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Virtual collective by Karen

Digital cinema by Marc

Research Topic

Since it is the course of "Visual Culture and Digital Media", I will focus on the aspect of Visual Culture as Image-dominating culture and Digital Media as a mean of distribution on the Internet. In other words, I will focus on how the visaul culture being reinforced by the rise of the Internet, in the contemporary context.

I have pointed out some of the interests of my research paper in brain-storming. Please have a look of it.

Cultural Studies Reference

Those web with rich infomation of both cultural studies and contemporary philosophy.

Cultural Studies Central

Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought

Internatioal Independent media: Indymedia

I have found it useful, although I am not sure whether it (the international scale) will be too board for my research paper about how the independent media distribute and perform their function on the Internet, in order to provide an alternative perspective for people in the contemporary social-political context. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

Performance art 7 : exhibition value and making visible

This performance is a good example to illustrate the concept of "exhibition value"(or simply, drawing attention from mass audience), which is one of the key characteristics of the performance art, to my understanding. You can see this artist was just performing some daily movements, say eating in the public space with no different from those domestic helpers who enjoy their weekend in the public space (maybe the only essencial difference is that he has naked his upper body and bare feet). However, he has drawn lots of attention from the mass audience as well as mass media. The high exhibition value of performance art can be distinctive feature, as opposed to the small audience group of performing arts (usually at theatre which limit the number of audience).

Performance 6 : listen to the city under water

This performance is quite poetic. The artist explained that a city called "奉" was flood and now is under water because of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China. In response to this history, the artist destroyed a little part of the road and put a bowl of water on it, and let the audience lay on the road and listen to the water as well as the city under the water.

During the performance (to be more concrete, at the time the audience listen to water), a taxi drove towards the performance site and almost hit the bowl of water. At the moment, one other artist steped in front of the bowl of water, used his organic body to protect the artwork from the taxi. What I can see is the space politic between human body and social transportation.

Performance art 5 : criteria of choice of material

This artist tried to use glue to cover (or "erase) the symbol of the Hong Kong Police, so as to criticise the over-power of the power force. I have also asked them why they chose to use certain kind of material (say, here is the material of glue, and others include washing powderm water, soil, chalk and etc), they replied that their main concern about the materical used was whether the materical will be easily cleaned and the site can be easily be recovered. For example, when the material glue gets dry, it will become invisible and transparent, and thus the performance itself will not affect the physical appearance of the site after the show, and more importantly, the police then will not have evidence to charge those performance artists.

One more example of the amazing use of material is the use of water. One artist used water to write the Chinese word "拆"("demolish" in English) on the wall of Hong Kong City Hall, in where supposingly it is too grand and too exposing to write sometime on it. However, since he understood the powerful characteristic of water---visible and then invisible, any authority can never catch him regarding to any kind of law. How clever are the artists in the use of materials!!