Abstract
In today’s algorithmic media landscape, East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) migrant identities in Europe are shaped less by traditional mass media than by participatory, platform-based visual cultures. This paper explores how emerging documentary practices—using found footage, memes, 3D scans, and AI-generated imagery—reshape the construction and circulation of migrant subjectivities. Focusing on works such as In Virtual Return We (Can’t) Dehaunt (Yarli Allison, 2021), In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool (Yarli Allison, 2023), and Tea and Sugarcane (Anti-Cool, 2023), I examine how ESEA creators appropriate internet vernaculars to document, distort, and reimagine diasporic memory. These works resist representational norms through glitch, fragmentation, looping, and remix—challenging dominant visual economies. The paper draws on Jonathan Beller’s “computational capital,” Wendy Chun’s Programmed Visions, and Lev Manovich’s AI Aesthetics to argue that these documentaries function as interfaces rather than narratives—where racialised data, affect, and embodiment collide. It interrogates how ESEA identities are encoded and commodified across mass and niche platforms, and how aesthetic strategies offer critical tools for rearticulation. Ultimately, the paper positions post-internet documentary as a socio-technical form of resistance—where unstable, remediated images generate speculative futures for racialised and migrant communities.
Presenters
Nam HuhDoctoral Researcher, Communications and Media, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
ESEA media representation, Post-internet documentary, Algorithmic media, Migrant subjectivities
