Hong Kong June 2010

8ths ACS Crossroads of Cultural Studies Conference, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 2010

The 2 “Public Screens” panels were held on 20 June — day 4 of the conference. In the morning, I went first, followed by Helen Grace and then Scott McQuire on a panel that was supposedly more oriented to theory. Then in the afternoon, Nikos Papastergiadis, Audrey Yue and Sun Jung, and Meredith Martin were due to present on a panel more focused on specific sites. Unfortunately, Meredith was sick and unable to attend, and so Nikos presented her work.

My presentation focused on two forms of “localness” in understanding Shanghai’s screen culture. One was the localness of context — in other words not a Chinese or Shanghai cultural localness but rather a localness corresponding to the functions and topographies of the spaces — retail, museum, and transport. The other was a more cultural lineage, noting that the prevalence of text-based “walking word” screens at thresholds and so on (not found in London or Cairo) could be traced back to the blackboard culture of the socialist era and then the kinds of engraved lettering found above doorways in pre-modern China. All of this comes under the umbrella of our larger arguments that these technologies have to be made sense of in their contexts and that, although the same technology is potentially available everywhere, it is taken up on locally specific ways. I confess, I’d forgotten this was supposed to be the theory panel, and so unlike my co-panellists, I didn’t mention any theory!! Oops.

Helen presented on her mobile phone camera images. She spoke of generalized hyper-production and circulation of images on small screens and blogs, a sense of enchantment, and the need to think about aesthetics and affect. In relation to the hyper-production of images, Helen invoked the idea of bildvergessensheit (or oblivion of images) — a condition where imagery is so ubiquitous we become oblivious to it. Another way of talking about this was “generalized aesthesia,” where compositional codes are so widespread and ingrained in easy-to-use technology that we are all trained in them without being aware of it. She compared this to Marx’s idea of “general intellect” (from the Grundrisse’s “fragment on machines”.) However, she was also eager to avoid another kind of argument that suggests or implements a lack of or evacuation of history. Here the theorist is Flusser, who draws on a Bergsonian understanding of time and argues that a culture where everything is intended to become image and then circulate in a manner abstracted from history has this effect. Helen instead wants to draw on Lefebvre’s theory of moments to think about how to grasp the historical specificity of these ephemeral images in their circulation. Here, she spoke of a “local aesthesia” as a way of talking about these moments and localized practices.

As I write this up, and the more I think about Helen’s talk, the more I think there is a way in which its attention to singularity, locality, affect, the material specificity of the images and the screens, and so on does run parallel to a lot of our interests and ideas and gives us a lot to think about.

Scott’s work was a bit more familiar to me already from the Urban Screens reader and from previous presentations I have heard. He spoke about his interest in going against the grain of seeing large screens in public spaces as only about spectacle, and wanting to promote their use to help produce participatory public spaces (and here the Federation Square example in Melbourne, that he and his colleagues have written so much about springs to mind immediately). Scott argued against Lev Manovich’s idea of “augmented space,” which Scott said depended on an idea of real space that is overlaid. Scott argued that media are not added to real space but are now imminent to it and constitute it. He went on to the idea of 3 types of screen practices that are not purely commercial: the Broadcast Model (BBC big screens); the civic model (Federation Square); and the Art Model (Zuidas, in the Netherlands). (These are discussed in much more details in the Urban Screens reader. His main interest was to go on and think about different kinds of public sphere that these screens help to constitute. Scott is particularly interested in those that promote meetings between strangers either within the spaces where the screens are, or, by networking, among people across different global spaces that the screens network together.

Again, as I write this up, I find myself thinking about how the last part of this connects up with the idea (and ideals) of interactivity that has been coming up again and again in our work. What Scott’s talk is making me aware of is how this relates back to ideals of the public sphere. Given how deeply this is tied to the ideological fantasy of a “good” liberal society (democratic etc), maybe it’s not surprising that it has become, as one of the people interviewed in the Urban Screens reader puts it, “the Holy Grail”.

Perhaps because it was the morning, this panel was well-attended (50 people or so, I guess, which is good where there were perhaps 20 concurrent panels to choose from), and the audience response was very positive. Anne Balsamo of USC opened her commentary by saying “a fabulous panel, and I don’t even have a ‘but’”, and you can’t get much better than that! She went on to emphasize the idea of genealogies for public screens going way back through histories of the use of the wall as a place to post writing and notices of various kinds, and also linking this up to the idea of public windows.

Bao Weihong (Sydney) talked more about genealogies of screens in the Chinese context. He seemed especially interested in the idea of the modern and the pre-modern, and Foucault’s ideas of epistemic shifts. I found this to be a very useful and thought-provoking comment, not least because, to be honest, I hadn’t thought enough about that issue already. So, answering off the top of my head and letting my thoughts evolve as I went along, I found myself emphasizing that the modern and the pre-modern were not unified, and that for example, it is important to think about how marketization and supposed liberalization actually coincided with an erosion of constitutional rights to speak in public space in China, because the right to stick up “big character posters” was removed in the late 1970s, following the Democracy Wall movement.

Other questions included some discussion of hacking and the question of different localizations, but I didn’t take enough notes on this (sorry!).

In the afternoon, Nikos Papastergiadis led off with a paper that first set up the project that was conducted between Melbourne and Seoul (Federation Square and a square in Incheon with a big screen), and the effort to run a interactive, real-time, art-based event using the two screens, with the aim of using them to constitute a cosmopolitan transnational public sphere. He then gave a detailed discussion of theories of cosmopolitanism and how they fed into this. What struck me particularly was how grounded the original concepts are in the architectural spaces of the agora and the stoa (hope I’m spelling that right!), the latter being the covered walkways around the agora itself where the true cosmopolitan space of meeting strangers was constituted.

Audrey Yue followed on from Nikos by giving a detailed introduction to the Melbourne/Seoul art pilot project. She invoked the idea of the contact zone, and questions of social belonging, as well as the idea of media convergence. Urban regeneration and the idea of the “media infrastructure” (i.e. a combination of media and building) were also used. In the pilot project, audiences brought into the two squares were asked to use their mobile phones to text the words they associated with what they hoped from in their cities. These words then appeared on the screen. As more people texted the same words, they became bigger on the screens in both cities. Audrey argued that here one could literally see the transnational public sphere emerging. However, I also thought about Goetz Bachmann’s work in the metadata part of the Leverhulme programme on Nico Nico Douga and the cyber-crowd that is produced.

Sun Jung followed on from Audrey by giving information on questionnaires conducted in Incheon and the feedback they got from people on the square about how they perceived their participation. Finally, as time was running low, Nikos summarized some of Meredith’s work on artists and the role of the artwork in the production of the participatory public sphere — Lorenzo-Hemmer (the guy Metadata invited to close their symposium) was invoked, and a video was shown in which (I believe) he talked about the need to move beyond mere co-presence to complicity and communion.

In the Q&A that followed, the first speaker was (I believe) a Korean woman who made some very pointed remarks. Using Debord and his ideas of spectacle and the dematerialization of the social contact, she suggested that the texting practices in the artwork maybe played into this model rather than undermined it. She also noted that the Songdo space in Incheon and the use of an artwork was a public space that would not be approached by the migrant workers who live in the suburbs next door to this but only by the Seoul educated middle classes. She argued for a need to engage with the critique of cosmopolitanism by, for example, Bhabha, and spoke of his idea of a “vernacular cosmopolitanism” as a kind of alternative practice that might involve the migrant cosmopolitanism she was talking about. Nikos questioned whether our understanding of  Debord’s work no spectacle might be over-simplified, and Sun Jung pointed out that while the questioner was fundamentally correct, there were actually 2 Bangladeshi migrants among the people who had come to the square and who filled in the questionnaires.

Another question followed about the languages people were texting in to the screen with, and how the lack of familiarity with Korean among the people in Melbourne was pushing most of the Korean participants to try and text in English. Then a discussion developed about the idea that although people might be texting the same word, they might not be meaning the same things, and that this incommensurability went far beyond just a difference between Seoul and Melbourne.