Screen, Space and Urban Imagination in Hong Kong and Taipei
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Situations 7.2 Summer 2014 Biorhythmanography: Screen, Space and Urban Imagination in Hong Kong and Taipei Helen Grace (University of Sydney) Abstract This paper discusses recent public screen events in Hong Kong and Taipei, as interventions within local communities undergoing major infrastructural & urban developmental changes. In both Hong Kong and Taipei, the Magic Carpet events are tied to residual forms of festival and organic time: the lunar festival, the winter solstice, these ritual forms that remain active within hyper-modern contexts. This paper first contextualizes the significance of the screen as a focus of attention and critical work. After this, it looks at critical theories of urbanism and architecture, focusing on the empirical detail of two projects in Hong Kong and Taipei and the “screen works” that have been produced. The significance of community-based video work is considered within a framework for observing the rhythms—and indeed the bio-rhythms—of urban space, that underpin the research undertaken in these projects to re-envision community space using screen-based means. This argument draws upon and extends Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “rhythmanalysis.” As Lefebvre puts it, “[e]verywhere where there is rhythm, there is measure, which is to say law, calculated and expected obligation, a project.” Keywords: architecture, mid-Autumn festival, Hong Kong, Taipei, screen culture, rhythmanalysis, urban space 56 Helen Grace Introduction The imagination of space is always entangled in the re-animation and re-envisioning of a location, tied to a sense of time and duration that is culturally specific. Somehow we hold onto the hope that there are enough benevolent spirits called forth in these processes of imagination and projection to overwhelm the unsettled ghosts that haunt a place. In cinema—and in screen theory—hauntings are present in the very histories and technologies of vision that enable us to dream and that take us outside of ourselves: magic lanterns and projections, visions and phantasmagorias—models, in other words, of thought itself in the modern period.1 The story of this project begins in the desire to engage a community and to re-envision a locality, using the screen as a locus of attention. Over several years researchers had been involved in visualizing urban topologies and measuring the community benefit of major infrastructure developments in Sai Ying Pun, an older area in the Western district of Hong Kong.2 The area is directly in the pathway of two major urban renewal projects—the Island Crest and Biorhythmanography 57 Yu Lok Lane developments—anew metro line and a new escalator system. After this earlier research revealed how little residents were actually engaged in official “community consultation” processes of change, 3 researchers developed a project to directly draw the community into the process of re-envisioning the neighbourhood, by using video interviews with residents and then amplifying the impact of everyday experience by projecting it on a scale usually reserved for commercial messages.4 School students in the district were trained in video and interview techniques and set about gathering stories and personal testimonies from residents, entering an inter-generational space of enquiry and discovery. The resultant material was edited and the stories were compiled in a community screening, coinciding with the Mid-Autumn Festival. On the evening of mid-Autumn 2013 (中秋節 - zhongqiujiè),5 a time of festival, of lanterns and magic—of harvest in agricultural societies but now transformed as an urban festival of consumption (of lanterns, food and mooncakes)—Central Street, the main artery through Sai Ying Pun became an open-air cinema, with a ‘magic carpet’ of astro-turf and bean bags, converting the usually empty concrete thoroughfare into a kind of domestic space, dominated by a gigantic crane-mounted screen, reflexively projecting the community onto itself. 58 Helen Grace The disruption of the usual merchandising content of public screens temporarily reverses the more typical order of values in which urban audiences become the mobile surfaces upon which commercial messages are constantly projected, diminishing the value of ordinary bodies and lives by contrast with the over-inflated images of models and celebrities.6 The idea of the “magic carpet,” a virtual form of “space travel,” connected in some sense to the magic of lanterns, by its association with the popular Lunar Festival has an impermanence and mobility that can be taken to other places, like the spread of citizen empowerment in general. A new project is currently being developed in Tin Shui Wai7—an area of low income public housing in the Western New Territories, called a “city of sadness,” because of the number of high profile cases of tragic deaths, suicides and domestic violence.8 Beyond Hong Kong, exchanges happened between architectural schools,9 following another Magic Carpet event in Taipei, with a public screening of community-based student documentaries, which was held in the Wanhua district of Taipei, in a temple forecourt in Biorhythmanography 59 December 2013 (on the eve of winter solstice, emphasizing again the organic links of these processes).10 In both locations and on both occasions (Hong Kong and Taipei), the Magic Carpet events are tied to residual forms of festival and organic time: the lunar festival, the winter solstice, these ritual forms that remain active within hyper-modern contexts. This is not to argue ahistorically for some notion of unchanging “tradition.” Every residual ritual form is in fact extensively modernized, attached to consumption processes in new commodity forms, promoted within officially sanctioned ideas of cultural identity and heritage, in developing tourism markets and burgeoning academic fields (tourism and hospitality studies, for example). In spite of this deterministic overlay, communities nonetheless manage to squeeze out of these occasions meanings that evade the complete capture of monetizable opportunities, inventing, within these processes, new techniques for the production of space. Do events like this really make any difference? This paper explores what is at stake in attempting such projects, first, by contextualizing the significance of the screen as a focus of attention and critical work; secondly, by looking at critical theories of urbanism and architecture; thirdly, by focusing on the empirical detail of two projects in Hong Kong and Taipei and the “screen works” that have been produced. Finally, the significance of community-based video work is considered within a framework for observing the rhythms—and indeed the bio- rhythms—of urban space, that underpin the research undertaken in these projects to re-envision community space using screen-based means. This argument draws upon and extends Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “rhythmanalysis.”11 As Lefebvre puts it, “Everywhere where there is rhythm, there is measure, which is to say law, calculated and expected obligation, a project.”12 Screens Long before cinema, the screen as architectonic form and image- bearing surface, dividing the visual field, performatively organized 60 Helen Grace space and meaning in both art and in the classical Chinese domestic interior.13 Popular cultural forms of shadow play behind screens, performed by traveling troupes,14 suggest that the kind of modern imagination associated with cinema has many precursors globally. Cinema, however, adds another dimension to this play of shields and filters, electrifying the firefly of fleeting apparitions.15 When we erect a large screen in a public place, to engage a community, inviting residents to see themselves amplified, we are drawing on this long line of associations. This is also evident in a greater engagement with the experience of the screen in public space, and a more detailed exploration of the screen’s incorporation within everyday life in recent research. 16 Francesco Cassetti suggests that the nature of the screen has been transformed: he suggests that screens are no longer surfaces where reality is relived but rather they have become transit hubs for a more general circulation of images in social space.17 Situations Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle’s savage attack on modern urbanism, might be speaking precisely of the kinds of interventions undertaken in this research when he criticizes a particular tendency in spectacular culture that “seeks to remake, by means of “team projects,” a complex neo-artistic environment made up of decomposed elements: notably in urbanism’s attempts to integrate artistic debris or esthetico-technical hybrids.”18 He regards this aspect of spectacle to be “the one most closely linked to the repressive practice of the general organization of society” and dismisses interventions of the kind being attempted here as mere “expression,” within the “spectacular pseudo-culture” of capitalism’s general projection “to recapture the fragmented worker as a “personality well integrated in the group.’’” He specifically associates this tendency with the work of 1950s American sociologists, naming Riesman and Whyte among the culprits of this shift.19 The outcome is, for him, inevitable: “[i]t is the same project everywhere: a restructuring Biorhythmanography 61 without community.”20 He snarls again at us when he seems to dismiss our feeble efforts to enter into a festival mood, dismissing all such attempts as futile in the era of the spectacle and of spectacular time, replacing, for him, some more authentic organic experience: The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially the sudden return of multiple festivities is also an epoch without festivals. What was, in cyclical time, the moment of a community’s participation in the luxurious expenditure of life is impossible for the society without community or luxury. When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus of economic expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted.