::fibreculture:: Transdisciplinary Research on Creative Industries in Beijing

[Ned Rossiter]

hello fc - below is a summary of the counter-mapping of creative  
industries in Beijing undertaken over May-July. This was a temporary  
research platform, or 'pilot study', that will continue in 2008 with  
various projects, and develop through to at least 2010 with a  
platform of investigation and teaching at the Shanghai World Expo.   
The site is still under construction, and video interviews and  
documentation will be uploaded soon enough, along with counter- 
mappings of info-geographies produced with Slovenian artist Luka  
Frelih and Frida V. A pdf book will be published later this year, and  
a special issue of Urban China will come out next year.  So I guess  
it's one of those 'watch this space' type things.

Ned

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Transdisciplinary Research on Creative Industries in Beijing (CIB),  
http://orgnets.net

Mobile Research Laboratory, 28 May – 31 July, 2007

Coordinators: Ned Rossiter, Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carriço

mailing list: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/bei- 
ci_listcultures.org

This project brings international and Chinese academics together with  
urban research organisations, artists, curators, media producers and  
policy-makers in order to undertake transdisciplinary research on  
Beijing’s creative industries. Through collaborative practices of  
self-organization, one of the primary aims is to create a ‘counter- 
mapping’ of creative industries in Beijing. Unlike the usual mapping  
documents on the creative industries, which are typically derived  
from compilations of statistics on economic growth in the sector,  
this project will produce an alternative map of the creative  
industries in terms of the following vectors of research:

• migrant networks and service labour
• network ecologies of creative waste
• informational geographies vs. creative clusters
• centrality of real-estate speculation for creative economies
• import cultures & export innovations in architecture and urban design
• artist villages and market engineering

trans-CIB will consist of seminars, workshops and fieldwork organized  
around these six vectors. The research project is open to all who  
wish to participate in discussions, media practice, and a  
collaborative anthropology of Beijing’s creative industries.