A department of the College is a medium, not a subject. The English Department holds what is done in language; the Art Department holds what is done in the image. This department holds what is done on the screen — which is neither of those, and has been treated as both for a century.
Language can be slowed down and re-read. An image can be stood in front of. A broadcast can be done neither: it arrives at a speed it sets, in an order it chooses, and is gone. What it leaves behind is not an argument the viewer examined but a condition the viewer woke up inside. That is the department's object — not what was said on the screen, but what the screen did while saying it.
Media Studies elsewhere is a reading list. Here it is a working transmitter. The department does not study the broadcast from outside it; it broadcasts, and files the reading of its own signal alongside the signal. This is not a conflict of interest — it is the only position from which the machinery is visible at working speed. The fish have theories about the water. The theories are also in the water.
The department is built out of three standing parts: an organ that transmits, a faculty that reads, and instruments that hold a reading still long enough to be handled. The organ is The Red Screen. The faculty is the Collective. The instruments are below.
Two of the doors below are installations rather than instruments, and they are a pair. Ancestors is the console television in the corner of the living room — the furniture that dispensed the people. The Viewer is the one who grew up in front of it: a figure with a set for a head and a book in each hand, tuned to whatever is on. The first shows what the screen delivered. The second shows where it was installed.
One of those instruments points backwards rather than at the present. Sitcom Royalty takes the medium's most domesticated form — the situation comedy, seventy years of it — and asks who actually held it together. The answer is not any of the names the medium tells you to expect, and the method's refusal to flatter them is the point.
And one door on this page is not an instrument at all. Moving Picture is the intake — the aperture turned the other way, where work arrives rather than departs. A department that only transmits is a broadcast. The receiving end is what makes it a department.
The department transmits on no schedule. What it produces enters the signal feed alongside the Archive's pieces, and is read by whoever is standing in front of the screen when it goes up.