Carmine Grimaldi
My book manuscript, Structuring Vision: A History of Videotape, examines the untold history of early video, charting the many ways it came to structure everyday life. Each chapter follows the technology as it migrated and transformed American institutions: from the classroom, where it recorded a new taxonomy of behavior; to the psychiatric clinic, where it provided novel tools to understand the self; to the courthouse, where it transfigured the process of reason into optics and aesthetics. Finally, I turn to the emergence of video art, guerrilla television and countercultural aesthetics, all of which, I argue, quietly drew inspiration from these earlier bureaucratic techniques. I am also working on a project that traces the media history of conspiracy theories in postwar America, from amateur newsletters and early photographic evidence to today's digital networks. My research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Fishbein Center at the University of Chicago, The Harvard Film Studies Center, and the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.