Hong Kong Architecture in the Videogame Vernacular

  • From Hugh Davies's research, Call of Duty: Black Ops. 2010. ©Activision Publishing, Inc.
  • From Hugh Davies's research, Call of Duty: Black Ops. 2010. ©Activision Publishing, Inc.

2018 M+ / Design Trust Research Fellow Hugh Davies, an interdisciplinary artist, educator and investigator, will examine Hong Kong’s character, architecture and urban design as represented in videogames. Surveying Hong Kong’s representation in a multiplicity of videogame experiences over the past thirty years, Hugh Davies will explore the city in its varying incarnations, unearthing the correspondences between the actual and the virtual, and consider it through different overlapping areas of design disciplines.

2018 M+ / Design Trust Research Fellow Hugh Davies, an interdisciplinary artist, educator and investigator, will examine Hong Kong’s character, architecture and urban design as represented in videogames. Surveying Hong Kong’s representation in a multiplicity of videogame experiences over the past thirty years, Hugh Davies will explore the city in its varying incarnations, unearthing the correspondences between the actual and the virtual, and consider it through different overlapping areas of design disciplines.

The M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship programme consists of two separate fellowships investigating issues related to architecture and design. One supports research projects focused on Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area in an Asian or global context, and the second supports research projects related to Asia more broadly, closely in line with the curatorial position of M+, the Hong Kong museum dedicated to visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Past fellows include: Ling Fan (2015); Joseph Grima (2016); the team of Daniel Cooper and Juliana Kei (2016) and Thomas Daniell (2017).

More details about M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship here

M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2018 Public Talk

Date: 2 March 2019 (Saturday)

Time: 2pm – 5:30pm

Venue: Function Rooms, 2/F, Hotel Stage, 1 Chi Wo Street, Jordan

Speakers:

Hugh Davies (M+ / Design Trust Research Fellow 2018)

Fan Lok Yi and Sampson Wong (M+ / Design Trust Research Fellow 2018)

Discussants:

Marie Foulston (Curator of Videogames, Victoria and Albert Museum)

Thomas Chung (Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Moderators:

Ikko Yokoyama (Acting Lead Curator, Design and Architecture, M+)

Shirley Surya (Associate Curator, Design and Architecture, M+)

Organised by M+ and in collaboration with Design Trust

More details about M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2018 Public Talk here

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2018
Fellow: Hugh Davies

Hugh Davies is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and investigator. His research explores technology histories, screen practices, and expansive games. Hugh has held numerous leadership roles in the Australian arts/technology sector including senior lecturer in Media at La Trobe University, board chair of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and board chair of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. He is currently an Asialink resident at Tokyo Wondersite, researching games and play in Japanese art and society. Hugh was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 2014 and he publishes and speaks on digital culture, contemporary art, and mixed reality games.

Organisation: M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Design Trust

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District
Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, the West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, as well as provide twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometer waterfront promenade.

About Design Trust
Design Trust was established in 2014 by Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design, a registered charity in Hong Kong since 2007, as a grant-funding platform. Design Trust supports creative projects that develop expertise and build research initiatives and content related to Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. Working across a multiplicity of design disciplines, from graphics, media, and architecture to the built environment, Design Trust aims to actively accelerate creative research, design, and the development of meaningful projects that advocate for the positive role of design.