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Theorizing the Reproducible Image in Asia
3-4 December 2012

The Animate Image: Theorizing the Reproducible Image in Asia (3-4 December 2012)
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 brings 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?
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.

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3 DECEMBER 2012 (MONDAY)
10:00 REGISTRATION & TEA BREAK
10:30 WELCOME REMARKS & INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
CHUA BENG HUAT
Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore
DAVID TEH
Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore
11:00 PANEL 1
11:00 Temporality of Versioned Cinema
MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ, University of Westminster, UK
11:45 Projections beyond the Screen: Outdoor and Bodily Surfaces for Film Projection in Japanese Expanded Cinema of the 1960-70s
JULIAN ROSS, Meiji Gakuin University, Japan
Respondent LIM HOW NGEAN
PhD Candidate in Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore
12:30 ANIMATE IMAGES 1 SCREENINGS
A Selection of Expanded Cinema Performances from Japan
Introduced by JULIAN ROSS
Images that can remember their past lives
Introduced by DAVID TEH & MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ
13:30 LUNCH

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14:30 PANEL 2
14:30 Becoming Digital through Orality and Print: Indonesias Guerilla Engineers
JOSHUA BARKER, University of Toronto, Canada
15:15 Fragments of the Philippine Figurine
PATRICK D. FLORES, University of the Philippines
Respondent HO TZU NYEN
Independent Artist, Singapore
16:00 TEA BREAK
16:30 ANIMATE IMAGES 2 SCREENINGS
Experimental Documentaries from South Korea (Excerpts)
Introduced by MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ
Filipino Cinema (Animate Excerpts)
Introduced by PATRICK D. FLORES
17:30 END OF DAY 1
19:30 WORKSHOP DINNER (FOR INVITED SPEAKERS & CHAIRPERSONS)

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4 DECEMBER 2012 (TUESDAY)
10:00 REGISTRATION & TEA BREAK
10:30 PANEL 3
10:30 Indexicality in Digital: Aesthetico-Political Turn of the Social
KIM SOYOUNG, Korean National University of Art
11:15 Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Contemporary Cambodian Art
ASHLEY THOMPSON, University of Leeds, UK
Respondent LEE WENG CHOY
Independent Critic, Singapore
12:30 ANIMATE IMAGES 3 SLIDE-SHOW & SCREENINGS
Digital Portraiture
Introduced by HAMMAD NASAR
Haunted: Southeast Asian Video
Introduced by DAVID TEH
13:30 LUNCH
10:30 PANEL 4
14:00 The Remediated Landscape: Re-embodiments on the Dunes of Mui Ne
NINA HIEN, New York University, USA
14:45 Animating Site: Lens-based Ideas of Home
HAMMAD NASAR, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Respondents DAVID TEH & MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ
15:30 TEA BREAK
16:00 ROUNDTABLE AND CLOSING REMARKS
Moderators DAVID TEH & MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ
17:00 END OF DAY 2

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Temporality of Versioned Cinema
May Adadol Ingawanij University of Westminster, UK
[email protected]
Key concepts for theorising the relationship between cinema and time imply ideas of temporality that are in themselves historical. The index was defined in relation to a notion of modern time as rationalised. The time-image emerged as a concept in relation to the post-Second World War idea of time as catastrophic. Using a fascinatingly anachronistic episode of cinema history in Siam/Thailand as a case study, my talk asks how one might theorise cinematic time from the historical vantage point of acute temporal non-synchronicity. During the Cold War era in Siam, it was commonplace for versionists to give live voice performances accompanying the celluloid projection of local and foreign films. In the theatrical context of exhibition, they would be seated in a purpose built sound room next to the projection room. On the itinerant, open-air circuits of exhibition, they would perform near the projector and sound transmission equipment within sight of the spectators. The itinerant shows were particularly complicated sites of immiscible time. The mechanical equipment projected reproducible images, while the voice performance made the shows attractive as live events. Meanwhile, the limited number of celluloid prints created exhibition circuits with considerable time lag, in which itinerant shows inevitably came last. What emerge as key concepts for thinking cinematic time when one takes into account the projection of reproducible images in a genealogy of performance structured by the appeal of the live? If the temporal experience of the itinerant circuit were held up as the starting point of theorisation, what becomes of the idea of cinema? For a longer version of the paper, please visit the following blog: http://siam16mm.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/figures-of-plebeian-modernity/
http://siam16mm.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/figures-of-plebeian-modernity/http://siam16mm.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/figures-of-plebeian-modernity/

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Projections beyond the Screen: Outdoor and Bodily Surfaces for Film Projection in
Japanese Expanded Cinema of the 1960-70s
Julian Ross Meiji Gakuin University, Japan [email protected]
Intermediality as a theoretical framework has experienced a resurgence of interest in art historical research in the past few years. Cinema, despite its commonly recognized trait for being a meeting point between the arts, has only very recently seen publications devoted to its relationship with intermedia (Peth: 2011). Furthermore, we are also in danger of positioning intermedia as a Euro-American privilege in spite of the wide spectrum of global artistic activity that can be canonized as intermedial practice. It seems pertinent now to position case studies from Asian cinemas, both in their approach and theorizations, within the discourse of intermedial studies. Not only has Japan contributed an array of films relevant to the discussion on intermedia, Japan had also participated in the theorization of intermedia early on in its conception. By 1967, just two years after Dick Higgins coined the term, intermedia was discussed in Japanese art journals and events were organized with the word in its titles. Uniquely, the Japanese understood intermedia (intmedia) as uniquely embedded in cinema, in particular, expanded forms of projection. Whilst channeling both recent and more local debates, this presentation will introduce two expanded cinema pieces from Japan, namely Takahiko Iimuras Screen Play (1963) and Nobuo Yamanakas To Project a Film of Filmed River on a River (1971). In these performative projections, the screen was rejected by these artists in favour of more volatile surfaces, such as a human back or a river.

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Becoming Digital through Orality and Print: Indonesias Guerilla Engineers
Joshua Barker Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada
[email protected]
In this paper I examine the work of Onno Purbo, a self-described person of the people (rakyat biasa) who is widely credited with being the father of the Indonesian Internet. Onno and his followers have struggled for more than twenty years to bring the Internet to the Indonesian masses and to make the Indonesian Internet free from the predations of monopolists, authoritarian rulers, and corrupt officials. Along the way, Onno has published a steady stream of articles and given numerous public presentations reflecting on his experiences in this bottom-up moveme

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