Reinventing Contemporary Exhibition Space: Novels, Domestic Space and Cinematic Cartography

Keni LI

University of Glasgow, United Kingdom; 2827091L@student.gla.ac.uk

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence (2008), the physical museum “The Museum of Innocence” in Istanbul, and Grant Gee’s documentary Innocence of Memories (2015) can be viewed as innovative attempts to reimagine contemporary memory spaces. These three mediums present a shared theme—a fictional romance set between 1975 and 1984—across distinct yet interconnected dimensions: the textual space of the novel, the intimate domestic exhibition space of the museum, and the urban cinematic cartography of the film.

The novel provides extensive contextual information and a deeply personal emotional record, creating an intangible, virtual space for memory preservation. The physical museum anchors these immaterial memories through a collection of objects and materials, transforming ephemeral recollections into tangible artifacts that trigger remembrance and make memories visible. Meanwhile, the cinematic cartography of the film transcends the static boundaries of memory recording by rendering textual memories into an immersive, dynamic memory space. This cinematic medium strengthens the connection between contemporary urban landscapes and personal recollections, preserving the emotional and non-commercial aspects of the city in the face of modern urban transformation.

This essay examines these three forms of memory spaces through the following guiding questions. First, how do the three exhibition spaces—the novel, the museum, and the cinematic urban space—shape meaning, influence audience experience, and construct memory narratives through diverse media, objects, and the local urban topography? Second, how do the creators intertwine complex cultural discourses—politics, history, culture, and emotion—with the varied materials presented in these spaces? Third, how do the three spaces intertextualize and complement one another, collectively forming a multi-dimensional and immersive memory exhibition?

In addition, this essay explores the divergences and tensions between the three spaces in their treatment of the shared theme. It investigates how these differences generate alternative perspectives and interpretations of the exhibition, ultimately contributing to a deeper understanding of the role of cross-media memory spaces in contemporary memory preservation. Furthermore, the essay considers how these cross-media approaches may inspire future methods for constructing immersive memory experiences.

The presentation will come along with an interactive showcase, which features a multimedia immersive exhibition, incorporating photography, texts, video, and an interactive experience designed to highlight my research on the value of various media and spaces for contemporary memory preservation.

The Uncanniness of Film: On the Aesthetics of Cinematic Objectification in Double Suicide (1969) and Demons (1971)

Xuechun Lyu

University of Rochester, United States of America; xlyu6@ur.rochester.edu

This paper analyzes the experimental expressions that intentionally reveal the objectifying capability of film in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons (1971) to argue that the formal practices of defamiliarization in both films elicit a sense of uncanniness and disorientation as well as present an aesthetic of non-humanness. These formal practices involve manipulations of elements such as time, visibility, and human bodies, thereby showcasing mechanical performativity and multiple layers of visual objectification. The aesthetics of objectification or alienation transform filmic images into a potential platform for dialogues between Marxist materialism and New materialism.

The two films will be discussed in the contexts of post-war avant-garde art, Japanese New Wave cinema, and sociocultural movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Japan. Both Double Suicide and Demons were funded by Art Theatre Guild and adapted from theatrical plays; they exhibit an intended incomplete fusion of theatrical and filmic conventions, presenting themselves as attempts at anti-naturalism cinema and the exploration of artistic expressions. The repetitions of similar or entirely distinct shots within a single scene in Demons disrupt the linear narrative, illustrating the distortion of time and the inversion of life and death achieved through film editing. The exposure of the artificiality and plasticity of the images also serves as a critique of historicism in relation to the grand narrative. Double Suicide uncovers the hidden labor of puppeteers, who are deliberately ignored in Bunraku puppet performances and can be interpreted as representatives of the working class. These puppeteers are invisible to the diegetic world as they guide the human characters toward the conclusion of suicide, thereby implying the spectral nature of the unseen agents. On the one hand, the objectifying depictions of human beings in these two films are reminiscent of the Marxist critique of alienation, which aligns with the sociopolitical resistance movements of that time. On the other hand, by reducing human images to graphical elements, such as lines and color blocks, these cinematic portrayals render humans as manipulable and inorganic as non-human entities and inanimate objects. This simultaneously uncanny and visually pleasing aesthetic reflects the central idea of Object-Oriented Ontology, which considers all beings as objects.

In addition, the uncanny performativity exhibited by both films is closely tied to film as a medium. The perceivable cinematic apparatus functions as an interventional supernatural force, introducing a surreal dimension to the images. This paper further explores the connections between critical thoughts on the film medium’s potential and the aforementioned aesthetic expressions.

Polyphonic Resistance and Secret Utopias: Technology and Language in the works of Cathy Park Hong and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Neethi Alexander

Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, India; neethi@iitmandi.ac.in

The proposed paper will examine the poetry of Cathy Park Hong and the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to uncover how their works rely on technological motifs to address the difficulty inherent in the communicability of their respective experiences as Korean-American immigrants. The works of both poets employ stutters, fragmentation, silences, and erasures to reflect upon the untranslatable and unbridgeable gaps in experience and the inadequacy of available communicative modes to inscribe and convey their individual and collective experience of exile, diasporic travel and assimilation. While Cha’s works employ technological apparatus in various forms (photographs, videos, and art installations) to contemplate upon the themes of immigrant assimilation, untranslatability, and the history of the Korean-Japanese conflict, Hong’s works employ futuristic and fictive scientific images to ponder upon similar questions of exile, linguistic colonialism, and the violent histories that circumscribe Korean-American immigrant experience. The proposed paper is specifically invested in examining how the works of both poets in their unique ways emphasize on the performative and embodied aspects of their subject matter, and in doing so present a poetic performance that resists easy subsumption into algorithmic pattern-seeking or text mining.

“To Be Technologically Up-to-Date”: Media Anxiety and the Cinematic Quality in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions

Kaili Wang

Nanjing University, China, People's Republic of; wangkaili@smail.nju.edu.cn

In “The Shallow Grave”, James Wood criticizes Auster's writing for falling into the two worst scenarios of "pseudo-realism" and "shallow skepticism." However, he does not situate Auster's creative characteristics within the history of film media development. After the 1950s, the evolution of cinema itself exerted a "rebound effect" on literature. The absurd sense of realism and the characters' unironic use of clichés in Auster's works, as noted by Wood, might indeed stem from the influence of cinema. Perhaps inspired by John Barth's notion of "the literature of exhaustion," Auster is committed to formal innovation, with emerging film media providing significant inspiration. Therefore, this paper takes Auster's novel The Book of Illusions as a case study to explore the extent, aspects, and forms in which cinema has influenced Auster's novelistic creation. This can be seen as a fruitful exploration of the possibilities of form by Auster.