Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

These projects underscore that networked media require a multiplication of sites, strategies, and situated practices.
The panel demonstrates the complex constructions of the environmentally-located, networked-cinema imaginary.
The projects themselves move through and connect with ways that we increasingly live through digital habitats,
which we access on multiple screens throughout the day. They extend and complicate assumptions about digital
relationships as a function of environmentalism. The papers propose that we can learn from projects that work
between these assumptions and reevaluations to think through digital media about our online and offline habitats
and our online and offline cohabitants.
Dale Hudson
Where Organisms and Multispecies Live
Dale Hudson’s paper examines places of encounters, where we are often blind or deaf to seeing and hearing
our cohabitants. Artists ask us to hear and see what we have been largely trained by commercial media to
ignore, disavow, or discredit. He examines Francois Knoetze’s Cape Mongo (South Africa 2015) and Shazia
Javed’s Can You Hear Me? (Canada 2015), which offer us an opportunity to consider multicultural
community in terms of religion and species as contemporary environmental iterations.
Heidi Mikkola
On the Wings of a Dove. Aerial Filming in Wildlife Documentary and the Challenge of Posthumanism
Technologies, like films, help us to see things we could not perceive otherwise. An act of flying is one thing
we cannot experience without such help. How does wildlife documentaries represent a bird’s-eye view and
what kind of environment is produced through a camera angle high above? I will discuss about aerial filming
and the interactions and encounters of humans, animals and technologies in a film event. In my
presentation, I will examine BBC’s documentary series Earthflight (2011). In the series, cameras are flying
with the birds or are attached to them to provide an aerial view. Although it is not the way how birds
perceive the world, these images provide a nonhuman point of view to an environment usually perceived
from a different angle. How are human and nonhuman bodies composed in a relationship with an
environment?
Claudia Costa Pederson Virtual and Imaginary Mapping of New Geographies
Claudia Costa Pederson’s paper looks at space as a central a topic in the digital arts. She examines Chiara
Passa’s Live Architectures (Italy 2014–present), Mauro Ceolin’s Spore’s Ytubesoundscape and His Wildlife
(Italy 2010), and Banu Colak’s The New Empire (Turkey/UAE 2014), all of which are projects addressing newly
created spaces—augmented reality (AR) over virtual maps, an online world that replicates biological
evolution, and a new nation-state in a new era of empire, respectively. Together, they remind us that
mapping, geography, and architecture, are concepts and forms that both reflect and shape the way we
organize and imagine community, and thus construe individual and social identity.
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Hong Kong feminisms through visual practice (Chair, Hanna Weselius)
Gina Marchetti Class, Gender, and Generation through the Lens of Hong Kong Women Filmmakers: Ann Hui’s A
Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013)
From its genesis at Birmingham and Open University, Cultural Studies has taken “class” as a major
component of any analysis of social formations involving gender and generational differences. Moving away
from England, the United States, and Western Europe, Chen Kuan-Hsing takes class analysis to the Pacific
Rim in a call for “Asia as method.” This presentation uses films made by two Hong Kong women directors to
probe the ways in which class operates in relation to gender, generation, and the Chinese border. A Simple
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