The Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas conference (ASEACC) is returning to Malaysia in August 2027. Hosted by Universiti Kolej Yayasan Sabah in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, it is the first time the conference is taking place in Borneo. The thematic title of the conference, ‘Looking Back to the Future: Media Archaeologies in Times of Crisis and Resistance‘, addresses urgent questions about the politics of cinema and screen technologies disrupted by sweeping transformations and media domination.
Since the early 2000s, media production and distribution in Southeast Asia have undergone substantial democratisation, led on by the availability of new technologies like digital video and platforms like YouTube, while the weakening grip of traditional studio systems and changing financing needs and patterns of co-production helped open cinema to a whole generation of filmmakers. Even as these opportunities ensued, the last twenty years have also ironically witnessed multiple interconnected crises that challenged these possibilities of media democratisation. AI is at the center of the current “polycrisis” in which geopolitical, social, economic and environmental catastrophes overlap. Seen by some as a beacon of emancipatory possibility, for others the ubiquity of AI across various media platforms and technologies (and now being adopted for military and state surveillance) risks losing the very thing that makes us human.
Responding to these concerns, the 2027 Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas conference invites individual papers or organised panels that take a media archaeological approach: examining how past media production and distribution practices are also entangled with the present and the future. For instance, digging into older “revolutions” (and their aftermaths) when formats, paradigms, styles and technologies shifted radically as a way to understand what is happening around us now and what is to come.
Papers may consider the following questions: What can media archaeology reveal about the connections between creative practice and technology during periods of social upheaval and unrest? How can we use media archaeology (and modern technology, potentially including AI) to find and define new archives of old materials? What is the role of the archive — both within and outside of institutional contexts — in preserving these images and sounds, of crisis and resistance, for future viewers and makers? What can older forms of technology such as Super 8mm, 16mm or video formats like Portapaks or home video (VHS, betamax, 8mm, miniDV, etc) reveal about moments of resistance in earlier times of crisis? How have film and video aesthetics (including more recent audiovisual forms) offered counter-narratives that provide alternative perspectives on the past, present and future? How have narratives of earlier films been adapted for contemporary audiences? How do diasporic Southeast Asian filmmakers negotiate their positionalities to imagine different pasts of their homelands? In what ways have film and video cultures shaped critical responses to political and social upheaval and how have film and video communities worked together to reimagine what is possible?
- Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Archival practices in and outside of institutional contexts
- Community media and video activism
- VHS & home taping
- Television and memory
- Video Art
- Found footage
- Film and video collectives and communities
- Home movies
- Diasporic Southeast Asian cinema and nostalgia
- Experimental cinema
- Past waves of independent cinema and short films
- Music videos and changing technologies
- Youtubers who bring together past and present forms and styles of cinema and video making
Abstract Submission Deadline: January 1, 2027
Please visit the official ASEACC 2027 webpage for more information on submitting your paper and panel proposal.
