If you can’t join the colloquium in person, you are welcomed to join the colloquium via Zoom.

Zoom link: https://cityu.zoom.us/j/95037521539
Meeting ID: 950 3752 1539
Passcode: 833274

The SCM Research Colloquium takes place approximately once a month for graduate students, faculty and professionals from creative media and other related disciplines to present their recent research topic/project. The colloquium offers a great opportunity for ideas exchange and intellectual conversations about one’s work. Each session will feature two speakers, a graduate student/guest speaker and a faculty member.

Each presentation is about 30 minutes, followed by 15 minutes open discussion. Seminar introduction and Q&A will be hosted by Prof. Richard Allen and/or Prof. PerMagnus Lindborg. No registration is needed and light refreshments are provided.

Seminar 3 
5 December 2023, 12:30 p.m – 2:30 p.m
The Algorithm-Influencer-Aesthetic Matrix in China

Zhang Ge, Dino: Wanghong Pastiche

This presentation is developed from a series of research conducted from 2020 to 2022 on the postdigital circulation of wanghong/influencer aesthetics - a Chinese colloquial term that I tentatively use while acknowledging its conceptual ambiguities – across designers, administrators, strollers, consumers, and influencers of various establishments such as art museums and cafes as well as the algorithmic systems of social media platforms. This influencerizing, gentrifying, reproducing in quick succession – or pastiche-ing – of certain design languages (such as minimalism, brutalism etc) and a circulated sense of taste and ‘cultural creativity’ (again, another policy term used here ironically) come to dominate a new cultural war constructing new channels of cultural ‘distinction’. While possessing immense economic potential and practical tangibility (streamlined and easy-to-replicate design much like the ethics of shanzhai), I argue that wanghong aesthetics does not create a new distinct aesthetic movement but an algorithm-influencer-aesthetic matrix of cultural production. The wanghong machine is speculative not just via human experimentations but also ingrained in algorithmic indexicality. Through interviews of designers, artspace administrators, and trendsetting café owners in Hangzhou and Shanghai, as well as field visits to artspaces and cafés in rapidly gentrifying districts, this lecture communicates not consistent definition(s) of Wanghong Pastiche but public feelings via everything (from spaces to objects to people) that is incessantly celebrified and aestheticized in an algorithmically directed circular process.

Links: https://anthropos.live/

Royce Ng: The Master Algorithm: Redux

This brief presentation by Royce Ng describes an artwork ‘The Master Algorithm Redux’ developed with the artist collective Zheng Mahler, in collaboration with Dino Zhang, Gabrielle de Seta, and Bogna Konior. The work uses an AI avatar ‘Qiu Hao’ released by Xinhua news agency in 2018 to voice a series of speculative scenarios about the future in China, written by several academics who conduct research on various facets of the topic.  The work is an update of an earlier piece from 2019 originally presented in the exhibition ‘Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong while the current work is shown at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany.

Links: https://www.themasteralgorithm.asia/