<videovortex> The Animate Image: Theorizing the Reproducible Image in Asia

[Geert Lovink]

(happened a month ago but maybe interesting for some /g)

Date: 03 Dec 2012 - 04 Dec 2012
Venue: NUS Museum, Lee Kong Chian Gallery, Level 1
University Cultural Centre, 50 Kent Ridge Crescent
National University of Singapore, Singapore 11927

The workshop is hosted by the Asia Research Institute, with the kind  
support of NUS Museum, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the  
National University of Singapore; and the Centre for Research and  
Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster,  
UK.
If seminal theories of film and photography emphasized formal  
specificity, recently scholars have drawn on media studies,  
anthropology and phenomenology to read these media against the grain,  
addressing an expanded field of 'visual culture'. Historicizing the  
reproducible image in Asia has required the excavation of cultural  
traditions stretching back beyond the arrival of photography. Whereas  
technologies of seeing (e.g. lenses, optics) and of representing (e.g.  
Realism, perspective) have been central to Western understandings of  
photo-media, in Asia, the latter partake of radically different pre- 
histories. They channel older cultures in locally specific ways; they  
reconfigure hierarchies of creative labour and redraw networks of  
dissemination. What is at stake for theory as it takes account of  
these contingencies? How do these mediations reorder the image's  
ritual and exchange values, or generate new ones?

This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together leading theorists  
and historians of art, photography, performance, film and video,  
addressing the multiple theatres and mixed histories of the  
reproducible image in Asia. What kinds of channeling does the animate  
image occasion? What are its capacities for truth and fiction, for  
violence and protection, for subjection and sovereignty? And what does  
it bring to contests over the past, to struggles of the present, and  
to the imagination of Asia's futures?

Convenors:

Prof Chua Beng Huat
Asia Research Institute & Department of Sociology, National University  
of Singapore

Dr David Teh
Department of English Language and Literature, National University of  
Singapore

Dr May Adadol Ingawanij
School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK