The Media Histories / Media Theories & East Asia conference will bring together prominent and emerging scholars to discuss Japanese and East Asian cross-cultural developments in media theory and culture from the early twentieth century to the present. The symposium will read East Asian film and visual arts as part of a changing media landscape in relation to commercial cinema, television, and intermedia arts as well as political, economic and cultural transformations. The conference topics include: the relation between urban space and the arts in cultural politics; reading the problems of film audience and reception; the important (and neglected) role of East Asian film and media theory and critical writings; East Asian arts movements in transnational perspective; film and visual art as a mediator of cultural/political history; avant-garde artist networks, commercial culture, and architectural transformation. The symposium aims to foster transnational and local scholarly perspectives on East Asian arts and media theory in the context of recent cross-disciplinary arguments in film and media studies.
In February 2013, UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive will host “Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild,”a retrospective of the films of Art Theatre Guild (ATG), Tokyo’s center of cinematic innovation from 1961-1988. This conference takes this opportunity, in conjunction with this film series and other events concerning Japanese arts in the 1960s, to bring together five invited media theorists from Japan, the prominent film director Hani Susumu from ATG, and 37 international scholars to discuss East Asian and Japanese cross-cultural developments in media theory and culture from the early twentieth century to the present.
For more information click here