Urban Screens, Media Facades, and the Infrastructural Politics and Poetics Digital Light
Date: January 10th,2023
Time: 7:00 pm-8:30 pm
Venue: LT3, Lee Shau Lee Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Guest Speaker: Prof. Stephanie DeBoer, Indiana University
Moderator: Prof. Tan Jia, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Urban screens and media facades are among the “latest significant contributor[s] to the lighting of the city.” Walk or transit through the central districts of Hong Kong or transit corridors of Shanghai and one will encounter a plethora of media screens and facades, both massive and small, affixed to buildings and surfaces to reflect upon and sometime sense their surroundings through the latest in digitally networked and LED advancements. This talk addresses urban screens and media facades as sites for explicating the contingencies of digital light, itself significant to understanding the politics and poetics of (here) Hong Kong and Shanghai urban space and experience. Certainly, much has been (and can yet be) said about the value of urban screens and facades as sites of communication in support of the media city or communication city. Yet attention to digital and LED developments in media screen and architectural technologies enables our further attention to the shifting relationships between “light, shadow, screen, …projection,” and urban inhabitation that continue to take place in the wake of recent state-commercial developments. In urban screens’ and facades’ function as digital/LED light, they are part and parcel of the recent infrastructures of illumination that participate in Hong Kong’s and Shanghai’s contested experiences.
Biography
Stephanie DeBoer is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University. She is writing a book about public urban screens and media facades in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Infrastructures on the Edge: On the Material, Poetic, and Political Valences of Screens in Urban Space. DeBoer 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. She is co-convener of a range of ongoing collaborations concerning urban screens and media art, including the 2018 symposium co-organized with Kristy H.A. Kang and Anne Balsamo, Emergent Visions: Adjacency and Urban Screens. A series of Emergent Visions online public roundtable provocations and publications will follow in 2023.
Registration Link for online participation: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13660654
Language: English
Website: www.cuhk.edu.hk/crs/ccs
Enquiry: cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk
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This event is co-organized by MA in Intercultural Studies Programme, CUHK and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK