Supporting data for “Theorising ‘arts tech’: Mediations between art objects, people and policy in Hong Kong’s creative industry”

This research draws on a year of ethnographic research in a Hong Kong cross-media creative studio, where I participated in the planning and creation of numerous arts tech projects, complemented by interviewing studio members and their project collaborators. By focusing on the artefacts created through these projects, my research uncovers the productive tensions existing between the policymakers, commercial marketers and creative practitioners from objectives to practices in applying technologies to arts productions in Hong Kong. Existing studies of the cultural and creative industries or creative workers in both Western and Asian contexts mainly focus upon and theorise with inter-human relationships. Material objects have primarily been classed as ‘tools’ or ‘media’ in analysis. In this research, I offer another approach to studying the cultural and creative industries and creative workers by putting the significance of material objects in the foreground, using case studies of arts tech development in recent Hong Kong.

This dataset contains: 1) the fieldnotes of my participant observation at the studied creative studio, during which I recorded the behaviours of the studio employees and all my interactions with them. 2) Metadata of individual interviews. I agreed with all interviewees at the written consent form that the interview content cannot be shared with any third party. The demographic and occupation information and interview dates are recorded in this metadata. 3) Metadata of photos and videos that I took during my participant observation. Record format, date of taking and short description of photos and videos are recorded in this metadata file.