as it relates to space and society.