Open Circuits: New Media Art from 1970 to Today charts the relationship between video art and television from the early 1970s to today’s “post-television” world of TikTok and Instagram. The class begins with the study of “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television” held in January 1974, and the subsequent publication of conference proceedings and essays as The New Television (1977), which was organized into three sections—the aesthetics of television; the support structure: change and resistance; and the politics, philosophy, and future of television; these will also provide the frameworks for understanding the contemporary new media landscape. Students will have unparalleled access to videos and archival material from Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), including an exploration of the Black Panther Party’s use of video and closed-circuit television and oral histories with such visionary figures as Philip Mallory, Susan Milano, and Beryl Korot. The course expands the scope of mid-’70s scholarship by considering the role of screens, first as television, now as iPhones, in domestic life, historically and in the age of COVID; the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of immediacy; and the ways in which artists today use mass communications to comment on the collapsing of public and private life