Stroke by Stroke: Calligraphic Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Art and Emergent Media

AHRC的研究项目名为《笔触：当代中国艺术和新兴媒体中的书法想象》，旨在理解一种独特的想象模式的令人困惑的排列和分支：跨媒体背景下的中国书法。在这个项目中，中国书法在当代艺术、电影、电脑字体、iPhone应用程序、虚拟现实(VR)和网络空间中进行了重新想象。这项研究将中国书法的艺术历史著作与电影史、媒体考古学、平台研究和数字人文进行对话，揭示了文化遗产是如何在历史断裂的时刻被重塑的。更重要的是，它质疑在数字世界中进行艺术和人文研究意味着什么，最充分地考虑到艺术史和进行艺术和人文研究的过程越来越多地受到媒体技术的调解。中国书法是图像和文本的结合。这项研究的核心是图文关系，适用于所有从事视觉艺术工作的学者和博物馆专业人员。该项目展示了图像和文本之间的振荡催生了电影业、当代艺术世界和工业设计领域中一些最令人兴奋的实验。在图像和文字的交汇点上，这项研究的书法想象力激发了世界不同地区未来的创造力。虽然书法在中国艺术史上一直占有一席之地，但在英语艺术史学术中，它仍然是一个被边缘化、有时令人生畏的学科。现存的中国书法研究大多被描述为著名的印书、书法、楷书、行书和草书大师的风格史，并根据中国的朝代和政治时代进行分类和标记。这项研究超越了主导中国书法史研究的“大师和杰作”叙事和对前现代的特权倾向，描绘了一段现当代背景下的不成文历史，在这段历史中，为中国无声电影写字幕的书法家现在被遗忘了，书法以当代艺术中最意想不到的混合形式重新出现。将中国书法置于更广泛的媒体视野中，这项研究质疑长时间曝光、虚拟现实和网络技术如何改变我们今天对中国书法的理解。它将人们的注意力转移到展览空间、功能和观众/用户上，所有这些都是中国书法史上刻意忽视的。在这样做的过程中，它使艺术和人文话语中的次要、边缘化和代表性不足的人变得显而易见。它还迫使艺术和人文领域更多地更新自己，以适应二十世纪和二十一世纪的重大运动。这种原创性和尖端的研究需要超越传统印刷出版物的数字表达、方法和呈现。语义注释工具是一种新的、实用的应用程序，包括一组数字工具。本研究使用语义注释工具为运动图像帧的特定区域创建基于时间的注释样本，重点是屏幕上的书法。它将严格的研究与发展和参与活动(季节性书法练习会议、公共电影放映、艺术展览、互动网站等)结合在一起，为思考研究数字艺术史和向公众传播研究成果所需的方法、工具包和技能提供了一个模式。该研究项目将产生一本专著、一篇视频短文以及现场和虚拟展览，这些共同证明了新的混合出版模式的潜力和局限性。

The AHRC research project, titled 'Stroke by Stroke: Calligraphic Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Art and Emergent Media', aims to make sense of the perplexing permutations and ramifications of a distinct pattern of imagination: Chinese calligraphy in the transmedia context. In this project, Chinese calligraphy is reimagined in contemporary art, cinema, computer fonts, iPhone apps, virtual reality (VR) and cyberspace. Placing art historical writings on Chinese calligraphy in conversation with film history, media archaeology, platform studies, and digital humanities, this research sheds light on how cultural heritage is reinvented at moments of historical ruptures. More significantly, it questions what it means to conduct arts and humanities research in the digital world, taking into fullest consideration the ways in which both the history of art and the process of conducting arts and humanities research are increasingly mediated by media technologies.Chinese calligraphy is image and text at once. The image-and-text relation at the core of this research is pertinent to all scholars and museum professionals working with the visual arts. The project shows that the oscillations between image and text give birth to some of the most exciting experiments in the film industry, in the world of contemporary art, and in the realm of industrial design. At the point of convergence between image and text, the calligraphic imagination of this research inspires future creativity in different parts of the world. While calligraphy has always had a place in the historiography of Chinese art, it remains a marginalised, at times intimidating, subject within the English-language art historical scholarship. Most existing scholarship on Chinese calligraphy is narrated as a style history of celebrated masters of seal, clerical, regular, running, and cursive scripts, categorized and marked according to China's dynastic and political time. Transcending the 'masters and masterpieces' narrative and the tendency to privilege the premodern that dominates the studies of the history of Chinese calligraphy, this research charts an unwritten history in the modern and contemporary context in which the now-forgotten profession of calligraphers who wrote intertitles for Chinese silent films comes into view, and calligraphy re-emerges in the most unexpected hybrid forms in contemporary art. Situating Chinese calligraphy within the wider mediascape, this research questions how long-exposure photography, VR and cyber technologies transform our understanding of Chinese calligraphy today. It shifts attention to exhibition spaces, functions, and spectators/users, all of which an established style history of Chinese calligraphy has assiduously neglected. In doing so, it makes visible the minor, the marginalised, and the underrepresented in arts and humanities discourses. It also compels the arts and humanities field to update itself more to significant movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This original and cutting-edge research demands digital expression, methods, and presentation beyond traditional print publication. The Semantic Annotation Tool - a new, practical application comprising a set of digital tools - is used in this research to create samples of time-based annotations for specific areas of the motion picture frames, with a focus on calligraphy on-screen. Combining rigorous research with development and engagement activities (seasonal calligraphy practice sessions, public film screenings, art exhibitions, interactive websites, etc.), it offers a model for thinking about the methods, toolkits, and skills needed for doing digital art history and for disseminating findings to the general public. The research project will result in a monograph, a video essay, and onsite and virtual exhibitions that together testify to the potential and limitations of new hybrid publishing formats.