Author: RishimaMathur 

Cat Links 2022 Blog, FINAL VIDEO ESSAY

[Video Essay] Hybrid City

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Link to Video: https://youtu.be/RYcMjUZFiRs   Concept Hypethral spaces like sidewalks are the circulatory system of walkable cities like Hong Kong. They provide an access point, a platform, like blank pages of a notebook, to fill in one’s experiences of the city. However, they seem to encapsulate a series of dichotomies- not hidden but not the focal object, open, unsheltered but restricting accessibility and routes, used by everyone but outside one’s ownership. They are public, but everyone narrates their private route, weaving in and out, sewing their traipsing experience into a communal urban fabric. Each narrative flows together, creating the mesh

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Cat Links 2022 Blog, Lecture 8: Sci-fi Technologies

Reading Response: Carl Abbott

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The first text by author Carl Abott introduces the concept of ‘migratory cities’ supplemented by examples and comprehensive analysis of media from the science-fiction genre. He introduces examples such as Armada, which is a city consisting of a flotilla of ships together, Snowpiercer, life on a perpetually moving train in a world wrought by natural disaster, and the constantly moving, grinding Earth in the novel Inverted World etc. He shifts the perspective of cities being natural confluence of people congregating at an area for their livelihood from the perspective of a technocrat, to a living, breathing, moving machine.  Through the

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Cat Links 2022 Blog, FIELDWORK

[FIELDWORK] Echoes of the Rainbow, Wing Lee Street

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Echoes of the Rainbow [Dir/Scr: Alex Law] (2010) In the search for a distinct post-colonial identity, Hong Kong-ers, imbued with nostalgia, turn to architectural phenomena that showcase the transient journeys of their city from a bygone era. Amongst the ever-changing high skyline, fleeting moments are littered throughout the city, anachronistic cracks that show Hong Kong’s rich past and journey from a fishing village to an urban idyll. A genre-based on this premise, “Nostalgia Cinema” has been prominent in the Hong Kong film scene since the 90s. A paradigmatic example is ‘Echoes of Rainbow,’ a winsome, elegiac tale of a family

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Cat Links Lecture 4 Everyday Spaces as Narrative

Reading response: Nezar AlSayyad

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Author AlSayyad presents different layers of observation of the city in the modern world, especially in a time where mass surveillance and mediums like film are available to the masses. He elaborates on the “gaze” and how the notion of viewing and observing both people occupying the city and the actual concrete infrastructure captures the mundanity of life, generating a new archetype of experiencing space. A feature of the article that I found really interesting was the consideration of different gazes such as the token ‘male gaze’ inspiring power imbalance and a different “modern sexual economy.”    Using examples from

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