Panel Statement

Keywords: Urban media, cities, public art, screens, transnational, commons, mediated city, place-making, mapping, space

Introduction

This panel explores a range of strategies, poetics and possibilities of media art in and of urban public space practiced not in the spotlight but adjacent to and in the shadows of the spectacle. Each paper envisions a different mode of illumination, engagement and altered perception of our urban environs, calling our attention to ways of being in and sensing spaces and places that are often unnoticed, invisible or taken for granted. From media artists’ interventions that ask us to reflect upon the politics of disenchantment with the media saturated everyday in urban China, to the ways in which public art can potentially challenge the conventions of art not as object but as acts or gestures inscribed in the city itself and embodied in the memories of its inhabitants, to the design of urban interfaces that make visible overlooked cultural histories of peoples and places in Singapore, these papers present an inquiry into the ways in which urban media art can contribute towards a re-imagining and nuanced perception of the city’s corners, cracks and shadows and our sense of nature, place, poetics and politics in public space.

• Stephanie DeBoer is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts/Studies in The Media School at Indiana University, USA. She is the author of Coproducing Asia: Locating Japanese-Chinese Film and Media (U of Minnesota P, 2014), and her articles on media art, urban screens, media geographies, and global media have appeared or are forthcoming in collections such as Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research (Indiana University P, 2014) and The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema (Palgrave, 2018), as well as in journals such as Screen; Theory, Culture & Critique; and Leonardo. With Kristy H.A. Kang and Anne Balsamo, she co-organized the 2018 symposium, Emergent Visions: Adjacency and Urban Screens, which invited artists, curators, and scholars to address the concerns, possibilities, and problems of public urban screens. She is also co-convener of the Shanghai-based Screens Collective, which addresses fundamental questions concerning the potential of urban screens as sites of public contact.
• Elliot Woods (UK) is a digital media artist from Manchester. He tests possible futures between humans and visual design technologies (e.g. cameras, projectors, computation). Towards this goal, Elliot co-founded Kimchi and Chips, an experimental art studio based in Seoul with Mimi Son. He applies his academic studies in physics to produce sense-able phenomena from abstract systems.
• Kristy H.A. Kang is a practice-based researcher whose work explores narratives of place and geographies of cultural memory. She is Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests combine urban and ethnic studies, mapping, animation and emerging media arts to visualize cultural histories of cities and communities. She is currently developing a project with the Urban Redevelopment Authority mapping the spatial narratives of Singapore’s ethnic communities. Her works have been exhibited internationally and received awards including the Jury Award for New Forms at the Sundance Online Film Festival. She was co-organizer of an international symposium on mediated public space “Emergent Visions: Adjacency and Urban Screens” (http://www.emergentvisions.org) and her article “Interfaces and Intentionalities: Adjacent Practices of Urban Media Art in Singapore” will be published in a forthcoming special issue on Urban Interfaces in Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Full text (PDF) p. 700-702