Stephanie De Boer

   Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies

   Department of Communication and Culture, the Media School

Project: No Hard Edges: Media Art, Video, and Screens in Redefining Chinese Urban Place

For this project Professor DeBoer will partner with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) to create the foundation for an online digital companion to her book of the same name. To build a prototype upon which she will eventually construct this digital companion she will use Scalar, a born-digital, open source, media-rich scholarly publishing platform (http://scalar.usc.edu/) developed by the University of Southern California under the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

Professor DeBoer will explore the global phenomenon of national and international artists projecting new media art (digital video and images) on architectural landscapes and public screens in major metropolitan centers around the world. She will focus her study on site-specific urban locations in Hong Kong and the Peoples Republic of China to examine the controversies surrounding this practice, to discuss how issues of modernity and urban renewal come into play, and to critically analyze the power structures and vested interests involved in negotiating the development of these sites.

Professor DeBoer’s research will contribute to interdisciplinary debates on the relationship between geographical location and screen media, and how new media arts are marshaled to revitalize spaces and transform cities.