Funeral for Analog TV

Wake, Dirge, Eulogy, and Snowcrash

February 17, 2009 ; 7:00 p.m.

Berkeley Art Museum (please use Durant Avenue entrance)

It’s rare that the entire nation gets a specific date on which one major medium dies and is replaced by another. Join author Bruce Sterling, technology pundit Paul Saffo, sound artist Author and Punisher, artist collective Neighborhood Public Radio, and other special guests to mourn the loss of the analog television signal as the U.S. makes the switch to digital television. This event will be a scholarly and artistic reflection on the passing of one of the dominant mediums and cultural influences of the late 20th century. In a soap-opera melodrama fit for TV itself, Congress has debated changing the official date for the switch to digital television; this event, however, will take place on February 17, the originally announced date of the transition, because, as the event’s organizers note, “We prefer to bury a fresh corpse rather than wait for the walking dead to fall over.”

Please bring your analog TV for display and recycling. A pre-event workshop on building your own pirate TV transmitter takes place at 5 pm in the Berkeley Center for New Media Commons, 340 Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley campus.

This event is organized by the Long Now Foundation, Berkeley Center for New Media, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. For more information, please visit the event website at http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/tvfuneral/.