Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Audrey Yue, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Urban screens and media facades are significant contributors to the infrastructuring of the city. Walk or transit through the central districts and transit corridors of Hong Kong, and one will encounter a plethora of “overdimensional” screens, both massive and small, whose networked presence seem only to anticipate advancements in the state-entrepreneurial city. This talk offers an adjacent history of scaled screen practices, situated between such dominant articulations of urban screens and surfaces and the media artist and curatorial practices that have negotiated them over the past few decades.

Scale is a multidisciplinary concept both “crucial and [crucially] problematic” in revealing the contingencies through which we inhabit, dwell, work, play, commute, commune, and create in the media/screen city. Its complexity is variously practiced in mobilizations of material screen design, to be sure. Yet its valences are also performed in more geographic articulations of networked politics and presence – all set within tensions among differently located territories of bodies, being, space, site, and screen. As urban screens and facades in Hong Kong are significant sites of contest over public urban space, they enable reflection upon what was (perhaps what may yet be) potentiated in the performance, poetics, and politics of screen and surface infrastructure.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stephanie DeBoer is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University. Her work addresses the socio-cultural, artistic, and technological formations of screens; media and video art; media infrastructure; and public, urban, and global media geographies. Her work is interdisciplinary, multi-modal, often collaborative, and spans locations including Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Bloomington. She is currently developing the book project, Infrastructures on the Edge: On the Material, Poetic, and Political Valences of Screens in Urban Space. She is also the author of Coproducing Asia: Locating Japanese-Chinese Film and Media (U of Minnesota P, 2014), and her articles have appeared in journals such as Screen; Theory, Culture & Critique; and Leonardo. With Kristy H.A. Kang and Anne Balsamo, she co-organized the 2018 symposium held at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Emergent Visions: Adjacency and Urban Screens, which invited artists, curators, and scholars to come together to address the concerns, possibilities, and problems of public urban screens. She is also a co-convener with Susanne Schwibs of the ongoing media art and curatorial project, “The People of IU: Moving Image Portraits and the Public Screen”.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.