The second Ecologies of Participation (EoP) panel discussion will explore urban mapping as a medium of participation. Reviewing participatory art practices since the late 20th century, urban space has become not only a static site of happening but also plays an active role in creating experiences. The act of mapping allows us to re-examine the familiar everyday space carefully and opens up new perspectives to question the preconceptions about the built environment. Different from the passive or reactive user of urban space, the creative user engages with space through a critical lens and intervenes in the often-deterministic designed conditions. Through constructing a map involving multiple public participants, what kind of collective image or understanding can be created that leads to social transformation?
About the speakers:
Patrick Cheng-Chun Hwang’s main scholarship field is foundation design pedagogy in general and drawing education through “relational collaboration” in particular. His recent publications include “Drawing the Line” in JAE (2022), and “Inclusive Disegno” in Ardeth (2023). Patrick is a Taiwanese-American educated at RISD and Columbia University, and is a licensed architect in the United States. He has practiced architecture and taught in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He is currently Associate Professor at Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University. Prior to joining NCKU, he taught at CUHK for over ten years.
Jessica Thompson is a media artist working in sound, performance, and mobile technologies. Her practice investigates how sound reveals spatial and social conditions within cities, and explores how creative applications of urban data can create new forms of citizen engagement.
Her interactive artworks have been featured in exhibitions, festivals, and art fairs worldwide, including the International Symposium of Electronic Art (San Jose, Dubai, Vancouver), the Conflux Festival (New York), Art Basel Miami Beach, New Interfaces in Musical Expression (Oslo), Re:Sound (Aalborg), and The Politics of Sound (Lethbridge). She is an Associate Professor of Hybrid Media at the University of Waterloo, where she currently serves as the Director of the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business.
Dr. Minna Valjakka specializes in artistic and creative practices in East and Southeast Asia. Through locally embedded research at the intersection of art studies, urban studies and environmental humanities, she investigates how different practices created in public spaces interact with varied forms of ‘publicness,’ shared agency and civil society formation. Her multi-sited approach includes ethnographic fieldwork and archival research across the region. Minna has held numerous research fellowships and published widely in journals, books, and exhibition catalogues. Currently, she is working on a monograph about art and plants and leads the interdisciplinary project “EcoConjunctions,” funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024-2028).
About EoP:
Ecologies of Participation (EoP) is a transdisciplinary research collaboration between Fine Arts, Architecture and Media and Cultural Studies. Through panel discussions, workshops, artistic projects and symposiums, the initiative aims to bridge research and practice by providing platforms for developing experiments with creative practice, technology, and urban space. It was initiated by Yim Sui Fong (Assistant Professor of Fine Arts), Melody Hoi Lam Yiu (Research Assistant Professor of Architecture) and Ashley Lee Wong (Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024. The initiative aims to develop practice-based collaborations to explore the role of creative arts in society.
