The Development of a New Media Expertise in the Creative Economy of Hong Kong: Project number: 2016.A1.045.16D. Final Report

Since the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has embarked on the ‘creative turn’ bandwagon, following Richard Florida’s controversial ‘Rise of the creative class’ (2004), it has put into place a series of measures aimed at diversifying its economy by fostering cultural and creative industries (CCI). Technology-based creativity is considered as one of the main pillars of this new strategy, causing an inflation of projects referring to ‘creative media’, ‘new media’ and so on. This research seeks to describe the development of new media expertise in the context of the creative economy in Hong Kong: taking the new media artists’ skills as a starting point, we will examine their modes of acquisition, development, and integration into the creative economy. This research aims to provide an overview of the realities, challenges, mechanisms, and obstacles to the transfer of new media expertise into the cultural and creative economy of Hong Kong. We adopted a mixed methodology relying on four different methods: desk research, a questionnaire, in- depth interviews with artists and stakeholders, and direct observation of new media arts events (exhibitions, performances, workshops, conferences, and roundtables...) in order to address the following questions:
• What is new media expertise in the context of Hong Kong according to the practitioners?
• How is this expertise created and maintained?
• How is it transferred to the creative economy?
• How can this transfer be improved?