Events

CHAIRPERSON

Asst Prof Dorothy Tang, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

The ways in which mediated space carries out modes of calibration and calculation serve as an increasingly important basis for the redefinition of what media has been and has become–a form of architecting behavior, power, and control. As a media-theoretical framework, “Media Architectures” turns the question of “what is media?” toward elemental, environmental, and systems design. Functioning as both a noun or as a verb, we approach the notion of “architectures” as reference to infrastructures (built, computational, economic, cultural, etc.) of power in environmental and systems thinking. In this workshop, which develops from a series of ongoing seminar discussions convened with colleagues from a variety of fields, we relocate conceptions of media from their traditional sites of projection and reception (such as the film theatre or the radio set) to increasingly mobile, elemental, and ambient contexts. These papers discuss how “Media Architecture,” as a framework, potentially extends the media concept into new environments of design and control. Thermal and sonic comfort (and their complementary violences) become sites where mediation and their architectures of control take shape.

Key concepts: Media, Infrastructure, Architecture, Environment

Peter J. Bloom: Sonic Architecture of British Colonial Politics in Radio Malaya
The radio sound archive associated with Radio Malaya evolved as a special effect library but also a means by which to supplement broadcasting about the Emergency in the postwar era. The conceptualization of sound as media architecture will be considered in relation to the reshaping of Malaya under a newly emerging context for listening and governmentality.

Nadine Chan: Ambient Governmentality and Media Architectures of Humidity and Control
In the Cloud Forest, Singapore’s hot and wet tropical climate is transformed into a cool montane forest through climate-controlling architecture and artificial weather. Representing a unique convergence of cybernetic thinking and colonial architecture, the invisible regulation and calibration of indoor humidity and temperature presents a form of thermodynamic governmentality.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Peter J. Bloom is Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He recently completed a co-edited volume with Dominique Jullien, entitled Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation with Edinburgh University Press that is forthcoming. In addition to a geographical focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia related to a monograph in preparation under the title, Radio-Cinema Modernity, he has been engaged in a wide array of other projects. He has published extensively on British, French, and Belgian colonial media including French Colonial Documentary, Frenchness and the African Diaspora (co-editor), and Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (co-editor), among other publications.

Nadine Chan is Assistant Professor at the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto. Her research investigates environmental media and infrastructures of power in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. She has published in Cinema Journal, Journal of Environmental Media, Periscope for Social Text, Studies in Documentary Film and the anthologies Theorizing Colonial Cinema and Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film. Her book manuscript-in-progress is titled A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Tropicality in an Unruly Medium. Chan’s second research project is titled Humid Media: Thermodynamic Architectures of Calibration and Control.