Workshop | The Animate Image: Theorizing the Reproducible Image in Asia

Date: 3 - 4 December 2012

Venue: Lee Kong Chian Gallery, NUS Museum

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? REGISTRATION Admission is free. Kindly register early as seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Please register at this link. Event Photos