Eastern-Western Interaction in Digital Media

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Eastern-Western Interaction in Digital Media

Presentation Title:
  • Eastern-Western Interaction in Digital Media

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • In academic debates around culture and media, creative interventions into new technologies that seek to bridge the ‘digital’ and the ‘analog’ as well as the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, have traditionally been discussed under the rubric of hybridity. While cultural discourses largely focus on radical practices that try to challenge borders and engage in in-between-spaces and creative zones with the aim to resist globally networked homogeneity, the media debate instead tends to be more concerned with questions of medium specificity and the affirmation of difference. The latter is seen as crucial for aesthetic, social and cultural intervention into commercial industries. The two-fold challenge for creative practices is therefore to somehow move towards a ‘borderless world’ while at the same time to address, affirm, and/or contest (the notion of) borders for the sake of radical intervention and the articulation of identity under globalisation.

    This challenge foregrounds itself especially when ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ concepts and traditions of creative practices interact through new digital technologies. With regard to the emergence of media cultures that merge ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ influences and components in increasingly complex ways, the panel scrutinizes to what extent the digital provides a ‘universal(ised) language’, as well as how differences in culture and media remain relevant. The panel consequently seeks to address the ways in which the discourses, technologies and aesthetic practices of investigating and crossing borders and boundaries, in their cultural but also in their material specificity, reproduce or even aggravate contemporary modes of gendered, raced, and classed in- and exclusion under globalisation. What kinds of borders are overcome, mediated, transformed, veiled, reproduced, or even newly established? Main focus for such analyses are cross-cultural collaborations and networks that operate in blurred zones, for example creative industries, collaborative networks, open sources, and so forth. Questions of in- and outside are of high importance in such contested spaces, in which diverse identities, potentially conflicting interests, and discordant perspectives meet each other in real, virtual, and imaginative spheres.

    1. Kerstin Mey — Hybridity and Interactivity in contested Spaces
    2. Yvonne Spielmann — East-West interaction in digital Media Arts
    3. Zaki Omar — Across the Net: collaborative digital productions (on collaborative digital productions (Potsdam-Beijing)
    4. Ingrid Maria Hoofd — Mediations of ‘East’ and ‘West’: The productive borders of networked globalisation
    5. Sean Cubitt — Settler dread and indigeneitiy: digital media arts in Oceania’.
    6. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun — Imagined Networks: From the erosion of national sovereignty to networking sites?

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