Introduction: Audio/Visual

“A/V” seems to belong to the always-already obsolete. Even at the height of the craze for “audiovisual aids” in the mid-twentieth century, its association with the humble schoolroom and the “A/V geek” gave the acronym an air of the outmoded. Overtaken, in quick succession, by “multimedia” and “new media” at the end of the century, the audiovisual seems all the more rudimentary, remedial rather than remediated, or simply a minor component of larger media systems.