Theorising 'arts tech' : mediations between art objects, people and policy in Hong Kong's creative industry

Abstract

In the Hong Kong Chief Executive’s 2020 Policy Address, the HKSAR Government implemented strategies to integrate arts and technology as a new trend in cultural development (HKSAR Government, 2020a). With the co-existence of governmental initiatives under the rubric of ‘arts tech’ (‘arts and technology’) development and the rapid advancement of new technologies, there appears to be increasing adoption of novel technologies (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality) across arts and cultural productions in Hong Kong.

This project draws on a year of ethnographic research in a Hong Kong cross-media creative studio, where I participated in the planning and creation of numerous arts tech projects, complemented by interviewing studio members and their project collaborators. By focusing on the artefacts created through these projects, my research uncovers the productive tensions existing between policymakers, commercial marketers, and creative practitioners, from objectives to practices, in applying technologies to arts productions in Hong Kong.

Existing studies of the cultural and creative industries or creative workers in both Western and Asian contexts mainly focus upon and theorise about inter-human relationships. Material objects have primarily been classed as ‘tools’ or ‘media’ in analysis. In my thesis, I offer another approach to studying the cultural and creative industries and creative workers by putting the significance of material objects in the foreground, using case studies of arts tech development in recent Hong Kong. The conceptualisation focuses on the relations or processes of cultural production without a presumption of structural order. I combine Alfred Gell’s art nexus (1998) and Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (2005) in what I termed the ‘retro-prospective’ approach. This approach aims to synthesise cultural and creative industries studies with material culture studies to examine the industry ecology, in which digital technologies have become unavoidable and critical elements in almost every stage of production. Arts tech in Hong Kong sets an ideal example for revisiting the theorisation of the cultural and creative industries studies. I propose developing ‘arts tech as theory’ to illuminate more complex and comprehensive epistemological and methodological frameworks for understanding the cultural and technology industries and the people working in them.