Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies
Curator and Convener: Bruce Bo Ding
Issue #1: Roundtable | Screen/Body/Attention: Interruptions for Urban Screens
Chaired by Stephanie DeBoer, Fall 2015 scholar-in-residence at Chronus Art Center
Contributed to by the Screens Collective: Shaw/Xu Zhifeng, Wu Jie, Taqi Shaheen, Petra Johnson, Stephanie DeBoer
Hosted and intervened by Bruce Bo Ding
Time: 2016.06.11 15:00-17:00
Language: English
Organizer: Chronus Art Center (Building 18, No 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai)
Supported by: CAHI (College Arts and Humanities Institute), Indiana University; Abteilung Kultur und Bildung, Deutsches Generalkonsulat Shanghai
(Free admission, but there are only limited seats so reservation is required. Please sign up here: http://form.mikecrm.com/tmNCZG)
As the first issue of “Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies”, this roundtable is a hands-on invitation to reflect on how experiments in media art can engage the body’s relationships to what Zhang Ga and Lu Xiaobo once called our “new technological urban settings.” By the mid to late 2000s, large-scale LED screens were common in the city centers of Shanghai, with interactive surfaces in taxis, buses, subways, and other public spaces soon to follow. Clearly used for commercial purposes, these media screens have also been used by city planners as a strategy for revitalizing key urban districts and transport infrastructures. Urban screens are part and parcel of the infrastructural and ephemeral force-relations that modulate our bodies, movements, and relations; they elicit our bodily dispositions, rhythms, structures of feeling, and sensations.
The roundtable thus reflects on our ongoing preoccupations with how media artists, theorists, and curators can enable spectators or passersby to engage with the processes that form the body’s interface with these screened urban infrastructures. In so doing, we offer both practical and conceptual intervention into the following questions: 1) How can we make visible or tangible the ephemeral, infrastructural and often commercial screen forces reshaping urban locations in Shanghai, China, and beyond? 2) How can we offer interruptive grounds for accruing attention to the ways in which the body is mediated and modulated by these forces? 3) How might we utilize (even poach) the interfaces among media art practice, screen infrastructures, and Chinese urban spaces to do so? 4) What else can be potentiated in this process? We seek to reflect on the tactics through which more speculative, relational, and reflexive grounds might be found in the screened urban settings through which urban citizens live, work, play, despair, and aspire.
About Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies
“Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies (M.B.E.T.)” is an open-source practice repository and research process addressing the various mechanisms and possibilities of human future mediated by technologies. Started by reflecting and speculating on the relations between the enacted and the represented as well as the virtual and the real (a contingent production rather than a natural inevitability), M.B.E.T. brings back embodiment into the picture to investigate if/how the forms/media of embodiment are relevant in the production of identity and subjectivity as well as the circulation and communication of information. In the spirit of open source, it tries to create a fluid and evolving space in which practitioners and researchers from different areas can come together and contribute in this creative exploration.
