Poster announcing NHK’s inaugural broadcast, 1953. Collection of the Postal Museum, Japan.
Please join us for an informal presentation by AHVA Visiting Scholar, Professor Hideaki Matsuyama, this Friday, September 11, 12 to 1 pm, in Room 1002, Audain Art Centre.
Rethinking Reality through the History of Television
A presentation by Professor Hideaki Matsuyama
Friday, September 11, 2026
12–1 pm
Room 1002, Audain Art Centre
In the 2020s, videos are everywhere. People enjoy watching videos on Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube. They also watch short videos on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. In recent years, fake videos created by generative AI have also become common. As a result, it has become more difficult to tell what is real and what is fake. Why has the world become like this? Can we rethink our current media landscape by looking at the history of television? This presentation explores changes in the representation of reality throughout television history.
A media sociologist and historian, Hideaki Matsuyama is Associate Professor of Sociology at Kansai University, in Osaka, Japan, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in 2025–26. Professor Matsuyama has written extensively on the history of broadcasting in Japan. His talk will expand this topic in relation to his broader research interests.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
