In search of a sculptural dialectics: moving image, a materialist, intermedia game

**This project is partly supported by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's Research Grant Council (Project No. CityU 11404614) , "Where Else to Look."

From a Critical Theory point of view, writing history is invoking change. My point of departure is to rise above aesthetic and stylistic history, to debunk base-superstructure and text-context models, to overcome the limitation of ecological readings. In this discussion, I assert “general organology” (Stiegler) as a productive historiographic model that views moving image to be bearing dynamic, multi-directional relations to different domains of the lifeworld. To view moving image as an organ is to view how it functions alongside other individual organs in different moments and occasions, without a fixed hierarchy. In this sense, one must “allow apparently unrelated human purposes, courses of events, institutional histories, incidents and accidents, personal calling, as well as desires that precede and surround the popularization of a named practice, to shed light on moving image practices and their players. This is partly a media archaeological mentality, embracing as well Bruno Latour’s call for the study of shared agencies between humans and artifacts integrated into the same framework, and partly an interplay of the inner logic of moving image organs (in plural form), the logic of governmentality and the impulses of individual stake-holders at work. There is the need to track down institutional provisions, processes, artists and their facilitators, the disparate but abundant locations where moving image activities were realized and made visible, and what has been left out. In this presentation, I want to highlight several examples of stake-holders in Hong Kong who self-consciously push their way boundaries to become (re-)grounders. Specifically, I shall discuss projects that acknowledge non-moving-image professionals as stake-holders worthy of understanding, as well as (my own) projects which assume pedagogy as a battlefield for activation and change (historical materialism and dialectical materialism).