The TV-Box: Reconsidering a Lost Television Set, Santa Claus and the Ants

For several years now, early cinema historians have developed certain notions that can help us define, in a much broader context, the axes of research in intermedial studies. Even though I’ll be giving it a slightly different importance, the notion I will be borrowing from these historians here is that of the “parameter.” Work by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion on the emergence of the cinematographic medium relies on the idea that the medium appears as the result of a choice made by the historian (or some other author of periodization). To write the history of any given medium and separate it into periods, one must also select the components “that gathered together as a way of giving ‘birth’ to that medium at a given moment” (Gaudreault and Marion, “Pour une nouvelle” 230; all translations mine). Gaudreault and Marion designate these components with the concept of the “cultural series,” though they often use the term “parameter” to refine its meaning. Thus, according to them, every medium is, at the moment of its birth, a “cluster of convergences,” a system of federated and provisionally stabilized “mobile parameters” that point toward apparatuses and media.