From July 21-25, I will again join the Lausanne Sumerschool in Area and Cultural Studies. Together with Ian Condry (Comparative Media Studies, MIT), Chow Yiu Fai (Humanities Program, Hong Kong Baptist University), Jürg Neuenschwander (Film director and MediaLab, Hochshule der Künste Bern, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University Shanghai) and Marc Laperrouza (EPFL), we will explore the multivocality of Asian cultural productions, and engage with questions of creativity and innovation. Key assumption of this week is that debates about identity, creativity and politics are taking place, as well as being represented, in the aesthetic field. There, we will examine our contemporary individual and collective experience in its complex entanglements with globalization, ideological conflicts and the pleasures and pains of consumerism and urban life. And we do so through a critical cultural-theoretical and personal engagement with concrete ‘Asian’ case studies that cross different genres of the aesthetic field; art, music, cinema, television, literature, architecture and shanzhai culture in China.
