In response to ZKM's invitation to speak at their Media Art 21 (MA21) Forum to take place in Hong Kong during the Art Basel period, I drafted this short piece to outline my reflection on my 25+ years of journeying through SCM to trace my tiny steps towards a paradigm of (new) media art that answers HK's local needs as well as bears a future-oriented vision for media art education. 因應德國 Karlsruhe 的新媒藝術中心 ZKM 的邀請，我動筆勾劃了以下的大綱，值此追溯我在過去這二十多年來詢問有關（新）媒體藝術的種種而自行編出的細步，會在它們於巴塞爾藝術節樹起的香港論壇 MA2 分享。
**feature image by Linda Lai, her office door with collectibles before moving out in 2023.
From a feminist-critical-experimental art point-of-view, all existing narratives of new media and media art are to me “templates” for reference, in order that I could re-conceive our local genealogy and re-invent our media art creativity as generative open works, in response to where we stand, and the power structures we are to address. Each move is tactical and specific to the subject of problematization. How to function as a re-grounder (Amie I. Thomasson), not just stake-holder, of art has been the general objective of my journey as a theorist, historian and artist.
My initial grounding Is Critical Theory and research in Early Cinema (~1895-1907): being able to respond to changing power structures within the art world and beyond leads me to an archaeological understanding of the (moving) image as a rich field of technological innovation, the new media at the turn of the 20th century before the institutionalization of cinema. My research of media art in Hong Kong, like Early Cinema, starts with my quotidian experience in the face of many new media platforms emerging (email, chat room, www, e-commerce, computer graphics…) and how a new social space emerged with many stake-holders partaking – marketing professionals, business enterprise, artists’ communities, government initiatives, and many in needs of new platforms for their voices. Ready to understand unstated assumptions in artistic practice, Early Cinema has inspired me to breakdown a medium to its composite elements – the result is the deconstruction of cinema’s representational function to re-define film language, to think of a single image as an objectile (Deleuze) and as data (Shannon, Hui).
My Critical Theory impulse is to problematize any safe and populist assumptions. This has had impact in my curriculum and individual course design. Below is a list of key words (course titles indicating theoretical positions):
>>Micro Narratives: Re-inventing Time and Space (videographic experiments)
>>Writing Machine [later re-titled Generative Art & Literature] (algorithmic and procedural art)
>>Computational Thinking in 20th Century Art
>>Contemporary Art: an Archaeological Study (with growing emphasis on “media archaeology” as a historiographic-research methods and artistic imaginary
New media art thinking is also articulated in the following courses in relation to other disciplines:
>>Interdisciplinary Practices in the Arts and Humanities
>>Introduction to New Media Art
>>Critical Theory & Socially Engaged Practices
>>Narrative Strategies (from time-based media to game design)
Curriculum innovation would have lost sight of the larger picture if I had not placed Hong Kong against many established conceptual and historical discourses:
The importance of multiple genealogy took shape largely through historical and conceptual research. ZKM’s new media genealogy foregrounded one machine – the computer – and its migration from the science domain to cultural-artistic practices. The duo-introduction in The New Media Reader (2003, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort) remains a most helpful framework for me: Janet Murray highlighted the need for storage and retrieval of data to be the driving force of new media, and Lev Manovich’s discussion of a new shape of our world via hyper-textuality, thus a new direction of connectivity. To me, these and more recent reference establish my organological vision (Bernard Stiegler), always seeking the less visible linkages, such as how academic programs, individual vision, artistic incentive, funding bodies, community collaboration, government programs, real estate economy, the market place and more, effectuate “progress” more often as chance encounters rather than systematic, planned strategies. Specific to Hong Kong, I persist in new media’s discursive impact and the ways the everyday is (re-)configured as observable miniatures (Alf Luedtke).
A few key tide-turning events for new media creation are often discussed in my various courses. These are my significant encounters I have put on my map:
>>The 9 Evenings (13-23 October 1966, New York)
>>Cybernetic Serendipity (2 August – 20 October 1968, ICA, London)
>>BEAP: Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (2002- )
My local significant encounters include Mike Wong, Hector Rodriguez and Felipe Cukor, colleagues who have introduced me to art and mathematics and the invisible spaces through Rodriguez and Wong’s short-lived Invisible Lab initiative at the City University of HK
Not a closure, but tactical annotations of my pedagogy, I have created the Writing Machine Collective and the Floating Projects to ensure collaboration, publishing and exhibition space for the many possibilities of media art in the midst of many conflated and fuzzy articulations, and to encourage artists not to stop creating. (28 February 2025)
