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“The contest over meanings of place stretch back to colonialism and forward to ubiquitous media. This collection draws together politics, aesthetics and ethics in a startling, innovative debate of exceptional value to both artists and sociologists of the new media landscape.”Professor Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne

“This book recognises the complex readings of what it means to be contemporary in a place. A compelling set of conversations that consider the alternative modernities and knowledge systems that destabilize colonial understandings of spatialization, self-representation and the role of new media art practice.”Professor Joel Slayton, San Jose State University

Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice explores tensions between global cosmopolitanism and local practices in the new media environment. This edited collection of work by practitioners and scholars emphasises political issues raised by artists working in an indigenous cultural setting.

Indigenous epistemologies provide sophisticated structures for negotiating belonging among communities who may become widely dispersed from their homelands. New media, by contrast, demonstrates biases toward the the dislocated: a cosmopolitanism implicitly located in the urban, where communities form and fragment in “virtual” environments. Nonetheless, questions of belonging and identification remain for those of us who use new media networks. Through analysis of a range of contemporary art and film projects, and tracking recent developments in cultural theory, the book provides diverse perspectives on how long-held attachments to place are transforming in the new media context.

Danny Butt is a partner at Suma Media Consulting and editor of the book Internet Governance:

Asia Pacific Perspectives. Jon Bywater is Programme Leader, Critical Studies at the University of

Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts and is the New Zealand reviewer for Artforum magazine.

Nova Paul is a film maker and Senior Lecturer at the School of Art and Design, AUT University. Original Image: Douglas Bagnall, Cloud Shape Classifier (detail) Design: Warren Olds, Studio Ahoy ISBN 9781847184849

Cambridge SCholarS PubliShinghttP://www.C-S-P.org

Place

Preprint: Please do not quote or cite

Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice

Edited by

Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul

Cambridge Scholars Publishing


Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice, Edited by Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Danny Butt, Jon Bywater and Nova Paul and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-484-7, ISBN (13): 9781847184849


Table of Contents

IntroductionDanny Butt, Jon Bywater, Nova Paul vii

Chapter One: Local Knowledge and New Media Danny Butt 1

Chapter Two: Pacific Parables Raqs Media Collective 9

Chapter Three: Indigenous VirtualitiesAllen Meek 20

Chapter Four: Compasses, Meetings, and Maps: Three media works Rachel O’Reilly 35

Chapter Five: Bicultural TemporalitiesJo Smith 44

Chapter Six: Virtual and Material Topographies Ayesha Hameed 60

Chapter Seven: Outage, Seepage, Blockage: art and cultural praxis in the networkAnna Munster 78

Chapter Eight: Making Things Our Own: The Indigenous Aesthetic In Digital StorytellingCandice Hopkins 93


Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practicevi

Chapter Nine: …the fluid line…Jason De Santolo 103

Chapter Ten: Strangers on the Land: Place and Indigenous Multimedia Knowledge SystemsMike Leggett and Laurel Evelyn Dyson 121

Chapter Eleven: The Graffiti Archive and the Digital City Lachlan MacDowall 134

Chapter Twelve: Play_Space: Interactive media practices for community participation and cultural transformationJuan Francisco Salazar and Sarah Janet Waterson 147

Chapter Thirteen: Diwà—a Filipino aesthetic of knowledge, language, body Fatima Lasay 165

Chapter Fourteen: Commons ConflictSoenke Zehle 181

List of Contributors 199

Index 205


Introduction

This book emerges from the symposium Cultural Futures: Place Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts held in Auckland,

Aotearoa New Zealand in December 2005. Cultural Futures was designed to foster international dialogue on the role of place and location in the new media arts environment, and brought new media artists from India, the Philippines, and Indonesia together with indigenous practitioners from New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The event was primarily held at Hoani Waititi marae in West Auckland. The marae in a Maori community is a meeting place where the traditions and aspirations of the people are taught and practiced. As an inter-tribal marae, with a strong educational and artistic kaupapa and purpose and the site of the first Kura Kaupapa (Maori language primary school) launched in 1985, Hoani Waititi has played a significant role in New Zealand’s cultural development, and an influential role in indigenous politics internationally.

The decision to hold the event on a marae, which mandates a specific set of protocols and mechanisms for discussion and interaction, was a


Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practiceviii

self-conscious one. A previous conference co-organised by one of the editors, Cultural Provocation: Art, Activism and Social Change (2003), was held in two separate locations – a marae situated in a polytechnic in South Auckland, and a university lecture theatre in Auckland City. Even with the same participants, the differences in the style of interaction supported by the two spaces was marked. Experiencing these differences has further sensitised us to the importance of context and to how academic and cultural frameworks can include or exclude certain kinds of discussion. The context of the marae is an inclusive one. The differing structure and hierarchies of the marae provided a valuable counterpoint to the implicitly European space of the lecture theatre. The powhiri’s formal process of introduction and welcome enables more intimate exchange to unfold at the marae. You are in the architectural embrace of an ancestor; you’re sleeping side by side in the same room that you are talking in; you have met the people responsible for maintaining the environment you’re in, from kitchen hands to senior guardians – the physical and spiritual aspects of the place sit alongside protocol and customs that make up everyday life and practice. Such experiences reiterate the value of local and indigenous knowledge systems offering alternatives to the dominant languages of globalisation and new media technologies.

As we developed the context for the symposium, it became clear that there was a gap in the critical literature on these issues. More anthropological texts on particular cultural traditions; monographs on particular artists; and books written by indigenous practitioners already exist. But the discussion on place and belonging in new media is less a disciplinary space than an opportunity to bring various traditions into conversation, incorporating currents from geography, art history, cultural studies. This book reflects our desire to bring together writers from a wide range of cultural and disciplinary backgrounds to give a broad overview of critical approaches to the topic. For us the located experience of the Cultural Futures symposium has shaped the dialogue that has been captured in this text. Some of the common threads in the book are drawn out in our brief introductions to each chapter.


Introduction ix

Acknowledgments

Compiling a book like this is a collective effort that has involved the generous support of many individuals and organisations. For the Cultural Futures symposium, we are especially grateful to the participants and especially to the presenting artists: Raqs Media Collective, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Fatima Lasay, Jenny Fraser, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Creative Combat Collective, Charles Koroneho, Rachael Rakena, Albert Refiti and Lemi Ponifasio, and Lisa Reihana. Our advisory board of Sean Cubitt, Albert Refiti, Natalie Robertson, Jo Smith, and Stephen Turner provided guidance and advice. Thanks to Creative New Zealand, the Asia New Zealand Foundation, Hoani Waititi Marae, Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design, and the Moving Image Centre for their support.

The symposium was an initiative of the Place and Practice Working Group for the Pacific Rim New Media Summit, held in San José 2006 as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts and the Zero One festival. Thanks to the working group, Jason De Santolo, Jenny Fraser, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Ashok Mathur, Rachel O’Reilly, and Lisa Reihana who participated in the group along with the editors. We also appreciated the support of Joel Slayton and Steve Dietz from ISEA/ZeroOne. The chapters by Butt, Hopkins and O’Reilly previously appeared in the special issue of the journal Leonardo devoted to the Summit, our thanks to Roger Malina, Pamela Grant-Ryan, and the Leonardo team.

We are also grateful to our publishers Andy Nercessian, Amanda Millar and Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Publishing; and our designer Warren Olds from Studio Ahoy has consistently gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Most of all, our thanks to the writers and artists who have allowed their work to be included here.

Mauri ora.

Danny Butt, Jon Bywater, Nova Paul


In this introductory chapter, Danny Butt outlines some of the key issues and affective dimensions of the new media environment that underpin this publication. The article begins elliptically, suggesting that while the role of new media in bringing a shift from place-bound knowledge to more interest-based and cosmopolitan forms of knowledge has been considered, the communities of the settler and the colonized have always had very different means of spatialising the landscape they inhabit, even when this is the same physical space. More accurately, the colonial has been the imposition of one spatialisation over another, and our understanding of “new media” reflects this colonial viewpoint, through its instrumental approach to land and bias toward quantification. Drawing on Spivak, indigenous authors and the science studies literature, Butt suggests that it is difficult to know how deeply our “vision for information technologies is limited by epistemological biases that we have developed experientially within colonial capitalism,” but that through a conversation between indigenous and settler knowledge systems there is the possibility to clarify and transform these constraints.

Local Knowledge:Place and New Media Practice Danny Butt

I grew up selling Local Knowledge, although I didn’t think much about it at the time. Local Knowledge was the brand name for the

surfboards made by my stepfather’s surf shop on Australia’s Gold Coast.

Compared to most other white settlers outside the agricultural sector, surfers have detailed relationships with physical places and locations. “Local knowledge” is a term used to describe insider information such as the conditions under which a particular surf break might be good, or how to surf a particular wave most effectively. While some local knowledge can be shared, a certain amount is tacit and experiential and cannot be codified—remaining obstinately located around a particular environment and the people in it. Local knowledge is reified in the doctrine of “localism”, which claims special rights to the best waves for those who surf particular breaks regularly.


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There is a class dimension at work in surfing’s localism: cosmopolitans who travel regularly see localism as small minded and against the spirit of surfing, while those who grow up around the best breaks (which tend not to be in major cities) rail against the magazines, surf reports and webcams that provide increasing information about particular surf locations, making them destinations for the “blow-ins” from somewhere else. It is true that even among the surfing community’s “locals” there are occasional, romantic nods to the “connection with the land” of Aboriginal peoples, but more commonly settler culture views indigenous culture as something existing in the past, which has “been lost.” To recognize indigenous culture as contemporary and viable would call one’s own localness into question. Ironically, then, it is the urban cosmopolitans—unencumbered by non-negotiable attachments to a place—who are more open to the reality of ongoing indigenous relationships to and guardianship of the land.

‡

Abie and Wok Wright were born and raised in Newcastle, Australia, which is my hometown. They also promote Local Knowledge—that’s the name of the hip-hop group they formed with Joel Wenitong in 2002. However, the “localness” of their knowledge is somewhat different. Newcastle was named after the English coal town by a British lieutenant who discovered coal there while searching for escaped convicts in the early 19th century. The Wright brothers, however, describe themselves in interviews as being from Awabakal country, a broader group of nations/peoples centered for thousands of years around Awaba, also known as Lake Macquarie. While the rise of hip-hop is often characterized as a function of U.S. consumerism and inauthenticity, for Local Knowledge hip-hop values articulate their anti-colonial cultural politics: keeping it real, name-checking your roots, and representing for your community all come naturally in both hip-hop and indigenous struggles for self-determination.

My experience of these competing versions of Local Knowledge leads me to reflect on the incommensurability of indigenous and settler versions of knowledge of the land, and how these echo in the activities of indigenous new media practitioners. There are at least three axes where


Butt: Local Knowledge 3

this incommensurability is visible. These axes may also be described as aporia in the deconstructive sense—contradictory impulses that are not necessarily resolvable, because they are constituted by the disjuncture between colonial and colonised cultures (Spivak 1999).

The first is the role of cartography and the map. The turning of land into data through surveying, mapping and renaming is the most basic function of the colonial process. In many colonial projects, the surveyor was hated and feared more than the soldier. The removal of surveying pegs, the refusal to be mapped, is an important thread in anti-colonial activity from Ireland to New Zealand. This places the role of new media and its data-centricity in question. As Solomon Benjamin’s fascinating studies of land tenure in Bangalore have shown (2000; also presentations in Delhi and Amsterdam 2005), the systematisation of land information routinely results in a centralisation of control and a loss of local self-determination. Land becomes appropriable at a distance. A common occurrence in settler encounters with indigenous culture is the discovery that the land is more full of story than we knew. The formation of objective, story-less data via, for example, GPS—even for the purposes of developing narrative media practices through “locative” works—is difficult to reconcile with the non-transferable yet profoundly social relationship with land that is characteristic of indigenous epistemology.

The second aporia is that of time. To claim affiliation to a space of land via a property right, or to activate the concept of sovereignty itself, is an act of history-making. As David Ellerman (2004, ) notes, however, this historical dimension is usually suppressed in Western economic and political theory: “Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and almost completely neglected the question of the initiation and termination of property in normal production and consumption”.

Part of the silence around the initiation of property is due to the fact that the actual, often grisly stories of property initiation raise questions about the legitimacy of that property. The reality of indigenous relationships to land, if connected to the history of property in specific locations, always brings up an uncomfortable anteriority for a culture that views property as transferable, as James Clifford (2001, 482) observes:


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[The] historical, tangled sense of changing places doesn’t capture the identity of ancestors with a mountain, for as long as anyone remembers and plausibly far beyond that. Old myths and genealogies change, connect, and reach out, but always in relation to this enduring spatial nexus… Thus indigenous identities must always transcend colonial interruptions… claiming: we were here before all that, we are still here, we will make a future here.

Homi Bhabha has referred to the colonial moment as generating a “time-lag” that destabilizes the ground from which a singular history or theory of place is possible. The perspective of the colonized puts both our contemporary theorization of property and our understanding of property in times past. As Gregor McLennan (2003, 74) puts it, “We cannot readily reperiodise and re-name the object of enquiry to fit our revised inclinations” or suppositions in the new media environment. The “new” remains unhelpfully bound to different, competing histories of the past.

The third axis relates to the concept and function of knowledge itself. Historical knowledge is constantly reinterpreted and re-located to become useful for the work of the present. In settler culture, knowledge is instrumental—it is useful because it can do things, here and now. In indigenous epistemologies, knowledge is commonly viewed as what the Maori call taonga tuku iho, a gift from one’s ancestors to the present. The ultimate social good is not the transfer of knowledge, as it is under modernist theories of information diffusion, nor is it the maximum extraction of capital value, as under capitalism. More important is who the knowledge is transferred to and whether their use of that knowledge will help maintain the entire knowledge system.

Poet and librarian Robert Sullivan (2002) notes that, when considering the digitisation of cultural material, important questions for indigenous maintainers of knowledge are:

How do we send a message that strengthens the holistic context of each cultural item and collection? How do we ensure that both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples receive the message? How do we digitize material taking into account its metaphysical as well as its digital life?



Resolving these three conflicts would require “new media” in which the technologically augmented experience of location is inseparable from a philosophy of land and belonging. These are distinctive and important questions for new media practice. I do not seek to romanticise the distinctions between indigenous and nonindigenous approaches to land and knowledge, or to suggest that indigenous knowledge systems can or should be adopted by nonindigenous cultures. For indigenous peoples, the recovery and maintenance of their cultural systems is quite simply a lot of extra work that they do as part of their survival. It is empirically the case, however, that the cultural meaning of place and location is more sophisticated in indigenous culture than in nonindigenous culture—indigenous practitioners are far more likely to be able to deploy a range of strategies for “reading the country” that emerge from a variety of worldviews, and to be able to critically reflect on the effects of these understandings (Benterrak et. al, 1984). Such systems make us aware that our vision for information technologies is limited by epistemological biases that we have developed experientially within colonial capitalism.

To understand some of these limitations it is instructive to look at the way new media theory is invested in settler culture and its relationships with land. In these relationships I mean more that the homologies Virginia Eubanks (1999) identified between the “mythographies” of new media development and the frontier values of “Conquest, Flexibility, Democracy, and Individuality” in the white settlers of the Western United States, although those are important. Instead I suggest that our very ways of thinking about new media are inevitably invested in colonial epistemology.

For example, Lev Manovich (2001), in his classic book The Language of New Media, identifies four distinctive properties of digital media products:

Discrete representation on different scales.• Manovich imagines a fractal structure, where individual objects can be recombined at will into different contexts while retaining their individuality.

Numeric representation• . Media can be described formally (mathematically or numerically) and subject to algorithmic manipulations.


Chapter One6

Automation• . Many media manipulations can occur automatically, and human intentionality can be removed from the creative process.

Variability• . New media objects (such as Web sites) are not something fixed once and for all but can exist in different (potentially infinite) versions.

Of course, these properties are clearly associated with the values of European modernism, but it is also interesting to consider the first two in relation to the development of “freehold title”—in which divisibility and aggregation are important components of property under the industrial system. However, these first three characteristics—valorised in Manovich’s conception—are unhelpful under value systems where no person or media object is imaginable outside of specific social relationships, as these characteristics suppress the particularity of the subjective social context that produces them. As David Turnbull (2000) puts it, in a culture that prefers the abstract to the concrete (because the abstract is without annoying limitations to circulation), knowledge has to be presented as unbiased and undistorted, without a place or knower. In a discussion of high-energy physics, Sharon Traweek (1988, 162) describes this ideal as “an extreme culture of objectivity; a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder—for a world outside human space and time.”

By contrast, the new media artists and commentators who are producing the work I find most fascinating create new media projects that are organised around experience-centered claims to aesthetic value—they are not telling the story of an abstract “global” but are reflexively embedded in their own location and understanding. Works created by indigenous artists often assert a different frame of reference for the role of the digital within their practice, highlighting the “alternative modernities” that have simultaneously existed outside European thinking, while forging political sensibilities in relation to colonisation and racial prejudice.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle (2004) notes that “the current lack of attention being paid by programmers to Indigenous communities around the world represents a missed opportunity, because our languages are eloquent, concept and process-based, and fully capable of describing



various complicated technological dynamics.” Our aim with this book is to bring these worldviews—often relegated to the “cultural” as opposed to fully “contemporary”—into the mainstream of new-media practice. For me, these “cultural futures,” as Eric Michaels (1994) termed them, open new directions for critical practice among indigenous and non-indigenous new-media practitioners alike. These directions are not founded on the basis of shared values (though these are always being sought), but on what is different and distinctive. They are about encountering stories on our travels that emerge from and remain tied to specific locations, stories that—although they travel far and wide—have a home.

References

Benjamin, Solomon. 2000. Governance, Economic Settings and poverty in Bangalore. Environment and Urbanization (12): 35-56.

Benterrak, Krim., Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe. 1984. Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. Fremantle: W.A: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Clifford, James. 2001. Indigenous Articulations. The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 468-492.

Ellerman, David. 2004. Introduction to Property Theory. Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com/abstract=548142. (accessed November 20, 2004).

Eubanks, Virginia. 1999. The Mythography of the “New” Frontier. http://web.mit.edu/mit/articles/index_eubanks.html. (accessed May 2, 2002).

L’Hirondelle, Cheryl. 2004. Sub-rosa. Horizon Zero 17 (Tell—Aboriginal Story in Digital Media) http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/tell.php?is=17&file=0&tlang=0. (accessed September 20, 2005).

Manovich, Lev. 2000. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

McLennan, Gregor. 2003. Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory. European Journal of Social Theory, 6 (1): 69-86.

Michaels, Eric. 1994. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.


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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sullivan, Robert. 2002. Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights---A Digital Library Context. D-Lib Magazine, 8 (May). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/sullivan/05sullivan.html. (accessed April 15, 2005).

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Turnbull, David. 2000. Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. Australia: Harwood Academic.


This book has its origins in the editors’ hypothesis that the Asia Pacific region offers a useful vantage point on the question of place, where, for example, issues of sovereignty are often tied to material struggles to reclaim traditional territories, and many distinctive cultural values stem from human relationships with the land. The region, though, is arbitrarily constructed, and it is from this starting point that the Raqs Media Collective weave together some myths — factual and symbolic — of the Pacific into a series of images with which to frame and to think urgent ethical questions about the fate of cultural values in new media practice. For example, remembering the knowledge system that preceded the currently dominant Western conception of navigation, they explain how older Pacific sailors calculated their progress in an inversion of Dead Reckoning, “on the basis of a metaphorical assumption of the still navigator interfacing with a world that courses towards or away from him or her”, concluding that Dead Reckoning won out as a way of thinking because the ships that used it were equipped with more deadly munitions. In relation to a detail like this, the essay traces cultural values deep into human practices, and in making them visible, asks how we might avoid the violence that homogenises culture in the way information is handled and different ethoi are brought into communication: How can we think of culture without thinking in terms of property, for example? How can we avoid the hegemony embedded in “end-user agreements”? In posing these challenges to their own practice, Raqs demonstrate the learning that may occur in openly and curiously engaging with different histories.

Pacific ParablesRaqs Media Collective

The Pacific Rim as a Fiction of Place

The Pacific Rim is a fiction about place, a filter through which you can look at the world if you choose to and confer more or less arbitrary meanings on to a set of latitudes and longitudes. There have been previous fictions about place straddling this water, one was called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and unleashed havoc in the name of the solidarity of oppressed peoples of Asia, another thought of the Pacific as a Californian frontier, a kind of Wild Blue West. A third spoke French, drew naked women in Tahiti, and detonated hydrogen


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bombs in the water. A fourth, the South Pacific Bubble, was one of the first episodes of global financial speculation that shaped the turbulence of the economy of our modern era.

Meanwhile, Sikh peasants from the Punjab, Chinese railroad workers from Canton, agricultural workers and sugarcane cultivators from the hinterland of North India traversed the ocean, Mexicans swam or walked along the coastline, Australian sailors, New Zealanders on whaling ships, Japanese factory workers, Filipina nurses and itinerant Pacific Islander communities traversed the Pacific, and the wider world, buffeted by the rough winds of recent history. They grew fruit trees in Napa valley, felled timber in British Columbia, mined tin in Peru, pressed grapes in Chile and made what some choose to call the Pacific Rim what it is today. In time, agricultural labourers were joined by software programmers. And roads from Napa Valley began to lead in and out of Silicon Valley.

Ringed by fire, held together by fragile surfaces that slide on to each other, girded through with pipelines, beset by storms. You could say that the Pacific Ocean, apparently endless and bottomless, sounds almost like the Internet. Which is not altogether inappropriate considering that the Pacific Rim, between California, East Asia and Australasia, probably contains within it the highest density of Internet traffic.

The first question we want to ask is: how can this fiction of location, this imaginary map, the one that we are all currently engaged in drawing, not reproduce the boundaries that beset all mapmaking exercises? How can we as mapmakers avoid the predicament of an expression of mastery over the landscape we intend to survey?

Dead and Living Reckoning

We forget that cartography is as variable a practice as any. There are maps and then there are maps, and there are different kinds of mapmaking. Modern maritime navigational charts, based on latitude and longitude, determine a principle of navigation known as “Dead Reckoning”. Dead Reckoning, in our limited understanding, is the method by which the position of a moving body is deduced in advance by taking fixes from previously known positions and then reading them against calculations with variables such as speed, direction, wind speed, tide patterns and currents. Prior to GPS, most navigators had to rely on dead reckoning, with a little help from a compass, an astrolabe, star charts, chronometers


Raqs Media Collective: Pacific Parables 11

and longitude tables. Dead Reckoning models itself on the dynamics of the relationship between a moving object and a notionally inert surface.

We say most, but should qualify it immediately, because for most of human history, the largest water body in the world was navigated using a different system of reckoning. The Pacific Island cultures, which were probably the most prolific seafarers that the history of humanity has known, actually used the opposite navigational principle. Reckoning was taken on the basis of a metaphorical assumption of the still navigator interfacing with a world which courses towards or away from him or her. Thus, it is not the sailor that approaches an island, but the island that advances towards, and then past the sailor. Meanwhile, the stars remain constant, thus marking general orientation. The course is set by the stars, and the world—a living, dynamic entity—flows past under the navigator’s gaze. For terminological convenience alone, one could call this method “Live Reckoning”. The relationship between dead and live reckoning is a study in the encounter of two knowledge systems, two practices and ethoi of information. The difference between them ultimately lay in how much gunpowder they had backing them. One had lots, the other, none. The ships that used “dead reckoning” carried cannons and muskets; the canoes of the live reckoners were armed with arrows and spears. The knowledge system with guns won the day. Pacific Island navigation systems remain as relics, occasionally resuscitated by an anthropologist or a sailing enthusiast.

Today, we who are practitioners of information, artisans of knowledge, often forget that our practices are also guaranteed by sophisticated weapons, and not only of the lethal kind. Modernity’s edge is ultimately a matter of ammunition. What safeguards should we institute to ensure that our encounters with the few remaining knowledge, information and communication systems different from our own do not result in their extinction? How can the business of reckoning continue to remain alive?

Cargo Cults

We head now in the direction of the island of the long wait. We refer here to a quintessentially modern practice of faith, the Cargo Cults that arose in the Pacific Islands, as a poignant marker of the power that


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technology (even if it does not work) can wield over the human spirit. In a typical Cargo Cult, contact with the accoutrements of modern Industrial civilization at war time (in the form of airdrops of food and other essential items from large transport or cargo planes for soldiers stationed in the islands) allegedly convinced the islanders that all that they needed for utopia to arrive was the ability to attract the right kind of airplane to land and disgorge its cornucopia of wealth (tinned food, white goods, durables, clothes etc.) on the island. It had been observed that airplanes tended to land on airstrips that were complete with runways, observation towers, a few standing airplanes and radar. So replicant infrastructure and replica airplanes were built with locally available materials in the hope that such engineering efforts would attract the bountiful flying machines from the sky. Needless to say, the planes would never land. The islanders waited, and perhaps still wait.

Cargo Cults are a useful metaphor for thinking about many diverse phenomena in contemporary culture, ranging from shopping malls spreading across space to imitative work routines. When the success of shopping malls in a region spawns mall clones in adjoining areas that wait for customers that do not arrive, we can see a cargo cult like phenomenon at work. Gigantic hulks of retail, arrayed for miles, stand girded by empty parking lots in many parts of Europe, North America and Asia.

Why do we wait for things to come to us? What guarantee is there that if we create replicas of the structures that house cultural expressions in other spaces, we will automatically create the conditions of a new culture? Why be in such a hurry to acquire the latest technology, and why wait so long for the perfect machine, the perfect piece of code, the killer application? What is it about our situation that makes us so afraid of being left behind? Why do we fear obsolescence?

Easter Island

What more remarkable reminders of obsolescence can there be than the stone giants of Easter Island. They too stand, as if waiting, scanning the horizon of the Pacific for a perpetually deferred future. We know almost nothing about the people and the culture that created them, and we do not know what they were trying to communicate to the big ocean by placing these standing figures. What we do have a sense of is the fact



that this activity of intensive stone quarrying devastated the ecology and social structures of the island, and that ultimately, the culture could not bear the burden of its own communicative practices. Perhaps a useful object lesson. Sometimes it becomes useful to audit the social and ecological footprints of our communicative practices.

The making of computer hardware and software also involves toxic materials, depressed wages and prison labour, and a great deal of this occurs on either side of the Pacific seaboard, in East Asia and in California. How can we reconcile the utopian promises that are made on behalf of information and communication technologies with the dystopic realities of their production in our societies?

The Imaginary Island on the Dateline

The utopian impulse is castigated elsewhere, but remains uncritically celebrated when it comes to communication technologies. Sober, even conservative, men in suits turn instantly into radicals when it comes to a new gadget. As if what were questionable in politics were automatically acceptable when translated into culture. Every product, every device, every new piece of code or procedure announces itself as a revolution. As artists working with these devices we are often the most effective bearers of this revolutionary zeal. This takes us to our fifth Pacific destination, to an imaginary island that straddles the dateline, encompassing within its circumference the diurnal revolution such that sunrise and sunset are locked into some kind of recursive embrace. And so you have sunrise media that almost immediately becomes sunset media. Where the pressure of getting a headstart into your tomorrow or the fear of being left behind in your yesterday leaves no room for today. What remains of the day is an insomniac anxiety about being adrift, lost in the ocean. How best can we jettison the burden of being the new, so that we can stop worrying about becoming dated?

El Niño

Sailing in the Pacific is a hazardous job. Depending on the direction in which you are going you could run across strong contrary winds. A combination of atmospheric phenomena and pressure conditions creates weather systems that may be specific to, or originate in the Pacific, but have global consequences. One of them is the El Niño, which


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together with its companion La Niña, arises in the waters off the coast of Peru, and creates weather conditions that lead to depletion in fish stocks in some waters, overabundance in others, hurricanes in some places, and droughts in others. It was noticed sometime in the late nineteenth century that drought and famine struck India and Australia with remarkable concordance, and it was deduced that this had something to do with the way in which the phenomenon known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation affects the weather system of the Indian Ocean and its littoral region.

This is well known; what is less well known is the matter of a speculative economy, particularly in the fixing of global food and primary commodity prices that capitalises on the eccentric but not irregular periodicity of the El Niño and La Niña systems. Here you have real time based weather report, statistical observation of meteorological systems going back at least a century, commodity price fluctuation indices and a globally integrated market working together to reap enormous profits from the tamed uncertainties of the weather. The futures market in primary commodities, in food and other natural products, works on this basis, creating enormous wealth, based on speculation, for some and misery for billions of others. Here, data and disaster often go together. How can those of us who work with information in a creative manner begin to get a handle on the enormously significant ethical questions that arise from the handling of information in today’s world, especially in the region that we describe as the Pacific Rim?

Nauru: Birdshit and Gold

The consequences of the generation of disproportionate assets through operations on information, knowledge and culture, require special and extended treatment, and this is probably not the best occasion to do that. But there is a Pacific Parable that can be drawn from the dots in the ocean that are composed of skeletons and shit. We refer to islands like Nauru in the Pacific, where one of us actually visited over a few years as a teenager, whose entire economy consisted of phosphate mining operations that processed fossil birdshit into gold. Nauru is a parable for the toxicity that accompanies a gold rush. The wealth that was produced within the span of few generations—the first ship with guano left in 1907—was consumed within a generation, leading to a population that



is unwell, intoxicated, and poor. Growing up in Nauru was not the most exhilarating experience, and the teenage utopia of a Pacific Paradise never matched up to the reality of dependence and decay. Today, Nauru is reduced to being a place where the Australian state out-sources the detention of people it considers to be potential illegal immigrants.

When the accumulated deposits of millennia are mined within a generation, people are left with little or no resources for the future. If the ruthless commodification of nature always produces a toxic culture, what would the relentless mining of a commons of culture produce? An unquestioning faith in the mechanisms of intellectual property takes for granted that the accumulated creative, imaginative and mental labour of our ancestors, which informs all our thought and creativity today, is a resource available for plunder. This engenders an acquisitive, proprietary attitude towards cultural production that inhibits growth, learning and future creativity.

The epics, stories, songs and sagas that represent in some ways the collective heritage of humanity have survived only because their custodians took care not to lock them into a system of “end usage”, and embellished them, adding to their health and vitality, before passing them on to others.

The parallels that we are drawing between guano and intellectual property rest on a variety of resonances. It could be argued that some of the unilateral features of TRIPS agreements that definitively shaped the destiny of Intellectual Property (IP) legislation across the world had a historical precedent, or at least shares a resonance with the piece of US Federal Law known as the Guano Islands Act (currently embodied in federal statutes as U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, Sections 1411-1419). The Guano Islands Act, which became law in August 1856 (exactly 150 years ago), enabled any and all U.S. citizens to take possession (for the United States of America) of any island, rock or key, containing Guano deposits, anywhere in the world, provided they were not occupied or within the jurisdiction of any other government.

The intellectual property regime legislated by the TRIPS agreement allows citizens of several states to patent, trademark, copyright or otherwise assert their intellectual property claims on several forms of life, aspects of knowledge systems, cultural material and practices (wherever previous private intellectual property claims are absent).


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This renders much of human culture akin to islands of Guano, primed for possession and mining. They create enclosures where none existed before.

When codes or languages closed in on themselves, allowing no “interpolations” or trespasses after a point, they rapidly haemorrhaged. How can we in our generation, immersed as we are in the language of property, ensure that there is space left for the cultivation of the commons? We ask this also because even initiatives like free and open source software, and the Creative Commons initiative, ultimately take recourse to the language of ownership and property, albeit an annotated notion of ownership, to make their case. Is there a language for culture, especially for the reproduction of culture that can elide the question of property?

The Kula Ring

Unlike commodities, gifts can accrue value to themselves as they pass from one person to another in a network of gift exchange. The ethnography of the gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands, made famous by the Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski as the Kula Ring in his remarkable book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, is an instance of this phenomenon; as is, in a less exotic sense the ways in which heirlooms add value to themselves as they pass down generations. In a digital environment it is not necessarily the patina of age or prestige that will lend value to a digital object as it passes between persons; rather, it is the possibility that it will be improved, refined, and have things added to it through usage (without doing any damage to an always available earlier iteration of the object itself, which can be recovered through the layers that gather to a work in a palimpsest).

It is this fact that gives to electronic piracy, and to any act that frees information from the prison of artificial or illusory “originality”, its true cutting edge. It does so not out of any radical intent to subvert the laws of property and the commodity, but because it makes eminent common sense for people to share information in any community through networks of informal sociality, especially if the act of sharing brings with it no depreciation in the value of that which is shared. Rather, the person who shares more gathers prestige to herself, and by now we are all accustomed to extraordinary feats of electronic



generosity (which sometimes carry with them an aura of “bravado”) as means of earning reputations within tightly knit online communities. The new pirates are just as desirous of chronicles of their adventurous heroism as their ancestors! The Pacific has distinguished histories of gift giving, complex circulation and custodianship principles for cultural material, pirate economies and mutinous sailors. How can this history of an adventurously redistributive generosity inform our practices with information and culture today? What can Pacific traditions of abundant reproduction and replication teach the contemporary global moment? How may we rediscover a robust ethic of transaction that does not lock culture into the dungeon of “end user agreements” that inhibit circulation?

Depth, Shipwrecks and Dark Fibre

It is well known that the Pacific holds within itself the world’s deepest spots. Many fathoms below the surface of the sea, the Mariana trench is the world’s deepest place. Deep spots such as these are places where residues and remains accumulate. The depths of cyberspace, and what is beginning to be called “information society”, like the depths of the ocean, are places where all sorts of residual pieces of information accumulate. Here, amongst forgotten and shipwrecked media, one encounters strange, mutant electrical life forms. Beings made of what Geert Lovink (2003) has called “dark fibre”.

So much of the discourse about information technology and communication is about light, about transparency and knowledge, that we forget that information is crucial for the manufacture of disinformation. We are thinking right now of the enormous energy that is being put into the media, electronic, online and print, all over the world, but also especially in the United States, in justifying the naked aggression that the State of Israel is inflicting on the people of Lebanon. How can we begin to talk about the dark matter of information, or disinformation, and the political management of information, with at least as much attention and energy as we do about information enlightenment? How can we render the deep and the dark in our work with light?


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Lemuria: Lost Continent

We come now to our final destination. This time, we are sailing in a submarine. After all, we were plumbing the depths of the Mariana Trench a moment ago, so it makes sense to keep going under water, crawling along the sea floor in search of a lost, submerged continent. At the fag end of the age of geographical discovery in the late nineteenth century, the public imagination in many parts of the world, in its thirst for new worlds, hit upon the idea of lost and submerged continents. Mariners tales, philosophical speculations and utopian strains of thought were dredged from all across history to yield lost continents like Atlantis, and its variant in our neighbourhood, Lemuria. Lemuria first came into view as an attempt at explaining a zoological puzzle, the pattern of distribution of the lemur family of primates, which hugged the shorelines of islands and continental landmasses of the Asia Pacific region, from Indonesia to Africa. Lemuria was invoked in explanations of everything from the missing link in the chain of human evolution, to the origin of diverse language families, the origin of the human species and the routes taken for the first human migrations.

What interests us here is not the project of recovering a fascinating imaginary history so much as a speculation about the distribution of a life form yielding an image of a space and a continent. This can lead to a prospective, and not retrospective insight. Like lemurs, many of us who occupy spaces within the media arts, hug the shorelines of landmasses of cultures, especially in the Asia Pacific region. We recognize that something, a family likeness perhaps, an eccentric sense of the kinship of our practices, the broad features of common questions and concerns, hint at some kind of extended lineage that we can draw from. These would include the histories of communication that we have inherited and the questions that our social, cultural and political milieus confront us with. If we are to create cultural futures for ourselves, we will have to place and ground our practices on the terrain of a recovered continent. How can we begin mapping this continent that awaits our recovery of its submerged landscape. What do we need to do now to explore the shorelines of all our practices?

This chapter is adapted from a keynote address given at the Pacific Rim New Media Summit, ISEA2006/zero one, August 2006, San Jose, USA.



References

Davis, M. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso.

Diamond, J. 2004. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.

Economist. 2001. “Nauru: Paradise well and truly lost.” The Economist, 20 December 2001. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=884045

Fitzgerald, J. “Contemporary Cargo Cults.” http://www.actualanalysis.com/cargo.htm

Harris, M. 1974. Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random House.

Howe, K.R. 2003. The Quest for Origins. Auckland: Penguin Books. Lovink, G. 2003. Dark Fiber. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Malinowski, B. 1984 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Reprint ed.

Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press. Raqs Media Collective. 2003. “Value and its Other in Electronic Culture—

Slave Ships and Private Galleons” in DIVE, edited by Armin Medosch. Liverpool: FACT. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/texts6.html

Ramaswamy, S. 2005. Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories: The Lost Land of Lemuria. New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Teaiwa, T. K. 2006. “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context.” The Contemporary Pacific 18, no. 1. 71–87.

Turnbull, D. 2000. Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Wikipedia contributors, “Guano Islands Act,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act


Allen Meek identifies a conceptual problem facing indigenous new media practitioners: how to think past the dominant view that virtual culture is defined by its freedom from physical location? With reference to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s classic work on decolonising methodologies, he responds to contemporary Maori film and video, theorising the ways in which artists like Lisa Reihana can be seen to “indigenise” virtual culture. Meek discusses how Reihana understands her digitally manipulated photography and video as inhabited by a spiritual presence, thus extending the domain of indigenous values and protocols, rather than leaving them behind in a transcended physical space. He acknowledges that the discussion of the politics of the production, possession and control of images in a colonial context has a long history, and he traces it forward to the question of virtuality, comparing theorisations of the virtual and of Aotearoa’s colonial history with writings and works by Maori scholars, artists and film makers, distinguishing “Antipodean” virtualities from indigenous virtualities.

Indigenous Virtualities Allen Meek

Contemporary discourses about virtual culture are dominated by metaphors of displacement, mobility and multiplicity. Discussions

of new media such as the Internet and digital imaging technologies have tended to align the notion of virtuality with the transcendence of physical location and the arrival of an immaterial and potentially infinite cyberspace. New media also supports its own social and geographic imaginary—the “virtual community” and “electronic frontier”—with its visions of unlimited opportunity, spatial expansion, and freedom of communication. This rhetoric of a new information order often appears at odds with the struggle of indigenous peoples to reassert their rights to traditional lands and to celebrate the continuing vitality of their cultures. Indigenous media producers therefore face the challenge not only of developing technological capabilities in their communities but of imagining and articulating new media differently around their distinctive needs and political struggles.

Following the lead of Australian media theorist McKenzie Wark, several cultural critics in Aotearoa New Zealand have developed a


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discussion of the virtual around the spatial metaphor of the antipodes and, more recently, the fictional landscape of Middle Earth. This research reminds us how much the conceptualisation of new media is bound to established forms of imagined community. However, the increasing visibility of media produced by Maori demands that we confront more directly the historical legacies and ongoing impact of colonial power. Can virtual culture be indigenised? This paper pursues a conceptualisation of the virtual that recognises the historical experience of colonisation along with the transformative possibilities that are articulated in some examples of Maori media practice. Prominent Maori filmmakers Merata Mita and Barry Barclay have argued that photographs and filmic images of Maori be conserved as taonga (tribal treasures) while other Maori artists, such as Lisa Reihana, are using digital multimedia to deconstruct colonialist stereotypes and to celebrate new forms of virtual community. However, tensions remain. Images produced of and by Maori continue to play a significant role in the ways that New Zealand as a nation defines itself in the global marketplace. Tourism remains the largest national industry, while the international success of Peter Jackson appears to have given him the right, in King Kong, to reproduce the most absurd colonialist stereotypes of the native other. There are also ongoing anxieties for Maori about their culture’s locatedness in communal and sacred space as it is increasingly transmitted and disseminated by new media technologies.

Some theorists of new media and scholars of indigenous media practice have attempted to position indigenous media use in terms of contemporary discourses of virtual culture. For example, Faye Ginsburg’s (1995) research on Aboriginal media has lead her to suggest that the “capabilities of virtual media to transcend boundaries of time, space, and even language can be used effectively to mediate historically produced social ruptures that link past and present”(260). But how should one understand such a transcendence? Barclay and Mita have articulated an understanding of the photograph and film image as physically and spiritually located within the indigenous community. Barclay argues that the media image needs to be produced, circulated and shared in ways that do not so much transcend as conserve and maintain a collective experience of space and time. One way that the colonial appropriation of Maori lands and cultural treasures may be countered


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is by a reclamation of the image as a spiritual link to place and its people. Reihana’s multimedia installation Digital Marae (2002) uses digitally manipulated photography and video to generate images from Maori mythology, corresponding to the carvings of ancestral figures that form an integral part of the traditional meeting house. As Barclay’s and Mita’s films do, Digital Marae transmits a sense of continuity, locatedness and community, with new media conceived as being inhabited by a spiritual presence rather than as transcending the physical or pursuing the freedoms of unbounded space.

There is always a danger that the dominant discourses of virtual culture will assimilate indigenous struggles over place and identity into the conceptual currency of capitalist postmodernity. In this essay I hope to avoid this assimilation by emphasising the differences between Maori and non-Maori articulations of technological media. I conceptualise indigenous virtualities by means of a comparison between theorisations of the virtual with various writings and media texts produced by Maori filmmakers and artists. Maori scholars, artists and filmmakers have often directly challenged the status of the image as commodity or digital information open to constant mobility in the global market. The politics of production, possession and control of the image by Maori has been voiced over the past 30 years as a critique of modernisation, cultural imperialism and global homogenisation. But the intensification of transnational flows of people, information and capital continues to impact on struggles for tino rangatiratanga (Maori sovereignty). Due to a range of social and economic disadvantages, indigenous populations remain more likely to suffer the consequences of technological exclusion. And while the recently launched Maori Television Service, along with the Internet and other digital media are offering new opportunities long restricted by national film industries and broadcasting institutions, the networked society has also given rise to new forms of inequality.

While the virtual is predominantly understood in terms of spatial or temporal derealisation, it can be understood instead as a domain of potentialities by which the past is brought into a transformative relation with the present and the future. I do not seek to explicate a Maori spiritual conception of the image but rather to consider the ways that certain Maori articulations of media practices displace notions of



the virtual that underlie so much thinking about technological media. Many prominent theorisations of the virtual can be seen as participating in a narrative of spatial conquest and technological development that seeks to assign colonialism to the past, along with the memory and experience of its subject peoples. Indigenous virtualities, actualised in contemporary media representations and practices, disrupt that version of history and challenge us to imagine the past and future otherwise. By insisting on the living presence of an indigenous spatio-temporal experience, Maori uses of media constitute a virtuality that exceeds the dominant managerial model of communication, representation and historical change today.

While Maori struggles for self representation must contend with the apparatus and history of the colonial nation state, non-Maori are also challenged to re-think their understanding of contemporary culture in response to indigenous initiatives and criticism. To avoid once again appropriating Maori culture and assimilating it into established national or transnational discourses it becomes necessary to engage in an ongoing critique of established conceptualisations of media while also recognising cultural difference and social injustice. Linda Tuhiwai Smith has argued that while discourses emphasising the “authenticity” of indigenous peoples often work to “fragment and marginalise those who speak for, or in support of, indigenous issues”, academic deconstructions of essentialism can also inadvertently support ideological agendas pursued by mainstream media. For Smith (1999, 72-74), authenticity and spirituality remain important concepts for defining anticolonial struggles. In this political context the potential usefulness of the virtual as a concept may be in rethinking essentialist/anti-essentialist positions and in questioning the alignment of media technologies with metaphors of multiplicity, displacement and derealisation. I propose an understanding of indigenous virtualities that describes an active engagement of spiritual and communal values with contemporary technologies.

The Virtual Nation

Reihana’s Native Portraits was commissioned for the opening of Te Papa Tongarewa (The National Museum of New Zealand) in 1997. As a video installation and a direct engagement with the politics of identity and


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colonial history it was a provocative work for such an occasion. Native Portraits drew on archival photographs of Maori, re-shot by Reihana and re-posed by her friends and family members. Some individuals appear in uniforms of soldiers or nurses, others display Maori headdresses, costume and tattoos, or nineteenth-century top hats. The foregrounding in this work of historical reference and intertextuality, as well as technological reproduction, showed how the image of the “native” had been constructed within the codes and conventions of colonial visual culture. At the same time Reihana’s re-posing of these images by living Maori suggested that the inhabiting of these stereotypes need not always be silencing or disempowering. The Maori subjects assume the colonial gaze that has positioned them as objects of knowledge and redirect it back at the contemporary inhabitants of, or visitors to, Aotearoa. In these new images Maori have no longer been consigned to history, but become present in an ongoing engagement with historical change. The subjects of Native Portraits look back at the viewer in ways that throw into question ideas about nation and history that underlie the very foundations of a national museum.

One way to understand Native Portraits is with reference to Henri Bergson’s theory of memory as virtual. While Bergson’s philosophy obviously should not be made equivalent to Maori understandings of space and time, it does allow an entry point into contemporary discourses of virtuality. For Bergson the past constitutes a virtual dimension of the present that may be actualised at any moment. This virtual dimension of memory is what makes possible both the consciousness of time passing and the possibility of unpredictable events and free acts. Without the virtual dimension of memory, the concrete material world has a spatial but no temporal existence (Shields 2003, 25-27). This Bergsonian theory of memory informs the later writings of Walter Benjamin, who rejects any historicism underwritten by an ideology of progress and dependent on a conceptualisation of time as homogeneous and, as Benjamin (2003, 395) puts it, “empty”. The idea that time progresses in a uniform way, rather than being formed from a range of possibilities existing in the past, makes history a tool of the dominant groups in society. Benjamin writes that to articulate the past historically “means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”(391). Only by bringing together the virtual dimension of the past with the actuality of the present can



this dominant version of history be disrupted. The virtuality of the past is a potentially creative or destructive force that is continually emerging into the present.

One of Benjamin’s examples of the break with homogeneous empty time is the French Revolution that “cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress” (395). Benjamin’s image suggests a way to think about Native Portraits: Reihana’s citation of these colonial portraits releases them from their consignment within a linear, homogeneous historical narrative. The past is suddenly actualised in the present in a new way, revealing that these images do not represent an historical stage (colonialism) that has passed, but that the colonial stereotype of Maori continues to play defining roles in the contemporary imagination. When the stereotype comes to life in the present, its subversion and transformation also once again becomes possible.

The virtuality of the past is what demands us to continually reimagine how the past shapes the present and the future. In the opening chapter of his book Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights, Barry Barclay invites the reader to imagine James Cook’s crew landing in Aotearoa in 1769 carrying a camera. If documentary images had been shot by this crew, then those images would have been shipped back to England and located in the archives of imperial power. As Barclay puts it, “no image is born innocent”(13) but is from the moment of its production marked for exchange in the marketplace or accumulation in the archive.

Barclay’s hypothetical anecdote explains how images can be “emptied” of the experience of the colonised in the interests of the colonisers. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991, 24) borrows from Benjamin the notion of “homogeneous empty time” to explain the technological standardisation of time, “measured by clock and calendar”, that is instituted along with print literacy and industrialisation and which creates one of the founding possibilities of the “imagined community” of the nation. This attempt to standardise experience also seeks to “repress” other popular or ethnic traditions located in specific places or territories. Because the “homogeneous empty time” of national identity can only emerge as a rupture with the autonomy and plurality of popular experience, there remain other


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temporalities that are persistently solicited or negotiated, denied or displaced by the institutions of the nation.

“The nation,” writes Homi Bhabha (1990, 291), “fills the void left in the uprooting of communities.” But the homogeneous empty time of the modern nation is punctured by the heterogeneous temporalities of those other traditions for whom the nation fails to provide a voice. The modern nation has served as a building block for the contemporary global economy while its boundaries have been deregulated to facilitate certain flows of information and capital. However, experiences of community, tradition and place continue to be articulated in new forms within the post-colonial nation and transnational information networks. Indigenous virtualities are actualised when these experiences are narrated, witnessed and performed. Indigenous virtualities constitute a dimension in which memory and history, private and public experience, may enter productive and disturbing new configurations.

This notion of virtuality should neither be conflated with nor separated from the prevalent notion of the virtual as a mediated space or interface with an information network. The representation of history and identity today will always be transmitted and in turn subject to further reconfiguration by various media. No recovered memory or history is entirely innocent of such processes, but is rather embedded in them and enacted through them. Thus in Digital Marae Reihana creates a “virtual” meeting place. Using digital technologies to fabricate fantastical images of Maori ancestors and deities, Reihana takes a distinctly Maori experience of space and time into the inherently dislocated and unbounded spaces made possible by technological media. Yet Reihana insists that wherever Digital Marae is exhibited it becomes a space of engagement with this collective experience of a shared past.

A Virtual Antipodes?

Linda Smith (1999, 29) writes that the postmodern or poststructuralist discourses which seek to destabilise dominant European narratives of Enlightenment or progress often articulate a scepticism that has long been part of the indigenous perception of the colonist’s culture. But for this reason Smith is also sceptical about the usefulness for indigenous peoples of the post- in postmodern or postcolonial:



Our colonial experience traps us in the project of modernity. There can be no “postmodern” for us until we have settled some business of the modern. This does not mean that we do not understand or employ multiple discourses, or act in incredibly contradictory ways, or exercise power ourselves in multiple ways. It means that there is unfinished business, that we are still being colonised (and know it), and that we are still searching for justice. (34)

One attempt to conceptualise the virtual as a postmodern condition in Australia and New Zealand has been developed around the notion of the antipodes. The story begins with Australian McKenzie Wark who, like other postmodern and postcolonial critics, emphasises a transitory, mobile experience of identity. However, unlike the theorists of diaspora, Wark turns to indigenous peoples as an example of a community sustaining cultural autonomy and diversity. Wark (1997, 17) proposes what he calls “antipodality”—“the feeling of being neither here nor there” is “an experience of an active trajectory between places, identities, and formations, rather than a drawing of borders, be they of the self or place” (57). So antipodality is becoming a more “typical” experience globally. As Wark explains it, antipodeans have lost many of the traditions that support cultural identity, however this puts them “in an ironically similar predicament to Aboriginal communities, which have great cultural resources for resistance but have been systematically denied the resources for cultural survival” (Wark 1994, 21).

But can the antipodean really have it both ways? Wark tells how he was introduced to the videos of the Warlpiri Media Association by the work of anthropologist Eric Michaels. In his studies of video production by rural Aboriginal communities, Michaels describes a video produced by the Warlpiri collective called Conniston Story, which relates the massacre by police of a community of Warlpiri men, women, and children. He goes on: “The pans do not follow the movement of the eye, but movements of unseen characters—both of the dreamtime and historical—which converge on this landscape. ‘This is where the police trackers came over the hill, that is the direction the ancestors come in from…’” (Michaels 1994, 115). The Walpiri video suggests a virtual dimension of place that is invisible to the colonialist worldview.


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There is a similar moment in the first episode of the 1970s television series Tangata Whenua (The People of the Land) directed by Barry Barclay. The screening of Tangata Whenua constituted a televisual event through which the imagined community of New Zealand was fundamentally challenged and potentially transformed: this was the first time that many urban New Zealanders had seen the ways that rural Maori communities lived. But the series seemed to reveal more than just a living indigenous culture that for most viewers was previously invisible; it also seemed to inhabit and invoke a different temporal zone to that of the modern nation state. While this “Maori time” had been seen within colonialist ideology as “backward” or even “prehistoric”, its appearance within the temporality of the consumerist modernity transmitted by television was disruptive and haunting.

In one of the most extraordinary sequences from this film, the kuia Herepo stands in a boat and calls out across the water to her dead children, while her daughter (Eva Rickard) explains her act to historian Michael King. By addressing King and, through him, the camera, Herepo’s daughter mediates the ancestral spiritual world of Maori and the television audience in New Zealand. Tangata Whenua presented a new moment when the virtuality of a Maori experience of time and place became actualised within this mediated context. Both Maori and Pakeha in the television audience became witness to the reality of this experience of place, unsettling the nation’s claim for cultural homogeneity and assimilation. Barclay’s later docudrama Feathers of Peace, also broadcast on New Zealand television, tells of the massacre of Moriori (natives of the Chatham Islands) by Maori in the 1830s. This disturbing history, in which a colonised people in turn become the perpetrators of colonising violence, shows the risks that Barclay is prepared to take in confronting the buried traumas of the colonial past.

The inescapable violence of colonisation needs to inform our understanding of the contemporary mediascape. Emerging forms of digital culture in Aotearoa New Zealand have been discussed by Nigel Clark and Nick Perry in terms of a national mythology of distance and remoteness. Clark and Perry both show how the colonial narrative of discovery, emigration and settlement continues to resonate in contemporary articulations of place and identity, despite the extent to which new information technologies and networks appear to collapse



physical distance into the immediacy of real time. This should not surprise us, however, as this mythology belongs to a “settler capitalist, First World colony” defined by its geographical relation to the metropolitan centre (Perry 2004, 21).

All of this is consistent with the international rhetoric of the “electronic frontier” that surrounds the Internet and what Ella Shohat has called the “imperialist imaginary”(1999, 216) that continues to inform the articulation of new media. The Pakeha mythology of innovation often invokes the image of number eight fencing wire, a history that speaks more directly of the regime of private property that was established on the lands occupied by the colonial settlers. The fantastic landscapes of Jackson’s “Middle Earth” (Lord of the Rings) or King Kong’s Skull Island belong in a long tradition of this imperialist imaginary, in which the remote islands of the Pacific became the object of European knowledge and administrative power and military force, while offering raw materials for its industrial mode of production and new homelands for its displaced populations. Today colonised territories provide “empty” locations for digital imaging.

Barclay’s Mana Tuturu makes clear that the European “discovery” and settlement was always marked by the appropriation of land and artefacts, with all of the force of European law overriding any local protocol or custom. Perry’s images of antipodean experience include the orange boxes used for seating in an early history seminar at the University of Auckland—an image that resonates again in the scenes of Ada’s packing cases unloaded on the beach in Jane Campion’s The Piano (Perry 2004, 23-24). The image suggests the dislocation and transformation of metropolitan culture on arrival in the colonial outpost and belongs to a mythology of antipodean subversion of European hierarchies. Barclay’s narrative, on the other hand, is concerned with the freight moving the opposite direction: the indigenous flora and fauna, artefacts, images and information gathered by the emissaries of Empire and destined for its archives, gardens, museums and zoos. Indeed the displacement of European civilisation in the antipodes must be seen as a relatively marginal issue when compared with massive accumulation of property, wealth, knowledge and power resulting from the global appropriation of indigenous territories. So we must add to Perry’s account of antipodean self-fashioning as hybridising the less benevolent notion of one


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group’s identity constructed by way of appropriation of the resources of another.

Like Clark and Perry, Thiery Jutel stresses the construction of national identity as an ongoing historical process. Jutel explores how the Pakeha articulation of identity, particularly around images of the landscape, is inevitably confronted by a sharp contradiction. Maori presence is evoked as the “spirit of place,” while the Maori legal claim on the land is feared as “reverse colonisation” (Jutel 2004, 58). He argues that this historical contradiction is only overcome or displaced by way of a virtual dimension that can transform place in terms of a yet-to-be-actualised future. One of Jutel’s examples is Tolkien’s fantasy world Middle Earth, which cannot ever become manifestly real in the physical geography of New Zealand but instead constitutes a virtual dimension, a becoming-other, of the landscape (Jutel 2004, 63-64). But Lord of the Rings and King Kong do not only transform local places into digitally-enhanced fantasy worlds, they also re-present local and global imaginaries of colonisation and Empire. So the virtual dimension suggested by these narratives and technological representations does not constitute a becoming without carrying with it other narratives that remain unassimilated by dominant discourses of nation and identity.

The Spirit of the Image

Barclay’s earlier book Our Own Image concludes with some comments on the spirituality of the image. For Barclay, the filmmaker and his crew depart from the community they have filmed as “custodians of other people’s spirits” (84). The image must not be taken, but rather is given and held with trust and respect for its spiritual value. This locating and holding of the image suggests processes of healing and mourning that sit uneasily with the globalising rhetoric of virtual capitalism. In her essay “The Soul and the Image”, Mita discusses the sacred quality attributed by Maori to photographs and film images. Yet images of Maori have long served to promote New Zealand as a tourist destination and featured prominently in early feature films as romanticised, exotic natives of the South Seas. Thus Mita sees the camera in this context as an instrument of colonisation. Reihana’s Native Portraits strikingly dramatises this ambivalent inheritance.



Reihana rearticulates received ideas of community in terms of the possibilities of new media. Reihana’s Digital Marae suggests that tradition need not always be embodied in the physical presence of an object or place but may be transmitted on a screen. However, the difference between antipodean and indigenous virtualities becomes clearer when we grasp that Reihana’s fantastic images evoke a spiritual rather than a purely material world. Antipodean theory tends to celebrate the technological resolution of the anxiety about distance. A software package for televising the America’s Cup or the inventions of Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop may appear to reverse New Zealand’s sense of international marginality, but Digital Marae presents a alternative reality to dominant secular, materialist models of society. For Reihana the inherently mobile, dislocated nature of digital information apparently does not preclude a spiritual experience of community. In a technologically advanced, market driven economy there is no contradiction of value in promoting place through whatever media are available. Rather, this is consistent with a larger history of the appropriation of colonial territory. But for Maori who insist on the spiritual experience of community and place, filmic or digital modes of simulation must themselves be reconceptualised in the struggle for cultural and political self-determination.

Within the fine arts this drama has been acted out in the so-called “appropriation debate” over the ways that Pakeha painters, as well as national institutions such as Air New Zealand, have borrowed motifs from traditional Maori crafts. Art historian Rangihiroa Panoho (1992) has emphasised the lack of equality in the appropriation of images across settler and indigenous cultures. While Pakeha artists make use of motifs from Maori visual culture in a search for identity, Maori artists borrow from European visual language as a means of survival. Panoho argues that participation in Maori culture is accessed through tribal affiliations and right of birth, from which Pakeha are excluded. Maori art can therefore communicate experiences and values that are tribal rather than individual, local and specific rather than Western and universalist. Barclay has extended this point by arguing that copyright law, under which the image is defined as private property, forces Maori media producers into the contradictory position of appropriating images of their own people and transforming them into tradable commodities.


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Concentrating their attentions on the status of the image within traditional or localised Maori communities, all of these writers—Barclay, Mita, Panoho—write in response to a dominant culture of the image as commodity and instrument of colonising power. The larger historical reason for this situation is, as diagnosed by Mita, the failure of settler culture to analyse its own experience of dislocation. The international success of figures like Peter Jackson is attributed in mainstream media to the settler culture’s lack of inhibiting history and tradition that supposedly allows for individuals to be more open to fresh approaches. This mythology of innovation has played a major part in responses to new global markets. Like all mythologies it denies that settler cultures, far from lacking a history, are part of a very long history of migration, appropriation of territory and repression of indigenous peoples.

In his catalogue essay for an exhibition held in Wellington in 2001 called Techno Maori: Maori Art in the Digital Age, art historian Jonathan Mane-Wheoki voices his concern that: “Maori material, including highly tapu [sacred] images… is floating around in the electronic ether of cyberspace with Maori powerless to secure ownership by means of copyright.” But he goes on to say:

Although many contemporary Maori artists utilise leading edge technology, Techno Maori celebrates not so much their use of that technology but the Digital Age that shapes the cultural and social contexts in which they make their art and in which electronic communications make possible the kinds of linkages across countries and cultures that enable Maori to participate in an expanding global market.

The exhibition included video texts in which Maori voiced new cosmopolitan identities as part of a global diaspora. At the same time they affirmed the solidarity of indigenous peoples. Are these contradictory positions: can a media image be sacred and local, virtual and global at the same time? How can it embody traditional values at the same time as participating in global markets?

One way to conceive of the complex relation between indigenous tradition, colonial history and contemporary media is by reconceptualising the virtual. While Barclay and Mita have argued for



a physical locating of the image as cultural treasure, Reihana’s work suggests that Maori spirituality can also be articulated in digital media. Interestingly, Native Portraits has since been transferred from video image into the more permanent material, granite. Barclay (2005) asks us to think of his book Mana Tuturu as a hui, a Maori form of meeting to exchange experiences and ideas. A book or a video text is never located in only one time or place, but it can be understood as potentially communicating a distinctive experience of place and time. An understanding of virtual culture as a world of pure simulation overriding physical presence cannot accommodate such re-appropriations of modern media. By understanding the virtual as a transformative dimension of the present we can better understand how our contemporary reality, including the materiality of new media, only becomes meaningful in relation to the different pasts that continue to shape its possible futures.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.

Barclay, Barry. 2005. Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

―. 1990. Our Own Image. Auckland: Longman Paul.Benjamin, Walter. 2003. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings

Volume 4: 1938-1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et. al. ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone, 1991.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1990 Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation. In Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London and New York: Routledge, 291-322.

Clark, Nigel. 1995. “Imaginary Reefs and Floating Islands’: Speculations on the Digital Refiguring of the Antipodes”. Sites 31: 1-30.

Ginsburg, Faye. 1995. “Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Production of Identity.” In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Eds. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U. California Press, .


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Jutel, Thierry. 2004. Lord of the Rings: Landscape, Transformation, and the Geography of the Virtual. In Cultural Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. Claudia Bell and Steve Mathewman. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004. 55-65.

Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan. 2001. Kite ao Marama. In Techno Maori: Maori Art in the Digital Age. Eds. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki and Deidre Brown. CD-ROM. City Gallery Wellington and Pataka Porirua Museum, 2001.

Michaels, Eric. 1994. Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons. London: Allen and Unwin.

Mita, Merata. 1996. The Soul and the Image. In Film in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996. 38-54.

Panoho, Rangihiroa 1992. “Maori: At the Centre, on the Margins.” Headlands; Thinking Through New Zealand Art. Ed. Mary Barr. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992. 123-134.

Perry, Nick. 2004. “Virtual Spectatorship and the Antipodal.” Cultural Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand. 19-35.

Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.Shohat, Ella. 1999. By the Bitstream of Babylon: Cyberfrontiers and

Diasporic Vistas. In Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge. 213-232.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed Books; Dunedin, University of Otago Press.

Wark, McKenzie. 1994 Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. P.

―. 1997. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. NSW: Allen & Unwin.


How do indigenous ways of knowing the world shift our understandings of new media works? Rachel O’Reilly explores possible interpretive approaches to new media art through a detailed appraisal of recent works by three contemporary practitioners from Asia and the Pacific: Lisa Reihana, Vernon Ah Kee and Qiu Zhijie. O’Reilly establishes how notions of place, location and cultural practice are articulated in their work, and addresses the influence of pre-digital aesthetic histories and the relevance of contemporary critical approaches to place and location across media forms. She points towards the rich locative and virtual schemas characteristic of indigenous epistemologies, which can meaningfully expand our approaches toward place-interested media art practices.

Compasses, Meetings and Maps: Three Media Works Rachel O’Reilly

The past decade has seen distinctive conceptual, material and political inquiries within the domain of indigenous and intercultural new-

media arts in Australia and the Pacific. Indigenous notions of place connect self and history to land, spirit to geography, and narratives to navigation in complex, highly diverse spatial practices that operate very differently from Cartesian representations and imaginings. While the relationship of new-media art practices, and indeed of individual artists, to cultural praxis is not straightforward, practitioners pursuing a field of inquiry that continues to draw its conceptual references, terminologies and histories of activity from European and American histories of art and technology have opened up important questions about the cultural assumptions of what new-media practice is. Qui Zhijie (China), Lisa Reihana (New Zealand) and Vernon Ah Kee (Australia) make useful points of reference when working to consider notions of place and virtuality as these are understood within contemporary new-media practice. In their videos and installations, these artists point to a complicated set of relationships between place and artistic expression within new-media arts—a field that has perhaps


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not yet fully accounted for diversely cultured engagements with media technologies and place-informed histories of aesthetics in its focus upon the narrowly technological new.

Differently, Navigation

Chinese artist Qui Zhijie, a seasoned traveller, records in Landscape (1999) his experience of key city centres, public transport systems, restaurant interiors, marketplaces, parks and museum spaces with a portable camcorder. In the work’s opening sequence, time-lapse photography of a public park in China is used to represent local meaning in fast forward. People walk hurriedly past the camera as slight changes in the weather and the flow of traffic accumulate in the viewer’s mind to indicate the nature of the everyday in that location. The way in which this fixed shot captures and compresses local inhabitants’ movements and interactions over time suggests initially that the artist understands “place” as a function of dwelling (Tilley 2004).Thereafter, however, a close-up image of the artist’s face links disparate international scenes—many of which are instantly recognizable to the international traveller—into a continuous, revolving, clockwise pan of short takes. Within this representation of circumnavigation, the strongest site of familiar dwelling seems to exist in the relationship between the artist’s body and his camera. The constant ground of the artist’s self pragmatically displaces any consistent reference to a habited locale, and experience is “local” only upon his body, which navigates within a fragmented field of international visions and experiences. Discussing his revolving self-portrait, Qiu Zhijie speaks of the importance of the compass to ancient Chinese culture, understood as divining navigation by bringing the heaven’s magnetic forces into dialogue with the earth’s plane. The artist’s conceptualisation of “landscapes,” in which the body and technology figure prominently, highlights a number of key aesthetic, epistemological and representational concerns in seeing and reading place in networked culture.

It is a less than subtle conjoining of metaphor and math that is at the core of conceptual approaches to new media art inherited from western modernist frameworks. Interestingly, Landscape questions the mobility of identity within trans-local experiences and exchanges in its framing - through a very specific, historically ‘Chinese’ technology


O’Reilly: Compasses, Meetings and Maps 37

of navigation. From the important comparative sociological work of David Turnbull, we know that there are no foundational mathematic (i.e. numeric, increment-based) or transcultural ‘languages’ of spatial practice through which the competency and accuracy of specific, functional, and often spiritually elaborate means of navigating, locating, and positioning can be investigated or compared (Turnbull 1993). In fact there are great discrepancies existent between the actual tools, metaphysical assumptions and computational methods used by the most reputed navigators of land and ocean, across different cultures and periods (Turnbull 1993). Such key findings expand our interpretation of “location” in significant ways.Here we might alternatively appreciate “place” in sociological terms, as a culturally specific assemblage of local realities, and “spatial practices”—methods for knowing and practicing location—as variable concept-objects subject to critical and comparative review (Turnbull 2000, 20). If Western maps are merely one means of experiencing the local, enabling mobility and constructing the global, we might read Qiu Zhijie’s gesture as at least implicitly grounded in an appreciation of the existence of other possible matrices and contemporaneous interpretive practices. Qui Zhijie’s visualisation of circumnavigation which begins and ends through the self also recognises the embodied nature of belief invested in spatial practices in order for them to be sense-making and truly operational. Lisa Reihana’s work similarly takes up these concerns.

Cyber-Mythologies

Conjoining Maori and cyberculture mythology, Lisa Reihana constructs culturally salient, richly ordered interactive meeting places. Her installation Digital Marae (2001) suggests that the principles of virtual culture (e.g. Harasim 1995) extend usefully outside material relationships to networked machines. Visitors to the artist’s reconception of a traditional marae (Maori meeting house) greet four life-sized portraits of lustrous, spectacular women reminiscent of otherworldly characters from fantasy fiction. These are ancestral figures in Maori mythology and would hang similarly in a very specific arrangement as pouwhenua or pou pou (carved representations of the ancestors) within the rectangular architecture of the marae. Traditionally the carving of wooden pouwhenuawa is undertaken by men. Reihana has used


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contemporary color photographic techniques to render her pou pou as lush, impassioned female characters, both as a reframing of, and tribute to, the importance of matriarchy in Maori culture and the contemporary dynamism of Maori lore.

As reworked traditional stories, the pou pou figures outline a series of archetypal narratives concerned with risk and becoming, desire, greed and consequence. These stories are both instructive and inspiring, and set up spatial relationships between marae inhabitants and the ancestors. Mahuika, the anchor figure of the marae, symbolises tradition in Maori culture and is surrounded by smoke and hot lava. Living in the underworld, she was tricked by her grandson into passing on to him all the power that she possesses in her fingernails (Page 2002). Hinewai, the youngest in the group, represents familial ties. At daybreak, she beckons her sister Hinepukohurangi to leave the worldly realm of desire that she succumbs to nightly with the mortal male Uenuku. Hinepukohurangi has never been visualised in traditional carved form. Her photographic representation as part of Digital Marae is an innovation that has been accepted by the artist’s Maori community (Reihana 2002). Kurangaituku appears in dual emotional states: saddened by the death of her exotic birds at the hands of Hatupatu, who covets her feather coat, and frustrated from a failed attempt to rip Hatupatu from his hiding place behind a rock face (Page 2002). She warns of the spiritual imbalance that accompanies greed and retaliation. Marakihau is an ocean taniwha, an ancestor usually represented in the form of a “merman” who embodies the ocean’s power. With a hollow tongue, Reihana’s female Marakihau is able to suck whole people and boats from the waves. Together the ancestors take up the four walls of the gallery space and look down onto viewers—the inhabitants of Reihana’s virtual marae—to create an aura of instruction and inspiration, and a deeply physical sense of habitation within this ancestral experience and wisdom.

In Maori epistemology, all living things are descended from the ancestors, which are embodied within particular mountains, rivers and lakes. Central to Maori community life, the traditional meeting place of the marae—both an area of sacred tribal ground and a physical architectural space—is a richly locative institution in that it is positioned in dialogue with this spatialised, spiritual order. The marae generates a strong sense of belonging for those affiliated with the meeting house.



Assemblies literally take place within the body of the ancestors (Page 2002). The wharenui (translated as the big or main house) symbolizes the ancestors’ body, the central roof beam its backbone, and the rafters its ribs. The back wall represents death and darkness, and the front doorway, usually facing east to greet the rising sun, represents life and creation (Page 1999). The architectural framing of spiritual landscapes before and behind the marae presents concepts of enclosure and cultural openness in concrete form, which are experienced and performed with the body (Linzey 1998). Public meetings, debates and ceremonies are given an ultimate expression in this context through complex cultural protocols and oral traditions. Here landscape, architecture and ancestral narratives engage the visitor relationally as a kind of calculus, structuring affective anchor points for Maori identity and for communicative practice, whether this be a public meeting, funeral, or celebration.

The video component of Digital Marae, titled “Let There Be Light”, an English translation of a Maori saying announcing life and knowledge, references this orienting function of the marae. The ancestral characters from the photographs appear “live”, in physical form, enacting their stories for the viewer. Within the video are further references to locative or navigational principles in the form of signs: of the heavens above, the sea below, and of east and west (Hinewai calling to her sister Hinepukohurangi, whose misty skirts cloak the land of Urewera country). “Let There Be Light” is shown on a monitor, where a window would be located in a Wharenui, providing light and a view into another cultural dimension existing outside the gallery context (Reihana 2005). By re-creating this affective dynamic of the traditional marae in an installed and animated form, Reihana’s marae is enabled to travel. The significance of this marae to its community is that it is no longer reliant on local ground for its power. The installation enables an embodied, immersive experience of lore and structured communal space for Maori far from home, while alluding to a trans-local ethics of virtual culture.

Problem Portraits and Places

Digital Marae’s confident virtual thrust results from a playful relationship between place and ground that also draws strength from a contemporary New Zealand sociopolitical reality in which Maori relationships to land


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are recognised under the platform of biculturalism. Australian artist Vernon Ah Kee’s work engages in different ways with the conceptual disjuncture that exists between indigenous and non-indigenous understandings of place within colonised territories. Investigating the complicity of photographic and cartographic media in reproducing racial and spatial narratives that normalise dispossession, Ah Kee uses new media to draw attention to the exclusive languages and utility of older media forms.

In Whitefellanormal (2004), Ah Kee’s voice narrates a prose piece over a series of short video self-portraits shot against a stark white studio background. The artist stares calmly into the camera’s eye as different camera angles document his expressionless face. Transitions between colour and black-and-white sequences invoke an interplay between past and present, between photographic documentation and embodied performance. While steadfastly refusing any visual references that might mark his work as “traditional,” Ah Kee positions the work’s relationship to place in other ways. Ah Kee narrates:

If you wish to insert yourself into the black man’s world His history, in his colour, and at the level at which you currently perceive him Then know that you will never be anything more than mediocre. You will not be able to involve yourself in the decision-making processes of this land and you will not have any constructive access to the social and political mechanisms of this land. At times, this land will shake your understanding of the world and confusion will eat away at your sense of humanity but at least you will feel normal.

The voiceover is spoken in a conversational tone, enabling us to “overhear” it, while a subtle sense of instruction has been imbued into the work in post-production; all pauses in the speech have been edited out.

Formally, Whitefellanormal isolates the problems of representation that connect portraits to maps. While the voiceover austerely references a politics of place that seems to operate at the level of “the nation”, the



video’s portrait-like images—all of Ah Kee—point to a concern with the local, and with the aesthetics of ethnographic portraiture found in Ah Kee’s previous work. For Fantasies of the Good (2004), Ah Kee drew intricate portraits from photographs of his relatives taken on Palm Island, and discovered in the archive of anthropologist Norman Tindale (Morrell 2005). Tindale travelled to Palm Island in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s as part of his project to map the boundaries of Australian indigenous tribal lands and language groups. Finally published in 1974, his map was the first to present a continent-wide cartographic representation of indigenous nations and language groups to a white Australian public. In their contentious allocation of fixed territories to diverse tribal groups, the maps presented key evidence in countering the doctrine of terra nullius (Tindale n.d.). The photographs in Tindale’s archive, however, betray the clinically distant gaze through which this project of turning grounded histories into mapped data was achieved. In these images, Ah Kee’s relatives Mick Miller and George Sibley, relegated by force to the island—essentially a penal colony for Aboriginal and Islander peoples who most strongly resisted being forced onto Queensland reserves—were dressed smartly for their picture. Each held a catalogue card with only a number on it to represent and distinguish themselves from every other island-bound and numbered identity. Upon locating his relatives in the archive, Ah Kee requested copies of Tindale’s photographs. He was given images devoid of place. Only the heads and shoulders of his relatives remained, neatly centered in the middle of the image (Morrell 2005), as if to overcompensate for their original exposure of Palm Island as an outpost of strategic dispossession.

For Fantasies of the Good (2004) Ah Kee re-drew the Tindale portraits by hand, but made his drawings purposefully off-centre—as a protest against the ways in which the clippings, and the formal qualities of portraiture more generally, make their subjects look “all right” (Morrell 2005). In the later video work Whitefellanormal, Ah Kee can then be seen to take the place of his relatives as the subject of the camera’s gaze. In front of a white background, similarly removed from contextual references to (a very specific) place, the artist reenacts the moment of ethnographic documentation in his ancestors’ mediated past. He stands calmly defiant, mouth closed, between the past and his assumedly white urban audience, re-performing a plight in images, but challenging the


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authority of portraiture in accurately capturing the past: his forehead, one side of his face or his shoulder is always outside the shot, defying full representation. Like Qui and Reihana, Ah Kee’s use of new media with the body brings broader cross-cultural epistemological issues in the treatment of place into material aesthetic form.

Conclusion

As ironic custodians, itinerant navigators and grounded, virtual selves, Vernon Ah Kee, Lisa Reihana and Qui Zhijie point to the importance of comparative literacies in expanding narrowly cultured ways of thinking about place and its articulation through the languages of new media. Importantly, place-informed genealogies of artistic production and cultural practice extend the histories of aesthetics in other media, such as carving, painting and photography, while the use of new technologies draws on the richly locative and virtual schemas of indigenous and non-Western epistemologies. Digital video and installation practices appear here as curiously virtual tools: able to deepen sensory contact with the local, with myth and lived history; to mobilize contemporary conceptual and aesthetic concerns in other media; and to distribute self-determined and place-interested expression beyond the sites of their original or immediate meaning. These artists expand the discourse of new media culture by locating the analogue in the digital and the digital in the analogue.

References

Ah Kee, Vernon. 2004. Fantasies of the Good, exhibition, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 24 November-December 18 (2004).

Harasim, Linda M. 1995. Networlds: Networks as Social Space. In Global Networks: Computers and International Communication, ed. Linda M. Harasim. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 15-34.

Linzey, Mike. 1998 “Some Binary Architecture: Sites for Possible Thought.” Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 4. Edited by Christine MacCarthy, Sarah Treadwell, Mike Linzey.

Morrell, Timothy. 2005. “Mythunderstanding,” (catalogue essay) for Fantasies of the Good. Contemporary Art Projects, South Australia (2002).



Page, Maud. 2002. “Digital Marae,” Queensland Art Gallery Collection essay (unpublished) by Maud Page, Associate Curator, Contemporary Pacific Art.

Page, Maud. 1999. “Interdigitating Reihanamations: Lisa Reihana’s Video Weavings.” Art Asia Pacific, 21:40-43.

Reihana, Lisa. 2002. e-mail to Maud Page, Queensland Art Gallery artist file, March 2002.

Reihana, Lisa. 2005. e-mail to author, October 2005. Tilley, Christopher. 1994. Introduction. In A Phenomenology of Landscape:

Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. 3-16. Norman B. Tindale, 12 October 1900-19 November 1993, South Australian

Museum online, http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/tindale/. Turnbull, David. 1993. Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of

Exhibits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turnbull, David. 2000. Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative

Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers.


Taika Waititi’s film Two Cars, One Night (2003) lyrically visualises the distinct worlds of children and adults, as some kids wait for their parents outside a rural pub. Jo Smith examines the way Waititi’s cinematic techniques contrast these worlds as having different temporal characters, and argues for their power as metaphors for the linked but distinct cultural spaces of Maori and Pakeha in bicultural Aotearoa. The contrasting depictions have a political force, Smith shows, dramatising the socio-political milieu out of which the film emerges. The tensions generated in Aotearoa by a struggle over which narrative of nationhood has greater cultural salience in the mediated public sphere: biculturalism as assimilation, or biculturalism as an eternally incomplete project that remains the ethical horizon of settler governance. We can understand these struggles as being waged in temporal terms, where representations of the timing of the space of the nation become the sites of contestation over which epistemology or mode of knowing (either Maori or Pakeha) will prevail. Smith critiques colonial paradigms of teleological time in favour of an affirmative serial time that expresses the socio-political tensions (the “not yet” or virtual potentialities) of a bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Bicultural Temporalities: Time and place in Two Cars, One NightJo Smith

“Romeo and his brother, Ed, sit in the car waiting for their parents to come out of the pub. This is their world, a place inhabited by adults and alcohol. The night passes slowly.” — Two Cars, One Night Press Kit.

Time appears as a theme in New Zealand-born director Taika Waititi’s two short films Two Cars, One Night (2003) and Tama Tu

(2005). In Two Cars, One Night three children wait in a car park while their parents drink at a local hotel and in Tama Tu six young Maori Battalion soldiers wait in a bombed building for night to fall so they can escape under cover of darkness. Both films provide a meditation on the fullness of empty time—such as the experience of waiting for a


Smith: Bicultural Temporalities 45

bus, for someone to arrive, for an appointment to be kept. Both films portray the richness of those strategies we deploy when we are forced to wait on the coming of an event or meeting, those little rituals, refrains and movements we invent to make the time pass more quickly. These motifs of waiting and of time are firmly situated within a specific socio-cultural milieu in Waititi’s cinema. Drawing on the lifeworlds of Maori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand, the films convey a strong sense of place through the use of elements such as black and white footage, which provides a form of documentary realism, and in the performances of vernacular culture through dialogue. Though this attention to time and place, Waititi’s films invite a consideration of the wider socio-cultural forces surrounding his cinema.

In Two Cars, One Night this theme of time passing is rendered stylistically through the use of time-lapse photography and digital imaging effects.1 These special effects combine with the black and white cinematography to enhance the themes of the film, which include the nascent nature of childhood, the banal habits of adulthood and the beauty and possibilities found in the everyday. How might these stylistic choices function as a heuristic device for examining Aotearoa/New Zealand’s wider socio-cultural context? Waititi cannot be considered an overtly political indigenous filmmaker, and as I shall demonstrate, Waititi’s relationship to the category of “Maori artist” is a vexed one. However, his interest in a simultaneously full and empty time in Two Cars, One Night, and the relationships formed in the in-between space of a car park, provide a refreshing approach to the bicultural dimensions of Aotearoa/New Zealand and offer a reconditioned form of cultural politics. The film does this by combining digital and analogue technologies to create a lyrical expression of the temporal dynamics underpinning this place that is sometimes called New Zealand, Aotearoa or Aotearoa/New Zealand.2 The lyricism produced through this blend of cinematic technique dramatises the socio-political milieu out of which the film emerges, and it is this method of dramatisation that yields a political force.


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The Time of the Bicultural Nation

Aotearoa/New Zealand can be best described as a contemporary settler nation. The temporal dimensions of its social-political milieu involve a continual splitting between the historical legacies of colonisation and concerns about the present and future survival of the nation within a global environment. Settler governmentality is a fraught affair, consistently caught between intra-national and international tensions and imperatives. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, signed between the British Crown and (some) New Zealand Maori, forms the bicultural basis of the New Zealand nation and subsequently fuels intra-national claims to indigenous sovereignty. Although the term “bicultural” suggests a separate but equal share in power and to a right to self-determination, sociologists Fleras and Spoonley observe:

Instead of power-sharing through structural adjustments, biculturalism tends to lead to institutional accommodation by incorporating a Maori dimension into state practices and national symbols. (1999, 239)

Images and elements of Maori culture have been incorporated into the mise-en-scène of the nation—from airline carrier advertising, to the sporting haka, to the nationwide reception of Whale Rider as a quintessentially “New Zealand” film. However, the differing socio-cultural systems and practices of Maori are rarely recognised or included in current systems of governance. Although the State attempts historical redress by enshrining Treaty principles “in official mission statements” and by hiring “Maori as advisors or consultants” (ibid), the values, ideals and social structure of te ao Maori (the world of Maori) remain peripheral to State practices. Prevailing discourses of biculturalism articulated by the State thus produce an insidious form of neocolonialism in that they offer only a cosmetic response to historically embedded structural injustices. Accordingly, the spirit of the Treaty has been repeatedly breached, from the overt practices of land alienation to the more covert modes of subordination enacted through the institutionalisation of colonial legal, juridical, economic, religious, educational and cultural modes of organisation.3 As such, the power-sharing principle of biculturalism as set out in the Treaty of 1840 remains an incomplete project. This incomplete form of social justice returns to haunt present-



day settler governance as a spectral presence that fuels intra-national concerns. For the settler, the Treaty might represent a certain form of benevolence and progressive liberal politics and it is often compared with the Aboriginal Australian experience of colonisation. However, those who argue for Maori sovereignty understand the Treaty as that which remains the horizon of a bicultural justice to come. Accordingly, the cultural tensions of the nation are generated by a struggle over which narrative of nationhood has salience in the mediated public sphere: biculturalism as assimilation, or biculturalism as an eternally incomplete project. We can understand these struggles as being waged in temporal terms, where the timing of the space of the nation becomes a contest over which epistemology (Maori or Pakeha) will prevail.

Pakeha epistemology treats time as teleological. Discourses of pragmatism, progress and claims to settler indigeneity are routinely circulated by state politicians who seek to shut down bids from Maori for the recognition of historical and contemporary injustices. In news media coverage, Race Relations Minister Trevor Mallard frames the national identity of New Zealand as predicated on the “now” of present-day occupation where “New Zealand […] has to get its British imperial past behind it” as “Maori and Pakeha are both indigenous people to New Zealand now” (2004).4 The conservative National Party (in 2007 serving in opposition to the governing centre-left Labour party) refer to indigenous bids for justice as “the Treaty grievance industry” and suggest that “We must put this behind us if all of us—and Maori in particular—are to stop looking backward and start moving forward.”5 These forms of public discourse, as well as media representations that privilege Pakeha perspectives on history and contemporary culture, teach national subjects how to understand their nation. In this cultural climate, where film and television present Pakeha as inhabiting a new “now” as indigenous New Zealanders, while Maori supposedly cling to an antiquated past, Taika Waititi’s film contradicts this hegemony. Harnessing the truth-regimes of black and white photography, and combining these with the visual pleasures of digitally manipulated cinematography, Waititi produces new images of time that heuristically address the bicultural tensions generated by the Treaty of Waitangi.


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New Images of Time

If the time-images produced in Two Cars, One Night gesture to the larger socio-political context of this settler (and postcolonial) nation, they do so in a variety of ways. At least three dimensions of time are dramatised in the film: the extended duration of waiting (where play and pretence help the time to pass); the potency of a time to come (when the bonds of friendship are broken by the arrival of others); and the spectral experience of time’s passing (induced by special digital effects). Waititi’s images of time invite us to reflect upon the wider socio-cultural milieu, as well as invoking a reconditioned form of cinematic cultural politics. Such a politics is echoed in Gilles Deleuze’s affirmation of cinema as an art that provokes new modes of thinking.

The relevance of a French philosopher to film production within the postcolonial context of Aotearoa/New Zealand should not be surprising if one recalls that Deleuze draws upon postcolonial filmmakers in his discussion of a specific model of time and cinema: the serial.6 Time as series is a form of time that apprehends a virtual or future event as a force of the present emerging from the past. In this schema, “before” and “after” are non-linear temporal sequences, caught up in the movements of a becoming. In Deleuze’s Cinema 2 this time image gives rise to a serial form of cinema that has a political force in its provocation to apprehend the “not yet” of a people to come, a mode of address also known as the virtual. We can put the concept of serial cinema to work within the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the Treaty of Waitangi complicates any linear notion of before and after. The Treaty is the sign of a social justice always to come, a sign of social justice that pitches and reels in a state of constant becoming. Accordingly, cinema made within this context might demonstrate this serial relationship between past-present-future becomings. In these terms, Two Cars, One Night expresses a future-oriented mode of thought bursting asunder colonial paradigms of teleological time in favour of an affirmative serial time that expresses the socio-political tensions (the “not yet” or virtual potentialities) of a bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Artistic Interventions in the Timing of the Nation

Born in 1975, Waititi is an emerging filmmaker, painter and photographer and an established actor and comedian (working under



the name of Taika Cohen) who has gained international recognition for his cinematic work.7 Portrayed in promotional and press materials as a multi-talented, high energy and offbeat character, the media persona of Taika Waititi allows his identities to avoid becoming fixed by orthodox categories. Instead, Waititi’s diverse creative intensities and irreverent public persona (he pretended to be asleep at the Academy Awards when being announced as a nominee) provide a refreshing change from nationalist discourses that often accompany film production in Aotearoa/New Zealand.8 Waititi also displays what Aaron Lister (2005, 47) calls “a canny awareness and negotiation of” the presuppositions underpinning the category of “Maori artist”. Waititi distances himself from the tendency to read works produced by Maori artists solely in terms of an indigenous dimension, even as Two Cars, One Night appears in the “Native Forum” section of the Sundance Film Festival and draws upon his own childhood experiences on the East Coast of the North Island. Waititi thus seeks to carve out a space within prevailing norms that define Maori artist in relation to the implicitly Pakeha category of art in general. He does this by asserting the diverse nature of his creative talents and by emphasising the universal themes of his films, affirming the diversity of this category of identity that is “Maori artist” and subtly altering prevailing norms of cultural and artistic identity, and challenging orthodox notions of what constitutes indigenous or Maori cultural production. In doing so Waititi maintains the spirit of creativity that Deleuze insists upon when he argues that cinema is an art of encounters with sameness and difference, an art which forces us to think in different ways.9 By emphasizing the universal identifications of Two Cars, One Night, Waititi seeks escape from those modes of cultural reception that frame his cinema as merely thematising indigenous experience.

While maintaining this universal appeal, Waititi nonetheless pays cinematic attention to vernacular culture (particularly in the use of slang, costuming and characterisation) and never loses sight of the specific cultural milieu of the township of Te Kaha. His cinema of time enables his audience to revisit the scene of orthodox representations of indigenous experience with a renewed sense of energy and engagement, in a new mode of thought. Two Cars, One Night does this by exploring the universal experience of childhood as a liminal space between the


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absolute dependency of infancy and a nascent form of adulthood. At the same time, this space also enables a more expansive examination of the specific cultural context of bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand. As Waititi says of the setting of Two Cars, One Night:

That situation is universal […] no matter what race you are, or your socio-economic origins. Everyone has been left somewhere by an adult. The film is trying to deal with that sort of thing—the feeling of being left, coupled with being a kid trying to create your own world. (Campbell 2004)

Adults spend the evening inside the hotel (and intermittently outside, to smoke or to leave) while two children sit in a car waiting for their parents to finish drinking.10 Into this scene enters Polly, an eleven-year-old girl who arrives in her parents’ car. As the night wears on Romeo and Polly strike up a friendship that ends with Polly giving Romeo the gift of a ring. As Polly and her family drive away, the film poses the question of whether these two will ever meet again, and if so, what might happen. The theme of chance encounter and the possibility of romantic connection is a common story, yet Waititi’s film is embedded in a local set of discourses that carry specific cultural meanings.

Waititi’s Cinema of Repetition and Difference

While a warm and funny film, Two Cars, One Night’s reference to abandoned children draws upon media stereotypes of Maori. Maori populations, alcohol and child neglect are repeatedly linked in mainstream media (Lee Tamahori’s film Once Were Warriors is a prominent example), and these representations produce habitual and stereotypical depictions of Maori as underprivileged subjects of the nation.11 Waititi thus runs the risk of perpetuating negative stereotypes by setting his film in Te Kaha, a small rural town populated primarily by Maori. However, his reasons for setting the film in such a space are varied, including the assumption that comedy emerges from pain, and that underneath the comic dialogue of the film there lurks “a subconscious sense of foreboding”.12 This apprehensive atmosphere is generated in the first instance by the predicament of the three young children who are bereft of the protection of an adult and whose proximity to the pub suggest the potential hazard of encountering adults the worse for wear from drinking. Two adults do



engage with the children in this precariously open space of the car park: an elderly Maori man whose greeting to Polly encourages her to wind up her car window; and a man with moko (Maori tattoo), a leather-clad figure who circles the car park in his vintage car and who shares eye contact and a raised-eyebrow greeting with Romeo as the children watch him leave. The encounters perhaps foreshadow Romeo’s own adult-life to come (as Maori elder or as middle-aged gang member), yet occur in the same cinematic space as the children’s interactions with each other. At other times the film produces a distinctly different time and space between adults and children, distinguished by time-lapse photography when depicting the adults arriving and leaving the pub, and slow takes and close-up shots of the children in the car park. These distinctive spaces also gesture to a wider sense of subconscious foreboding, with the children seemingly appearing as witnesses to the dynamic forces that surround them. In depicting a hackneyed scene (Maori kids abandoned in cars) using the spectacle of time-lapse photography, Waititi imbues the repetition of cultural stereotypes with a new and invigorating energy that affirms the differential elements of these repetitions.

The Timing of Place

Through the visual spectacle of time-lapse photography, Waititi sidesteps the stereotypical and highlights the mediated nature of our experience of time, space and social identity. His cinematic style forces us to think about the mode of representation used to tell the story. In this self-reflexive gesture, Waititi also forces us to think anew, about the relationship between adults and children, youth and age, and by extension, the larger socio-political climate of Aotearoa/New Zealand. In Two Cars, One Night, time is a disjunctive force that distinguishes between the adult world of the Te Kaha pub and the world produced by the children in the car park. Time-lapse photography animates the adult world to express a depersonalised and inhuman form of time where bodies are blurred in excessive and repetitive motion; attaching new and expressive forms of duration to the otherwise conventional scene (a lower socio-economic population spending their leisure time at a pub). This “timing of the place” that is the Te Kaha pub is oblivious to the child time of the two cars in the adjoining car park, with the former space featuring a time that passes quickly and frenetically. One time-lapse


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sequence of the pub involves a crowd of young adults sitting outside it and sharing a joint and later, tobacco. The light trails on the cigarettes (hand painted frame by frame in post-production) leave a graffiti-like mark in space, a sign or residue of shared excesses from figures that have now left the scene. Again, such attention to the details of the adult world produces an otherworldly space that the children seem protected from. Light, movement and frenzied activity contrasts sharply with the leisurely paced scenes between Romeo and Polly, whose duration expresses the empty time of waiting.

The timing of the space of the children’s encounters unfold gradually and gently, and offers a counterpoint to the frenetic energy of the digitally (and chemically) enhanced world of the adults. It is almost as if the view seen from the windscreen of the cars position the children as silent witnesses to the larger socio-historical forces that animate the social encounters going on about them. These frenzied activities can be seen as a metaphor for the teleological (adult) time of the nation where past, present and future blur as one in a headlong rush for futurity. In contrast to this form of time, the children wait for their parents and invent games and form contingent alliances that help to pass the time. Once Polly arrives in her parents’ car (we never see the parents’ faces) Polly is initially the target of Romeo’s teasing which is born out of boredom. “Hey, ugly!” yells out Romeo in greeting, while Polly answers in kind with “Hey, dick! I mean, hey, boy!” Due to having too much time on their hands (time-lapse sequences appear between the childrens’ encounters to register this sense of time passing), Romeo and Polly eventually strike up a friendship of sorts. Throughout the film Brother Ed sits in the passenger seat of the family car with Romeo, quietly reading a book about Crazy Horse and patiently responding to Romeo’s jokes and playacting.13 To distract themselves, Romeo and Polly eventually form a comfortable alliance that involves the exchange of a plastic ring. The sense of intimate and shared understanding between Romeo and Polly reaches a climax at this point. This alliance is subsequently interrupted by the arrival of Polly’s parents. As Polly’s car moves away, Romeo stands in the empty car park. Canted framing makes him appear slight and vulnerable in his long socks and short shorts in the cool night air. Polly’s face in the back seat appears in slow motion and a car’s headlight illuminates her face from behind. They



hold each other’s gaze and Polly nods, and then disappears off-screen, leaving Romeo alone in the car park. The final shot fades to black as Romeo stands in the empty car park, with his back to his family’s car and his face turned to the space that Polly once occupied. With the arrival of Polly’s parents and the ending which leaves Romeo alone, Two Cars, One Night introduces a third form of time to complement the teleological time of the adult world and the time of waiting of the children’s world. This third form of time is one that gestures to the impending arrival of a time to come, a time where actions, utterances, gestures and alliances cannot be anticipated in advance of their emergence. These three planes of time provide a glimpse of the postcolonial dimensions of Aotearoa/New Zealand which involves a continual splitting between past, present and future concerns.

The Force of Change in the Everyday

Waititi’s film explores the art of encounter, a form of cinema that reinvigorates thought and provides new mediations on the relationship between people, place and time. While the promotional material surrounding the film frames the encounter between Romeo and Polly as “first love”, (with the exchange of a ring supporting this heteronormative reading) Waititi’s press kit comments emphasize the more inconclusive nature of their meeting as simply “a chance at something.” As the car headlights illuminate Polly’s profile, and as the slow motion effects underscore the emotional import of this departure (in a manner reminiscent of New Zealand television advertisements raising awareness about drink-driving), the audience is left to ponder the future of these two. The central question posed by the film is whether or not the children will eventually come to repeat the patterns of their parents or whether they can maintain the durée they have produced in relation to one another, and invent an alternate future for themselves. This kind of indeterminacy suggests two things: that perhaps the pull of adult time (registered in the expressive time-lapse depiction of the adults at the pub) will lead the children to repeat the actions of their parents; or that the imaginative worlds that Polly and Romeo have created together will guard against this pull and provide each of them with the means to create a different future.


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To read the digitally enhanced adult space as a dramatisation of the teleological time of the nation, suggests that the shared everyday time of Romeo, Ed and Polly offers us an antidote to the progressive logic of orthodox bicultural politics. If state-sanctioned biculturalism requires Maori to leave behind their historical grievances and join Pakeha in some utopian and united future, the child time of Two Cars, One Night suggests that there are other timings of place and space that can pose a counternarrative to this dominant understanding of biculturalism. If we understand Two Cars, One Night as producing time images as heuristic devices for considering the tensions of a bicultural society, then the indeterminate ending of the film sows the seeds of an affirmative cultural politics of place. Waititi’s film demonstrates the many possible ways of experiencing time, suggesting that the timing of place and space is dependent upon differing socio-cultural systems and practices, and different modes of knowing that cannot be resolved under one rule of law (that is, state-sanctioned biculturalism). Such an interdeterminate ending signals the virtual nature of this bicultural nation state where social justice is always already a continual work in process.

To suggest that the film reveres childhood as a time that celebrates the virtual potentialities of life does not mean to romanticise childhood as a time of innocence, nor does it invoke a metaphor of simplicity that has historically aligned indigenous peoples with childlike mannerisms. Instead, the kind of cultural politics of place that Two Cars, One Night gestures to, is that type of political consciousness that Walter Benjamin discussed when he wrote of the relationship between childhood and cognition.14 According to Benjamin, a child’s consciousness, and ability to play, demonstrates the “unsevered connection between perception and action that distinguished revolutionary consciousness in adults” (Buck-Morss 1991, 263). The spontaneity, creativity and fantasy life of childhood are thus the necessary conditions for inciting social change and intervening in orthodox notions of place. Two Cars, One Night’s meditation on the fullness of empty time and the rituals, fantasies and narratives the children invent to make time pass, demonstrates these necessary capacities. In the banal space of a car park two children form fragile and contingent alliances that are nurtured by a shared sense of their predicament within an environment out of step with the adult world. Here we have a map for constructing new social realities in



Aotearoa/New Zealand according to laws premised upon the multiple ways of knowing a place and a people.

Conclusion

Against the hegemony of mainstream media practices (television and feature films) Waititi uses new media technologies and the short film format to produce new images of time that express the bicultural tensions of the nation from which the film emerges. Through the creative manipulation of time and space his cinema returns us to the importance of everyday, face-to-face contact and the fullness that even empty waiting time can produce for us. The formal distinctions between adult time and child time can be addressed as an indexical sign of the clash between bicultural time as assimilation and the incomplete nature of a bicultural justice to come. Adult time becomes the pedagogical space of the nation, where the relentless movement of time towards some preconceived outcome involves an abstraction from the everyday and a form of intoxicated sociality drunk on the myth of progress. Child time is the space of a nascent form of becoming, where one can play at being a variety of identities and where social bonds are forged through a shared sense of fantasy and a shared acknowledgement of the limits of fantasy. In focusing on different modes of time, Waititi displaces the reified nature of orthodox identity politics, where the question of biculturalism remains one of conflict between Maori and Pakeha epistemologies. Instead, by drawing upon a common theme of childhood, Waititi focuses on the different modes of action possible for a bicultural nation, a depersonalised form of cultural politics that accentuates the element of choice and of chance, elements that are not delineated or defined by cultural identity. In refusing to fall on either one side or the other of identity politics (Maori or Pakeha), Waititi instead explores the liminal spaces of childhood, in doing so he probes the temporal dimensions of the cinematic, raising questions about the larger socio-cultural context.

In its demonstration of mutually productive and yet distinct temporal modes, Two Cars, One Night suggests that the progressivist approach to biculturalism, as the assimilation and overcoming of difference, is only one side of a story of the bicultural nation, a narrative that has no end. Two Cars, One Night dramatises the space of waiting as a productive and powerful milieu, where even though one waits for the coming of another


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in order to enter into movement and action, one also has other resources to draw upon. Two Cars, One Night suggests that the waiting space offers up other modes of action and movement, and other forms of alliance and sociality.15 It is not that the waiting space of child time should be privileged over adult time, but that child time gestures to the bicultural becoming of this nation state, a form of bicultural becoming that runs alongside, and at times intervenes in orthodox narratives of bicultural nationhood. By leaving us with a subconscious sense of foreboding through the open-ended conclusion of the film, even as he has drawn upon humour to bring us into this cinematic space, Waititi sends a signal to the nation that the time of waiting for a bicultural justice to come is perhaps our contemporary condition, but that this should not prevent our experimentation with other modes of action, other forms of political expression. Indeed, the space of waiting holds intensities, rituals and practices that can be turned to political and affirmative ends. In its depiction of disjunctive timescapes, Two Cars, One Night highlights the transient and accidental nature of social and political change where the force of the everyday, and the time of waiting, might yet yield productive alliances. The trick is to be able to open up a little time-space pocket of our own, as the teleological time of the nation reels and pitches in front of us, a little time-space pocket that opens us up to other options, other modes of action that might bring us closer to the ever-receding horizon of a bicultural justice to come. Forging precarious alliances in the face of the ominous is one such strategy.

References

Abel, Sue. 1997. Shaping the News : Waitangi Day on Television. Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Campbell, Gordon. 2004. Taika Waititi. Listener 192 (3324): January 24. Available http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3324/features/1354/taika_waititi.html

Defender Films Ltd. 2006. “Press Kit” http://www.twocarsonenight.comDeleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: the Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson

and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kerr, Steve. 2004. “Untold Tales of Taika.” Staple, Oct/Nov. 7: 54-56.



Lister, Aaron. 2005. “Taika Waititi, Wayne Youle and the Pulse of Contemporary Maori Art.”. Illusions 37 (Winter): 47-49.

Rodowick, D.N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Spoonley, Paul, and Walter Hirsh. 1990. Between the Lines : Racism and the New Zealand Media. Auckland: Heinemann Reed.

Notes

1 My thanks to Ainsley Gardiner from Whenua Films and Tim Capper from Another Planet:

Animation and FX for their help in providing production details about the making of Two

Cars, One Night.

2 In this paper I shift between the use of “New Zealand” to designate a national identity of

biculturalism that incorporates and assimilates Maori socio-cultural practices into the

orthodox regime of settler governmentality. “Aotearoa/New Zealand” is used to denote

the unsettled and incomplete nature of the bicultural project.

3 A contemporary example of the Crown’s refusal to acknowledge the rights of tangata

whenua (the indigenous people) is the “Foreshore and Seabed debate. In 2004 the Labour

government passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which ensures state ownership of land

positioned below the high tide mark. This Act was a response to the Court of Appeal’s

ruling that the Maori Land Court could investigate claims of Maori customary rights

in this area. By declaring this land Crown-owned, the government prevents Maori from

exercising their rights as guaranteed by the Treaty of Waitangi. As Tom Bennion suggests,

the Foreshore and Seabed Act is as significant to this settler state as the Mabo decision

of 1992 was to Australia. See Bennion, 2003, 1-3 “The Claim of the Crown is Weak.” Maori

Law Review: A Monthly Review of Law Affecting Maori.

4 Mallard’s speech can be seen as a response to the National party position on Treaty of

Waitangi issues and race relations, encapsulated in Don Brash’s speech “Nationhood”

given on 27 January 2004 at the Orewa Rotary Club, where Brash refers to the Treaty as

contributing to divisive race-based legislation that gives special privileges to Maori. See

Trevor Mallard “We Are All New Zealanders Now”, Speech to the Stout Research Centre

for NZ Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. July 28,2004. http://www.

beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=20451.

5 See the National Party website http://www.national.org.nz/Article.aspx?ArticleId=4131.

6 In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine D.N. Rodowick writes, “Few have noted that most of

Deleuze’s examples of serial cinema come from “hybrid” and postcolonial filmmakers”

(1997,141).


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7 Two Cars, One Night won Waititi a nomination for an Academy Award for directing. Tama

Tu won “Best Short Film” at the 2005 Melbourne International Awards. Waititi developed

his feature length film script Eagle vs. Shark at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab.

8 Perhaps if Waititi had won his category at the Academy Awards there may have been

a fruitful opportunity to compare his “thank you” speech with the nationalist rhetoric

that accompanied the Lord of the Rings winners.

9 Deleuze’s discussion of the serial time-image in Cinema 2 affirms the creative powers of

those considered minority. Rather than an examination of cinema as a representational

regime, Deleuze looks for other forms of “life” immanent to the material that makes

up cinema: the components of time and movement. Discussing the characteristics of

post 1970s Black American Cinema, Deleuze 1989, 220) argues that this form of cinema

asserts a creative will to power when it makes a return to the ghettos and:

instead of replacing a negative image of the black with a positive one, multiples types and

“characters”, and each time creates or re-creates only a small part of the image which no

longer corresponds to a linkage of actions, but to shattered states of emotions or drives,

expressible in pure images and sounds.”

Rather than a form of cultural production focused upon positive representations of

minorities, the work produced by people such as Charles Burnett, Robert Gardner or

Haile Gerima involve the repetition and recirculation of stereotypes of the Black man

to the nth degree. Waititi’s cinema demonstrates a similar creative relationship between

film images and cultural identity.

10 As the promotional material for the film states, “Romeo and his brother, Ed, sit in the car

waiting for their parents to come out of the pub. This is their world, a place inhabited by

adults and alcohol. The night passes slowly” (Two Cars, One Night press kit).

11 For a discussion of the depiction of Maori in New Zealand news media and television

see Spoonley and Hirsch’s edited collection Between the Lines: Racism and the New Zealand

Media (1990) and Sue Abel’s 1997, Shaping the news: Waitangi Day on television, Auckland

University Press,.

12 The filmmaker notes, “Comedy always comes out of a serious situation—you’ve always

got to have the pain factor. If Daffy Duck wasn’t in pain after being smashed in the face

with a frying pan, it wouldn’t be as funny”. See Steve Kerr’s interview “Untold Tales of

Taika” in Staple, Oct/Nov. 2004. 7: 54-56.

13 While Romeo and Polly are the main characters of the film, Brother Ed’s immersion in

a book about Crazy Horse (a Lakota Warrior renowned for attempting to preserve the

traditions of his people) allows for a political reading of Waititi’s film.



14 In her chapter dedicated to Benjamin’s concept of collective awakening, Susan Buck-

Morss outlines the significance of childhood to Benjamin’s theory of cognition. Children

are drawn to certain useless objects of a society and their play reinvests the object with

new symbolic meanings. This active and creative form of mimesis (child’s play) retrieves

a prior utopian signification from the object (The Dialectics of Seeing, 1991, 262-286).

While Benjamin’s theory of collective dreaming concerned the industrial culture of

Europe in the nineteenth-century, the creative powers of play and mimesis are certainly

at work in Waititi’s film, and include not only the actions of the children within the film,

but also the mimetic forces of Waititi’s filmic form.

15 The themes of waiting and of play are again reignited in Waititi’s Tama Tu, The press kit

synopsis reads:

Six Maori Battalion soldiers wait for night to fall in the ruins of a ruined Italian home. Forced

into silence they keep themselves amused like any boys would, with jokes and laughter. As

they try and ignore the reminders of war around them, a tohu (sign) brings them back to the

world of the dying.

Where Two Cars, One Night focuses on childhood, Tama Tu’s theme of play and waiting

within the context of warfare and manhood opens up rich terrain for a discussion of

Waititi as a filmmaker who reinvests the language of cinema (its ability to mobilise time

and space) with a potent politics of culture.


How can new media forms help us rethink history? Critic Ayesha Hameed describes two video installations that present historical narratives of colonisation in fresh ways. The works highlight the multivocality of the new media environment, and the potential for representation of fractured histories through both narrative and formal means. Representations of fragmentation are discussed as releasing intensities and singularities that reflect Burke’s notion of the sublime, and as perhaps illustrating the ghosts of colonisation that underpin our experience of the cinema and landscape art.

Virtual and Material Topographies in Stan Douglas’ Nutka and Rosângela Rennós Vera Cruz (True Cross)Ayesha Hameed

Stan Douglas’ Nutka (1996) and Rosângela Rennós Vera Cruz (True Cross) (2001/2004) are artworks that focus on the construction and

silencing of indigeneity in the process of colonial expansion. Nutka looks at an exchange between a Spanish and an English ship captain in contention for trading privileges in Nootka Sound on the coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada in 1789. Nutka is a pixellated composite of two different shots of the coast of Nootka Sound, one panning from left to right and the other panning from right to left. It is accompanied by two overlapping accounts given by imperial sea captains, each describing their attempts to colonise this space. This very poetic and disorienting set of narratives coalesces at different points in the piece when they in unison quote Poe, Swift and Sade.1

Vera Cruz reconstructs a “first encounter” between a Portuguese sea captain and the people at the shore of Vera Cruz, Brazil in the sixteenth


Hameed: Virtual and Material Topographies 61

century. Vera Cruz is a multi-screen video projection of images that look like white scratched-up film. The two screens are double-sided and placed behind one another so that it is difficult to see more than one projection at a time. Subtitles punctuate the bottom of each screen in different languages, including French, English and Portuguese. The impenetrable image is accompanied by the lonely sound of the sea and rushing wind, pointing the viewer to read the subtitles. The text is an account of the voyages of Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese sea captain, as he “discovers” Brazil, a possible Eden in the worldview of Europe in the 1500s.2

What unites these works is the way they represent the silencing of indigenous peoples in these two different historical events. Both works document how the colonial accounts they draw on silence and speak for the peoples in the lands that were invaded, while also showing the fissures in these strategies where the agency of these others stubbornly persisted. Neither work attempts to speak for the people of Nootka Sound or Vera Cruz, but rather to amplify and tear apart the processes through which colonial histories have tried to write them out. Vera Cruz explores the writing out of the voices of others and the projection of Portuguese/European fantasies of the New World on the people they encounter in Vera Cruz. Nutka, on the other hand, focuses on the feverish extent that the Spanish and English Captains worked to objectify the Aboriginals in Nootka Sound, the captains reaching a state of near delirium.

That both works are in the form of video installations raises the question of how the choice of medium affects the historical reconstructions. More specifically, how do these works register the historical silencing of aboriginal others in the colonisation of the New World? And how can new media practices and digitality speak to this problematic?

Queried Spaces

Nutka and Vera Cruz (True Cross) were part of a larger exhibit entitled “Nous Venons en Paix: Histoires des Amériques”3 at the Musée d’ art contemporaine de Montréal in 2004. In the exhibition catalogue, Johanne Lamoureux highlights how the concern of history has shifted since the heyday of history painting. Classical history painting was narrative in its intention, telling the stories of battles, land disputes,


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mythical allegories. Conversely, history as it is reflected in contemporary art, acts as a site to rethink historical accounts and the relation of time and history to the present. It is freed from the constraints of the genre of history painting and consequently is more polysemous, shifting, and has lost its connection to a traditional narrative form.

As history has shifted from grand narratives, so also newer works provide a perspective “from below”. What this means in concrete terms is that rather than presenting a disembodied eye, installation or site spe-cific work takes context and space as problematics rather than transpar-ent authentic locations. Site-specificity not only calls attention to how space is constructed through political and social histories, but also ques-tions the origins of the space or its provenance. The site has a founding narrative that invents it. By pulling the rug from under that story of ori-gin, this type of site specificity “ungrounds” the space, making it a com-plex amalgamation of situatedness and illusion.

This troubled notion of space draws Douglas’ and Rennó’s works to-gether where its constitution is not dispensed with, but rather held to account for the liquification of home and identity that the conquest of the New World ushered in for indigenous peoples.

Place and Placelessness

Both works focus on images of coastal oceanic waters as counterparts to the historical narratives they construct. This transposition of social and historical anxieties onto the landscape is a common displacement that evokes discourses of Romanticism and the sublime.4 The ocean in this light becomes laden with the ambivalences and the silences of the marginalisation of indigenous peoples within historical narrative.

The image or the trope of water also evokes both the maritime nature of colonial conquest and the fluidity of contemporary digital culture. Zygmunt Bauman describes this new cultural form as a transition from “solid” to “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000, 120). Vera Cruz and Nutka balance aspects of both solid and liquid modernity: drawing on both the historical and the digital.

Within the era of solid modernity falls the aggressive territorialisation of colonial conquest and power structures that required “a mutual engagement”, or facing off between oppressor and oppressed. Solid modernity is full of the stagnant, non-flowing residues of history. Liquid



modernity on the other hand, is characterised by the advent of a software epistemology: one premised on speed, simultaneity and the collapse of space. Liquid modernity breaks the mutual engagement between worker and employer, making the latter ever more mobile and absent, which highlights the immobility and immanence of the former.

The historical ocean that is being evoked in both video installations draws on the heaviness of solid modernity: in Nutka through a sense of delirium and in Vera Cruz in the combination of the sound of the sea with a blank image. In other words, the water is heavy, it carries the weight of distance, incomprehension and the unknown. It carries the historical residues of “first encounters” that Andrea Gunita (1996) describes:

The “encounter of the two worlds” was marked by certain characteristics… the image of the New World was defined by its difference from the Old. The European logos was forced to stretch itself to cope with a new and diverse reality, which, not fitting the patterns, was inevitably distorted in this process. This was a conflict that affected, above all, language. (53)

Guinta points out that efforts to describe so much that was new to the Europeans, led to agglutinations and hyphenations of imagistic language that became a taxonomy accessed by explorers such as Columbus accessed, and against which they verified their experiences. These images of the Americas persisted into twentieth century modernity. Avant-garde artists like Joaquín Torres-Garcia attempted to subvert the hegemony of a European vision of the Americas, to allow for the otherness of (in his case) an aboriginal Uruguayan subjectivity. His desire to reverse these images involved literally drawing inverted maps of South America in an effort to create a new semantics and context for these images (Guinta 1996, 59).

This resematisising responds to the solidity of the Conquest, materially inverting colonial images. However, as Mirko Lauer (1996) points out, the advent of modernity has eroded the possibility of aboriginal identity, where land grabbing and changes in land ownership made the aboriginal person “an immigrant in the bourgeois nation, “a candidate for integration,” or rather ‘to be integrated’” (77). Lauer argues that under capitalism, all subjugated cultures are pushed to homogenise as part of the undifferentiated culture of the proletariat. Consequently


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he advocates a different notion of indigeneity that moves away from nostalgic essentialisms valorising the authentic aboriginal person, and a more ethnically differentiated notion of the proletariat that would acknowledge indigeneity to be both inside and outside of this system (Lauer 1996, 87).

This homogenising impulse of capitalism is analogous to “liquid modernity”, uniting Nutka and Vera Cruz in spite of their geographical and contextual differences. In their evocation of liquid modernity, they highlight within the ocean its fluidity and potential for extensive space. As digital and “liquid” works, they consequently partake in the discourse of liquid capitalism, in Lauer’s sense of the homogenising, or liquifying potential of proletarian culture.

Lauer’s concern about the erosion of indigenous identity by proletarian culture, can be compared with Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity as a separation of power from the context of its enforcement. Both notions highlight the further erasure of histories and persistence in inequality through the description of modernity in terms of digital connectivities and the flattening out of distance.

In this vein, following Deleuze, Srinivas Aravamudaran (1999) shifts the term virtuality away from cyberspace and computer technology to a sense of anticipation:5

The term virtualization describes colonialist representations that acquire malleability because of a certain loss of detail… In his adaptation of Deleuze’s philosophy for an understanding of postcolonial cinema, David Rodowick argues that “time as a series”—the juxtaposition of several pasts in the present—describes how a conceptual structure that is “not yet” summons a people who are “not yet”. Virtualizations work as retroactive focalizations of postcolonial “becoming-other”. (17)

Here, the virtual is experienced as a temporal set of possibilities, but the possibilities and world-views that colonial expansion unleashes are dystopian. In other words, colonialism becomes virtual in its malleability and modularity. The technological and historical premises that shift the use of the virtual into a historical term reveal the non-utopian, the immanence of the virtual’s “not-yet” set of possibilities. In other words,



the fissures and displacement signalled by new technologies both place and displace its subjects.

Both Vera Cruz and Nutka evoke in the image of the ocean an ambivalent relationship between the heaviness or “solidity” of its history and a sense of its fluidity in the spirit of liquid digitalism. The former confers on the latter a sombre note that highlights the erasures hidden behind the utopianism of digital discourse.

Babel / Sublime Misunderstandings

In his discussion on the politics of digital art, Sean Cubitt differentiates between the terms “transmission” and “translational” in the way their etymologies address communication and marginality; where the former denotes “sending across” and the latter “bringing across”. In the former, the process of communication is centered and authoritarian, configuring difference as a sort of exotic transgression. It operates by “rendering alterity as textual, [and thus] delimits and defuses it as purely cultural, disembodying the material challenge of material difference: of poverty, oppression, ignorance, disease and anger” (Cubitt 1998, 147). Materiality is in danger of being subsumed by language in one sense this is an effective form of communication, as the message is clear. However, this clarity is achieved by silencing or not listening to marginal voices.

To counter this, Cubitt suggests that narratives that focus on these marginalised voices can be materialised by the translation model. This perspective questions the virtue of clarity and successful communication, seeing in these qualities a glossing over of the materialism that is so important to a political project that focuses on written over and silenced histories. The translational model attempts to revalorise and materialise the historical realities of invisibility and placelessness that accompany the expropriation of indigenous people’s land without relocating it or conferring upon it a more comfortable materiality. This is an epistemic shift that is directed

…to ephemerality, to misunderstanding. In fact, the very concept of misunderstanding dissolves into a fuzzier logic, if you think of the multiplexed creativity that can occur when conversations are not exchanges of messages between autonomous and rational subjects, but


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instead mutual daydreams… Misunderstanding, far from being the evidence of a breakdown of communications, is symptomatic of a culture in translation, where every word or gesture, mark and sound has to be given over to the process of its remaking. (Cubitt 1998, 147)

Cubitt grounds this productive misunderstanding in the practice of translation that started after the tower of Babel was destroyed by God.6 Misunderstanding, he argues, is a far more powerful mortar than communication.

The myth of Babel and its valorisations of fragmentation, multiplicity and the reconstructions of identity, can be used to explore new media and its epistemic possibilities. This trope, laden with poststructuralist politics around language and marginality, is manifest in new media as image (in the form of text) and sound (voice-overs, narration, dialogue). Both the image and the sound of this trope has to take into account the cacophony of many voices, of the loss of meaning, and of the blurring of boundaries. Or what Cubitt would call “misunderstanding”.

The productive disintegration of language within a multimedia work, is evident in Stan Douglas’ own written description of Nutka: a straightforward historical contextualisation of the dialogue. Looking at Douglas’ description as a part of the work raises the possibilities of what is enabled in the movement between media. The disorientation and the fantastic quality of the written piece enables a certain kind of historical explanation that can be straightforward, but is inherently always displaced by the new media piece it is describing.

Douglas thus addresses the practice of historical recuperation through moving between the textual clarity of the description and the fuzzy disorientation of the work itself. A central motif that Douglas highlights is one of misunderstanding with which this colonial encounter begins:

The Spanish explorer Juan Perez was the first European there [in Nootka], in 1774, but it wasn’t until four years later that James Cook, thanks to an abiding misunderstanding, gave the area its name. When asked by the captain the name of his home and of his people, Chief Maquinna replied to the Englishman’s unfamiliar sign language and words, “Nootka”—suggesting that the visitor anchored at Resolution Cove could find safe



harbour nearby at Yuquot or, perhaps, that he should go back to where he came from. (Douglas in Landry 2004, 165)

This first misunderstanding around the name of the place, the source of the strife between England and Spain, confers an aura of unreality. When coupled with the all too real violence that was performed to secure Nootka, the event as a whole becomes a complex amalgam of the material violence and the surreal displacement of the misrecognition that marked the first encounter.

Misunderstanding is experienced within the work as both temporal and spatial displacement. The camera pans across the landscape of Nootka Sound in two simultaneous movements so that the viewer experiences the image as split by the same coast moving to the left and to the right simultaneously. This image is experienced as fractured and displaced and thus inaccessible. The voiceovers also have the same overlapping quality, where voices speak over one another rather than to one another. There are moments when the image coalesces into a single view of the coast, which coincides with the moment that the overlapping voices join to recite the same narrative together.

This is a manifestation of misunderstanding: although the disparate elements clash with one another, they are congruent enough to experience them as a moment or an inch away from “clarity” and coherence. In their fleetingness, these moments are almost more disorienting, especially in sound. If the cacophony following the destruction of Babel is literally that of speaking at cross purposes and the inability to listen, then the moments that the two voices speak in harmony are eerie, spine chillingly both unnatural and beautiful.

This sense of displacement follows the logic of Deleuze’s work on the radical potential of cinema, where its nth possibility resides in making the viewer aware of the heterogeneity of movement and of time as durations in the movement-image.7 This awareness is achieved by disrupting the smoothness of cinema as a vehicle. Through non-intuitive cuts and by separating the meaning of the image from the meaning of the sound, cinema becomes an exposure of time as a force or a virtuality (Colebrook 2002, 48-53). What happens in the tearing apart of the image and the babble of voices is that their sundering seems more true or natural than their suturing.


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In Nutka, Deleuze’s connection between cinema and time has a counterpart in the relationship between voices and sound. Just as the fragmentation of cuts and edits within cinema exposes the virtual of time, so also the dissolution of the textual and narrative elements exposes the relationship between text and abstract rhythms within sound.

The voice-overs in Nutka are abstract in their unintelligibility, and yet still recognisable as voices. Their abstract musicality inhabits a liminal space between sound and language, a specific kind of communication. The effect is similar to that described by JC Royoux in his discussion of another work of Douglas’, Hors champs (1992). Royoux describes the relationship between musicality and cadence to communication in a way that is applicable to Nutka:

…“the loss of rhythm is the same thing as a loss for taste in stories,” writes Serge Daney. In the same way he remarks, common expressions of spoken language such as “lets not even get into it”—which translates as “it’s not even worth telling you, and anyway, I don’t know how to tell”—signify a loss of the power to communicate. If the desire of cinema is “an imagined gaze on an absent space,” rhythm in Stan Douglas’ work is the image of a discursivity that implies the desire for the other. (Royoux in Douglas 1993, 56-7)

Cubitt describes the effect sound technologies on the reciting human voice as “textualizing”, where the voice becomes editable, its speed changeable like the cadence of music.8 Cubitt argues that the written and the spoken voice become severed from one another even further with the development of the typewriter, which concretised linguistic and poetic experimentation, and finally with the mourning gestures led by Paul Celan9 who felt that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz (Cubitt 1998, 109). The trauma of this event caps the demise of the voiced oral narrative of the ancients. In the wake of this Cubitt identifies two options:

poetry must either abandon seriousness and formality and dive into the struggle for a witty and alert entertainment—as in the performance poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson or the testimonios of Ernesto Cardinal—or it must abandon music. In the former the written persists as a parody of



writing, or as secondary documentation of a performance, which, in any case, is scripted and closed to dialogue. In the latter, the poem, in losing the temporal dimension, becomes solid, objective, sculptural, with the voice excluded from its navigation. Between the silence of print and the denial of writing, some third term is needed if the digital aesthetic, so textually dependant in its familiar forms, is to find a new accommodation of audible and visible language. (Cubitt 109-110)

One possibility of negotiating this severance is through the route that Douglas is taking: where the voices are stretched to the point of musicality and cadence, where their scriptedness points to their own construction and yet remain distinguishable as voices whose meaning is temporarily displaced.

Rosângela Rennó’s Vera Cruz uses of productive silence in contrast to Douglas’ use of the voice-over as abstracted, musical sound. Subtitles in three languages that run below the images on the projected screens, read as a taxonomy of this new world and a detailed account of Cabral’s excursion, but what becomes rapidly clear is the absence of any mention of the reaction of the inhabitants of this island. They are part of the spectacle of this new land, deprived of subjectivity, language and voice. Rennó’s installation focuses on this breakdown in communication and representation, where the blankness of the projected image and the impersonal force of nature in the sound are equally without humanity.

This work focuses on embodiment and its absence that mark this encounter, where the lack of dialogue “implies the development of a dialogue in body language—an action that is hard to explain in writing, however precise it may be—a dialogue the reader must imagine and use as support to make up for the lack in words” (Rennó in Landry 2004, 181).

The need for imagination is based on the inevitable incompleteness of any account of such an event after the silencing of those who became objects of colonial conquest. In her description of this work, Rennó makes the link between the impossible-to-recapture history that Vera Cruz gestures towards, and the medium and form of the work itself:

So many impossibilities could only engender a work founded on impossibilities. In response to the impossible dialogue between the


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Portuguese and the Natives, we have its double, that of the impossible existence of an image and a sound that can constitute a document… [where the] sound of the words is also missing, because, strictly speaking, there was no dialogue between conqueror and native. Still barely audible are the murmur of the sea and the sigh of the wind—witnesses to what took place. (Rennó in Landry 2004, 182)

The sound and the image act then as a proxy, a sort of mise en abîme that marks the place for something they can never fill, and that, in that inadequacy, forms a counter-narrative. Similarly, Rennó describes Vera Cruz as “a video copy of an impossible film, wavering in genre between documentary and fiction…Of the faded picture, we can only glimpse the image of the film itself” (Rennó in Landry 2004, 182). Video acts as a proxy for the film that could not be made, an inadequate form where the scratches are simulated, the age of the film fictional.

The effect of all these false walls and floors is the construction of an uncanny house that hovers between fact and fiction, materiality and imagination—other forms of productive misunderstanding. As Rennó states, “And yet everything is possible in fiction; you have to see it and hear it to believe it…” (Rennó in Landry 2004, 182). This suspension enables a delicate recovery of what that history might have looked like, which again links the lost language of the encounter with the multiple, perhaps urgent dissemination of texts and translations within this installation.

By coincidence, just as the origin of this work lies in the existence of its captions or literal translation, so the fate of the highly fragile content of this documentary/fiction seems to be that of its translation, dispersed in the greatest possible number of languages. Bringing them together suggests a very particular, oddly didactic semantic situation: more new (im)possible dialogues, ad infinitum, that prompt us to reflect on the precariousness of perception and the media and on the fragility of human relations. (Rennó in Landry 2004, 182)

This leads back to the incomprehension following Babel. Labelling the multiplicity of translation as didacticism in the face of precariousness invests such didacticism with its own fragility in this



work that suspends form, meaning and its own possibility. And yet it points to the resoluteness of this work to keep all from being lost. This work thus evokes Cubitt’s etymology of translation as a “bringing across,” itself akin to sailing a thousand paper boats across the sea with the most fragile missive in hand.

Vera Cruz thus is a challenge to the impossibility of an account of this event. Its silences and sounds are central to its practice of representation. The viewing subject’s act of imagination is a central component of the installation’s structure, drawing inexact links between the sound, image and content of the subtitles. The sound of the wind and the sea create an atmosphere of desolation: the viewer is alone and isolated. Consequently the feeling of displacement both spatial and temporal coalesces in this work in the body of the viewer who experiences such historical and geographic displacement, viscerally and intuitively.

The viewer does not only complete the effect of displacement but also participates in the act of suspending its truth value, where the literal meaning of the parts of installation come together both as a fiction and as a reconstituted historical event. This idea of a displaced, suspended and reconstituted history is what links Vera Cruz with Nutka. However, whereas Vera Cruz is marked by a presence felt only as an absence that is amplified by the forces of the natural world, the musicality of the abstracted and somewhat unintelligible voices in Nutka disorients the viewer/listener by overloading them with dense and saturated allusions and metaphors. The ghosts of this landscape are plentiful, whereas the ghosts of Vera Cruz are stark.

The notion of the supernatural is central to Nutka. Douglas calls Nutka an example of Canadian Gothic, arguing that the first contact between Europeans and Aboriginals constituted “one of the most sublime moments of the romantic period” (Douglas in Landry 2004, 165). Douglas links the Gothic preoccupation with decay, the monstrous and disease to imperialism’s anxiety and fear of the otherness of the lands and people it had conquered. Thus Dracula, Frankenstein and the stories of Poe flourish in a social imaginary “characterized by a return of the repressed: Some past transgression haunts then destroys, the culpable person, family or social order.” (Douglas in Landry 2004, 165)

This reads like the overripe outcome of the historical moment that Rennó’s work is marking. The naïve wonder that Cabral’s crew


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demonstrate in the face of the countless and unnameable acts of violence that they initiated coalesces much later as a unified gesture and image in Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Grey. The dichotomy between the consciousness of the bifurcated characters dissolves in the Gothic protagonist who is guilty even as he perpetrates his crime. As Sianne Ngai and Nancy Shaw state in their description of Win, Place, or Show (1998), another work by Douglas:

It is this very lack of an “outside” to ideology, or to the vast and intricately interconnected abstract systems (economic, political, representational) determining “the subject” as such, that is the starting point from which the reconfiguration of determining contexts becomes possible. Since exposure of the signifying mechanisms regulating visibility is never an aesthetic endpoint in itself for Douglas but a beginning, it comes as no surprise that his work directly confronts this more complicated issue—one that cannot be resolved by… dramatically “disclosing” representational processes previously hidden. (Ngai and Shaw in Douglas and Douglas 2000, 19)

In other words, in Douglas’ work there is no outside, there is no one villain to unmask. There is no temporal respite from the overlapping inescapable voices, or their confessions of fevered guilt.

In fact, Douglas’ and Rennó’s work suggests that the displacement and reification of indigenous peoples in the narrative of colonialism is manifest in an overwhelming interest in and fetishisation of the land, as well as a fear of nature’s force. What captures the bifurcated consciousness of early colonialism’s unselfconscious quest for Edenic shores and riches is a heightened investment in harnessing nature, whose irrational force stands in for what they cannot entirely conquer: the people living on the land. This is some of the energy that Vera Cruz captures in the sound of the sea. It is the older sibling of the Gothic, the sublime as manifest in the breakdown of language and the release of horror.

Landscape and nature become forces or vehicles that signify the sublime or the unspeakable of the historical moment. The Romantic scholar Edmund Burke described how the sublime is marked by fractures.10 Unlike the beautiful, which is smooth and harmonious, the



sublime to Burke is sharp, discontinuous, ambivalently divided, and yet obscurely synthesised into an un-countenanceable totality. The hidden and violent histories of colonial conquest are effected in both works by evoking the sublime and the Gothic conception of space, making the landscape under contention inaccessible, fragmented and unreal.

This productive fragmentation evokes Deleuze’s notion that the breakdown of cinematic images and sounds, the separation between objects and their meanings releases intensities and singularities. In other words, the scratches in Vera Cruz and the fragmented landscape in Nutka amplify the landscapes they represent, more than if the images were projected in their wholeness. The sum of the parts of these fragmented landscapes are more meaningful and dramatic than their wholes. The intensity of the separation and fragmentation of these landscapes releases within the bodies of the viewers an affect that makes the viewer aware of the elemental forces embedded in the image: the virtuality of time and of motion (Colebrook 2002, 48).

Deleuze sees an actual and a virtual component as characteristic of time: where the former consists of day-to-day life, while the latter is a composite of past, impersonal memory, and future possibilities. In the experience of living, virtual and actual time interpenetrate one another. What the time-image manages to achieve is to make the virtual of time reach the forefront where the idea of time that exceeds day-to-day language and experience is revealed (Colebrook 2002, 53).

Vera Cruz and Nutka fragment the landscape they are trying to account for, and call attention to the fissures in the elements of their installations that the viewer can only inexactly measure and conjoin. Unable to create a whole account while being made aware of the vital inescapable importance of trying, the viewer is afforded a visceral glimpse of these historical tragedies that is only accessible as a virtuality, an idea that has no corresponding image.

Conclusions

Douglas’ and Rennó’s works could be called acts of history painting in the spirit of the same methodology that Kobena Mercer hints at when he calls Keith Piper a history painter of the Black Atlantic:


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…not on account of his chosen medium… but on account of the insights wrought from his agile standpoint that consistently returns to representation as a site of struggle over how the past is made sense of by the present. Refusing to flinch from the vexed question of our troubled relationship to the memories, myths and narratives that constitute the collective past, Piper introduces a diasporic approach to history, not as a grand narrative of progress, in which an abstract ideal awaits fulfilment or its inevitable disappointment, but as an errant wandering of bodies and lives passing through worldly accident and material circumstance with a view to seizing a chance to make themselves anew. (Mercer 1997, 18)

This different notion of history painting captures what is singular about the kind of history being recuperated. Mercer highlights how the process of recuperating lost histories follows the untethered, written out subject of colonial conquest and genocide, whose story is recuperated: accidentally, hopefully, and sometimes, in fragments.

What the works of Rennó and Douglas call into question is how fleeting this reconstituted historical subject is—recovered through affect, through (un)mourned absence, through delirium. But the recovery of this subject is the central concern in each case, and the fragile materiality of that presence is the most material gesture that each work can make. Both the rational and the irrational, myth and event, fact and fiction, are brought to bear on this reconstituted embodiment.

This refusal of history as grand narrative is a refusal of its disembodiment, the erasure of the messy bodies that have been victims in the name of progress (colonial, capitalist, modernist). This erasure finds its counterpart in the disembodiment that new media signifies. Although two wrongs rarely make a right, it seems that the juxtaposition of a fleshless history from above and a bloodless digitality produces the possibility of this reconstituted embodiment at its interstices. These works try to make something of that bodily memory, creating through affect a reconstituted enervation in the best traditions of historical materialism, out of those memories come the possibility of action.



References

Aravamudan, Srinivas. 1999. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Burke, Edmund. 1971. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: Garland Publishing.

Colebrook, Claire. 2002. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.Cubitt, Sean. 1998. Digital Aesthetics. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.:

SAGE.Douglas, Stan and Douglas, Gordon. 2000. Double vision: Stan Douglas and

Douglas Gordon. New York : Dia Center for the Arts, distributed by Distributed Art Publishers.

Douglas, Stan. 1993. Stan Douglas: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Galeries contemporaines, Paris, 11 janvier-7 février 1994. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.

Giunta, Andrea. 1996. “Strategies of Modernity in Latin America” in Gerardo Mosquera (ed) Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary art in Latin America. London: The Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Landry, Pierre. 2004. Nous Venons en Paix: Histoires des Amériques. Pierre Landry avec la collaboration de Johanne Lamoureux et José Roca; [traduction, Annie Davée et al.]. Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Lauer, Mirko. 1996. “Populist Ideology and Indigenism: A Critique” in Gerardo Mosquera (ed) Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary art in Latin America. London: The Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Mercer, Kobena. 1997. “Witness at the Crossroads: An Artist’s Journey in Post-Colonial Space” in Keith Piper, Relocating the Remains. London: Institute of Visual Arts.

Notes

1 Edgar Allen Poe was a nineteenth century novelist from the United States. He wrote Gothic

short stories The Fall Of The House Of Usher (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1971). Jonathan

Swift was an eighteenth-century English satirist who witnessed and critiqued the rise

of the British Empire in works like Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press,


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1999). The Marquis de Sade was an early nineteenth century aristocrat and philosopher

who wrote about excess, hedonism through sometimes violent pornography in work

like La Nouvelle Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (Paris: Union générale d’éditions,

1978). These three quintessentially modern writers highlight the violent and repressive

undercurrents in the development of modern subjectivity.

2 For more on the Conquest of Latin America in general see Walter D Mignolo’s The

Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). For a more

specific history of the impact of the Conquest on indigenous people in Brazil see John

Hemming’s Red gold: the conquest of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1978).

3 The English translation is “We come in Peace: Histories of the Americas” which, as the

curator Pierre Landry points out in the catalogue, is employed to highlight its “cruel

irony” (Landry 128).

4 For more on the relationship between colonial ideology and the construction of

landscape see W.J.T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2002). A good example of how the sublime has been used to talk about colonialism

and seascapes in the context of trans-Atlantic slavery is Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory

(New York, NY: Routledge, 2000).

5 Gilles Deleuze defines the virtual as a force that exceeds physical actuality. It intervenes

and interrupts the world of actualities by magnifying already existing objects and events.

It is more forceful and perhaps more utopian than haunting, but is pervasive in a similar

way. For an excellent discussion of its thematics see Rob Shields’ “Virtualities.” Theory,

Culture, & Society 23, no. 2-3 (May 2006): 284-286 and Deleuze’s own Cinema 2: The Time-

Image [Cinéma 2.]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

6 The story of the Tower of Babel is a biblical parable that highlights the peril of human

arrogance. Humanity built a tower that was to reach the sky, but in this ambition they

forgot God who punished them by dividing them and introducing linguistic difference.

The builders could no longer understand one another so they abandoned the Tower

and scattered around the world. This parable has been adopted within the lexicon of

poststructuralist discourse, which valorises the chaos, and fragmentation of experience

after the multiplication of languages.

7 See Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image [Cinéma 2.]. Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze sees art and literature as means of transforming

thought—literature should shock and shatter realities, while art releases affective bursts

of energy and epiphanies in the world of thought and experience. So while philosophy

creates volatile concepts or ways of thinking, art creates new enervations, visceralities,

juxtapositions that create the conditions of possibility for new modes of action that

disrupt and reconstitute concepts (Colebrook 7).



8 For more on the historical process of sound recording technologies see Jonathan

Sterne The audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. (Durham: Duke University

Press, 2003). An excellent compilation of works on contemporary experimental sound,

composition and theory is Audio Culture: readings in modern music edited by Christoph

Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004).

9 Paul Celan was a post war European poet whose work focused on the impossibility of

language after the violence of the Holocaust. Some of his works include Breath-Turn

(1967) and From Threshold to Threshold (1955). This relationship between language and

violence is a theme that critical theorists like Theodor Adorno have struggled with in

their conception of modernity.

10 For more on the relationship between politics, race and aesthetics in Burke’s notion of

the sublime see Chapter 5 (“Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke”) in W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology:

Image, Text, Ideology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).


How can we best think the effectiveness of various kinds of intervention in the international flows facilitated by new media? Acknowledging the ways in which theoretical descriptions of space have come to incorporate the textures given by cultural factors, theorist Anna Munster explores the usefulness of the spatially suggestive figures of outage (a loss of service), seepage (a term previously developed by the Raqs Media Collective), and blockage. Outage becomes a reminder that global systems are locally conditioned, produced by ongoing processes that lead to seepage at particular points and to specific blockages and diversions. Munster develops a reading of the work of new media artist Shilpa Gupta with these ideas, showing how her works manipulate the dynamics between the global and the local, drawing attention to the tensions that mark the relations between different levels of materiality and immateriality and different kinds of mobility within the global. Beyond the ascendancy of “locative media” and their logic of control, she shows how Gupta’s works negotiate the virtuality and actuality of place, translating cultural material into international exhibition contexts. She highlights the specificity of the networks that her works are placed into, whether they be the network of contemporary visual art institutions or the Internet.

Outage, Seepage, Blockage:Locating Art and Cultural Praxis in the NetworkAnna Munster

The worker of the twenty first century, who has to survive in a market that places the utmost value on the making of signs, finds that her tools, her labour, her skills are all to do with varying degrees of creative, interpretative and performative agency. She makes brands shine, she sculpts data, she mines meaning, she hews code.— Raqs Media Collective (2001)


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In the Glossary of Telecommunications Terms (1996), developed for use as a federal standard and mandatorily implemented across the

American telecommunications industry, an “outage” is defined as any situation or condition in which a system completely divests a user of its service. In the business of providing standards for an industry that is riven with non-uniformity and uneven development, this glossary (otherwise known as Federal Standard-1037C) does its best to account for a global definition of what it means to utterly lose access to a communications service. In computer and communications systems, a global definition is one that applies beyond immediate circumstances and assumes that internal variables or local variations do not affect the overall state of the system. If we take seriously the claims of many contemporary sociologists who argue that telecommunications have played a driving role in the “state” we now call globalisation, we should also take seriously the protocols surrounding communications systems that imply a global condition. Yet the Federal Standard-1037C definition of “outage” provides an exception to the condition of complete deprivation of power or of a telecommunications or computing service:

Note: For a particular system or a given situation, an outage may be a service condition that is below a defined system operational threshold, i.e., below a threshold of acceptable performance.

This suggests that sub-systems or specific states of systems may in fact operate under conditions of considerable variation; operate in spite of the general or global non-functioning of a system. Under certain circumstances, then, there might be access to a system and its elements even though, overall, the system is not functioning globally. In these specific circumstances, adequate access to a service or just enough power seeping through allows a degree of operational capacity. How might a service be used, how might power flow, how would a system perform when its global standards are subjected to these variations?

An influential strand of cultural and sociological theory of cyberspace and globalisation has focused upon the standardisation of actual and virtual “architecture”. During the 1990s, Marc Augé’s (1995) concept of “non-place” provided us with a way to describe urban—and cyber-


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scapes of indistinguishable locales—airports, freeways, shopping malls. If this architecture of global franchising already accounted for cultures that were connecting through the similarity of these transit spaces, then surely the actual network of cyberspace would similarly provide smooth spaces of “non-place”. The theories of liquid architecture proposed by Marcus Novak (2001 [1991]) during this same period suggested a cyberspatiality of easy connectivity as space and form seemed to morph into each other. Augé and Novak’s contouring of “space”—whether actual or virtual—was symptomatic of broader cultural fantasies about a coming world of global communicative movement and flow. In this landscape, place could be easily traversed. The geopolitical variations produced by real unevenness of urban and infrastructural development and the “bumps” caused by the continuing presence of collectivities gathering around racial, cultural and sexual difference are not acknowledged as constitutive factors of this coming spatiality. They pass either unrecognised or present elements that need to be transformed—liquefied—into future “non-places”.

The standards-driven telecommunications industry definition of “outage” suggests however that global systems are not hard and fast structures for all conditions. The kinds of spaces and places they give rise to are also not uniform but produced through a processual dynamics in which local variation is at work, mining the systems’ seepage, even blocking its flows and diverting them elsewhere. Where a telecommunications approach ultimately subjugates the variable as fully operational only under overall global conditions, I want to suggest instead that variation is immanent to systems and has no predetermined hierarchical place or function within them. That is to say, the subordination, flow or leakage of variation and difference are effects of the operation and performance of the system and its various elements in its entanglement with forms of economic, political and juridical control. This further suggests that it may be possible to divert systems from flowing only toward global standardisation. In particular, new media artistic practices might harness the material, political and aesthetic potential of variable elements to both “block” and reroute seepage from global techno-cultural systems. Examining certain kinds of cultural praxis in the network today, we can see what aesthetic and



political strategies can be deployed in order to amplify and boost the constitutive role variability plays in the functioning of global systems.

Power stoppage, leakage and diversion can give us a visceral vocabulary for articulating the flows of information through contemporary service economies and cultures. Although the quintessential ground for contemporary production may have become the terrain of signs (and immaterial labour has likewise become the primary form of productive work), affective relations to information are indubitably coupled with materiality as Paolo Virno (2004, 84) argues:

The emotional situation of the multitude in the post-Ford era is characterized by the immediate connection between production and ethicality, “structure” and “superstructure,” the revolutionizing of the work process and sentiments, technologies and the emotional tonalities, material development, and culture.

Aesthetic work in information culture performs a kind of plumbing and mining; the manual manoeuvres wrought upon the dynamics of information such that these both mould and deform the creation of readily consumable signs. Could this unstable dynamics of flow, service, access, denial, leakage and deflection serve to locate the role and potential of art and cultural praxis in the network today? New media artist Shilpa Gupta deploys dynamics between the local and the global in order to shift their hierarchical relationship. Artists can foreground these dynamics in their deployment of the global rhetoric and infrastructure of the network in ways that reassert the intrinsic importance of local variation to the continued functioning of networks. Gupta’s work plays across both the global art scene and contemporary Indian urban culture, providing an example of how these dynamics might be aesthetically manipulated.

For Virno, the dominant modality that determines the dynamics of contemporary media culture is immediacy—the presumption of a direct connectivity between production/consumption and the emotive/affective register. Hence creative labour and the consumption of its goods and services, from viral advertising to downloading music, are experienced as immediately satisfying. There is a kind of closing down and capturing of affect here; a packaging of it not only within


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commodities but through consuming affect as good or service. New media art has the potential to re-open relations between materiality and immateriality, between embodiment and information and between localisation and dispersion. Typically this takes the form of drawing our attention to the tensions that course through and mark these arenas. These are tensions that are immanent to information cultures and economies.

During the 1990s, corporatisation rapidly ate into the interstitial networks of artists, thinkers and cultural producers operating in alternative online formations. Although the Internet lost its appearance of hosting the leftover dreams of the libertarian and utopian freedoms of the 1960s and 1970s, activism in the network became savvy to the redeployment of information protocols. Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker (2004) have suggested that the concept of protocol can be used to identify the logic of control in networks and hence to locate both normative operations of the network and “counterprotocological” strategies. During the 1990s, cyber-activism invented the mass “virtual sit-in” of corporate and state information infrastructure by organising thousands of reloads of business and government websites and by spamming their email servers, causing them to crash. These forms of cyber-activism “locate” and utilize networks’ counterprotocological processes, forcing them literally to “flood”. We might understand this hijacking of network flows as an attempt to push the flow of information in networks well above their thresholds of operation. Groups such as the Italian Anonymous Digital Coalition and US based Electronic Disturbance Theatre undertook various actions and produced software that temporarily blocked access to financial institutions in Mexico and America. They continue to organise virtual and physical swarms, flooding and “denial of service” attacks on servers.

However, Galloway and Thacker also caution against rigidly distinguishing between protocol/control and a counter logic that is to be located in the hypostasisation of “resistance.” If a network is in part constituted through the technical protocols that govern the interrelationships of its nodes, then all networks and even those that overtly work against corporatisation or state regulation, even those that culturally and aesthetically “resist,” are governed to a degree by the technical modulations within this field of intensive control. Some



of the most aesthetically and politically engaged networked events in the last decade are, then, tactical manipulations of the logic of protocols, cybernetically feeding the network back into itself. Of course, cyber-activism has never been so naïve as to claim that its resistance can be located outside the network. An important direction in much of the theorisation of this politics—for example, Hakim Bey’s T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1991) and Critical Art Ensemble’s Electronic Civil Disobedience (1996)—has been to affirm that information warfare is waged in temporary, fluid and tactical modes, following the liquidity of information itself. And yet, the tactical media strategy of redeploying network services can threaten to scale down to micro and ephemeral actions, becoming simply extra nodes in the overall operation of the network.

If any network seepage used for aesthetic or cultural ends simultaneously engages network protocols, a new issue emerges for information activism and indeed for evaluating the efficacy of politically engaged information aesthetics: how is it possible to transform these strategies of rerouting and blocking from mere feedback loops resonating with, and indeed multiplying the system’s reach, to transformations in and of networks? As Stephan Wray (1998) has suggested, part of the problem with electronic civil disobedience lay in the distinction between cyberspace as the new sphere for political action on the one hand, and the street as a dead zone of non-action, on the other. But street and information highway have become thoroughly imbricated. As the information service economy spreads its infrastructure across time zones and diverse geographical locations, its core system encounters places in which it has to operate in different conditions and where its centres of investment, growth and control—the US, Germany, Japan—have drifted towards, for example, India and China. It is not surprising, then, that the question of geographical place is re-emerging as the indeterminate nexus of street and information flow. Place may help us rethink informatic networks as not simply protocological, but geo-politically contoured.

We are also witnessing a massive recolonisation of the concept of place under the guise of “locative media”, driven by the boom in mobile and wireless telecommunications, where location is intricately bound up, again, with the logic of control. The locative—as manifest in the


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drive to insert GPS systems into mobile and personal media devices—is primarily concerned with the tracking and positioning of data and bodies in information space. Locative media therefore embody the re-purposing and creep of logistics—the “science” of militarisation. By keeping track of data and personnel in decentralized and globalised military zones, military command deploys logistical routines in order to retain its centralized command/control regime. It is not surprising that wireless technologies have boomed in the wake of 9/11 and even more so with the massive investment into GPS technologies leading up to and on from the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003 (NITRD 2007). The combination of US Government investment, the passing of legislation such as the IP-Enabled Voice Communications and Public Safety Act (2005) and continuing military research and development have meant that “place” has been reconceived through the necessity and desire to locate and cartographically track anything whatsoever using telecommunications technologies.

In 2003 three major Australian telecommunications companies—Telstra, Vodafone and Hutchison—released a swathe of services for customers providing increased interconnectivity between mobile phones and the internet. A number of “content-driven” independent start-up companies began developing SMS and Java-based games as a result. (Pierce 2003). Various mediating projects between micro-commerce and the arts—such as the phonebook Limited (http://www.the-phone-book.ltd.uk)—have attempted to harness the buzz around mobile technologies and inject some humour and aesthetic sensibility into the banal sphere of ring tones and screensavers. Artists are also feeling the lure of a new field of info-capital investment in commercial locative media preceded by its initial scoping in military applications. “Locative media” is fast becoming a moniker for art practices that “have come down off the screen” (especially after the dissipation of the “net.art” movement at the end of the 1990s) and into the gritty credibility of the street. As Mark Tuters and Kazys Varnelis note, many artists using wireless technologies, GPS and their various customized hybrids are sponsored by telecommunications companies. (14) This is not unusual in the area of technological art practice but what Tuters and Varnelis suggest is that the everydayness of wireless devices encourages a casual take-up of the locative within a broader acceptance of the techno-



fetishism of info-capitalism. Of course, there has been extraordinary work done by artists such as Jordan Crandall who are highly aware of the relationship of mobile and wireless technologies to the politics of tracking and surveillance. Crandall’s Heatseeking (2000), for example, uses surveillance cameras to capture scenarios at points on the US-Mexican border, where everyday incidents—erotic encounters, for instance—as well as “illegal” crossings occur.

Nonetheless, it seems that the cultural development of locative media has more often than not been associated with a fetishism for informatic cartography. It is less concerned with unpacking and re-conceiving local and collective practices and traditions associated with the cultural and political experience of actual places by the peoples inhabiting these places. Some excellent projects have been undertaken in the last few years that have deployed cartography in collective modes—Trebor Scholz’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island (http://24dollarisland.net) is one. Here Scholz uses a web-based database that allows participants to “remap” forgotten histories and narratives of Lower Manhattan. New “maps” of the city are constructed as combinations of text entries, images and “walking” tours are plotted through multiple user interaction with the site. Fragmented yet over-lapping sets of local histories emerge as you “stroll” through the various map overlays. For example, community protest over the US’ detention of Irish Republican Joe Doherty meets the African Burial Grounds, a site where the ancestral remains of enslaved African-Americans were returned for burial in New York in 2003.

Yet these kinds of projects are not what immediately spring to mind when thinking about the more recent trend toward the locative in media arts practice. The gadgetry of location-based devices has quickly become the norm in locative aesthetic exploration. In spite of the relationship of locative media cartographic projects to the military-info-capital alliance, it is vital not to refuse the possibilities thrown up for rethinking place now. Opportunities are thrown up by the entire range of possibilities associated with network and wireless and technologies, even if these are partly exposed due to a phase of technological opportunism. I am here interested in networked and media arts practices that are able to move beyond the lure of the locative device toward a thinking of place as situated in and a situation of networked culture.


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Much of the negotiation around the virtuality and actuality of place in the network comes directly from new media theory and art practices in India, China and Korea. In particular, the use of skilled Indian programmers and developers as a cheaper source of labour for US West Coast software companies in the 1990s, combined with the location of massive call centres in the outlying satellites of Delhi and in Bangalore—the logistical backbone of the current telecommunications boom—compound and concatenate India as a site of global/situated, space/place tensions. What is exciting about the new media art and cultural praxis that is seeping out of these sites of tension lies with their simultaneous comprehension of both network and what Broekmann (1998) calls “situatedness.” Rather than declare “India” or its specificity to be points of external resistance and fundamental difference to informatic culture, the strategy is to hew—from a situated place that is nevertheless “translocally” connected to the global via informatic flows—the protocols of global information. These protocols are operating to seamlessly try to integrate all places and variation into becoming mere nodes in the smooth functioning of networked logic. To hew them, then, involves performing a kind of material labour upon the informatic. The materiality of this labouring involves investigating what happens to information flows as they circulate through and encounter the embodied lives and actual places of peoples and collectivities comprising networked cultures.

No matter where you log on, interact with, watch or encounter Shilpa Gupta’s net, video, performance and installation work, this double occupation of the space of flows and situated place prevails. Working out of Mumbai but exhibiting in the global network of art galleries and biennales, Gupta draws the viewer in with internationally legible genres of web design. Yet the protocols of web design are actualised in her work through encountering the material conditions of Indian urbanisation. Using the seduction of consumerist branding and the affective economy of instantaneous interaction common to new media transaction, Gupta cajoles potential users of her sites into the global market place of online commerce, sentiment and aspiration. Her websites promise to catapult users into a shiny world of hard-to-come-by products—diamonds, kidneys, sanctification—with the mere click of a mouse. Just like gullible recipients of spam hoping to gain financially from guiltily depositing



monies in offshore locations, we readily submit to Gupta’s lurid online colour schemes and directives to submit information to her sites. And yet the further we follow the faceless imperatives of the web “presences” encountered in her online worlds—commanding us to “take a kidney test” or “get blessed for instant peace and happiness”—the more we are pulled below the threshold of the operating system of standardised networked communications.

Shilpa Gupta’s blessed-bandwidth.net, commissioned by Tate Online Britain in 2003, creates a one-stop religious bazaar for the user, urging them to choose a religion through drop-down menus to receive a blessing. But like any online transaction, uneasiness about the authenticity of quality, supply and delivery accompanies it. As we enter into acquiring a religious experience—motivated by the inverse impulse of insecurity produced at the intersection of dislocation and surveillance in networked time and space—we become suspicious at the same time as we require validation. At this point, we have the option to have our blessing “verified” by viewing images or video of the various pilgrimages made by Gupta herself to famous temples and churches of major religions in India including Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist. Carrying an actual network cable, Gupta performs a series of rituals to assist the blessing of the physical stuff of the internet that binds computers to each other and enables data to flow. Gupta’s physical visitations, various pit stops around her country and backed-up by photographs or video evidence, become the work undertaken by her body situated in time and place. There is always this sense, as you become further immersed in Gupta’s cheerful platitudes, that someone else is carrying out undeclared and undervalued labour in restrictive, regulated and arduous ways in order for the network transaction to flow efficiently. Gupta makes us acknowledge someone who ordinarily might be invisible at the global operation of networks but whose existence is just below the threshold.

What is left deliberately unresolved in blessed-bandwidth.net is the dialectical antagonism of affect and rhetoric that characterizes so much experience in contemporary translocated culture. The more we participate in networked economies, politics and cultures, the more we encounter both political and religious fundamentalisms. The network is not simply about the hype of global connectivity, but about technologies


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designed to promote the expansion of financial, governmental and military markets. At the same time as informatic networks expand, so too do measures to protect these networks, including research and development and funding for encryption, firewalls and border surveillance. Information networks emerge from the antagonism between linkage and enclosure, out of the dissipation and shoring up of identities. For Shilpa Gupta, antagonisms in the network are not exclusionary but coexistent. Her work hews away at the differentials between outage and seepage; anonymity and situatedness; metaphysics and material life. The chaotic oscillation between these polarities constitutes the dogged operation of networks. By siphoning off some of the network’s capabilities, Gupta reminds us of the ambivalence lurking at the core of every self-possessed choice we conjure up as our benefit from interacting with information technologies.

Between 2004 and 2006, Gupta shifted away from her signature website style toward more complex and directly embodied explorations of interactive installation—an intriguing move given that Gupta has so consciously played with the network antagonisms between local identity and place and global dispersal and design. On the one hand, we could interpret her shift out of the arena of net art and into the physical spaces of global art galleries, festivals and biennales as a safe move into the more buoyant contemporary art market and circuit. Net art has only ever been at the periphery of this field—both its deliberate construction by artists at the end of the ‘90s as anti-gallery, and its accessibility to anyone with a network connection have made it a rather ephemeral and unreliable platform for creative commodification. Gupta’s recent selection in a number of international biennales and events such as the 2006 Sydney Biennale and the 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth show at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, indicate that she is comfortable slipping through the circuits of globalised culture while she is deconstructing them. (19)

On the other hand, Gupta’s more recent works also continue to carry and enact the tensions and threshold points immanent to these circuits and flows. Her installation work from 2004 onward frequently bears the name Untitled, suggesting a serial production that refuses immediate identification. Of course, this is a well-honed artistic strategy and often marks a phase of production for artists where the name and signature



behind the work have overtaken the meaning or signifier of the work itself. But this is unusual in installation and interactive new media, where a title can often be the only means of inscribing the creative labour of a piece. Gupta’s refusal to name her works can be understood as a performative strategy. As a new media artist who risks the loss of recognition in a circuit where video art currently predominates, Gupta plays with the tension between making her mark using the sign of the artist’s name and losing identity altogether through the refusal to title her work.

Furthermore, the “untitled” status of this work draws the audience—its potential participants—toward an understanding that can only be grasped through experiencing the works themselves. The signs to be extracted from these works lie in the performative work undertaken by participants who join with Gupta’s visual, sonic and haptic representations in circuits that flow both above and below the threshold of global, cultural and political networks.

In her installation for the 2006 Sydney Biennale, Untitled 2006, Gupta develops a strategy of inversion so that the computer monitor no longer offers us a voyeuristic “window” to another place. Four monitors are each positioned on their own wall facing outward to participants and forming the exterior of an enclosed space and so participants are only able to circumnavigate the space. Place is thus configured here as somewhere, definite, possibly familiar, and yet simultaneously completely elsewhere and impossibly far away. The monitors transmit a set of moving and still images from the Kashmiri political and natural landscapes—zones that most of its Sydney audiences have never encountered. Gupta lures us with the beauty of Kashmiri landscape and architecture and the appeal of haptic interaction via the touch screens. But instead of the bloated consumption delivered by mainstream media images of the “faraway”, we are drawn into the complex history of political violence that has wracked Kashmir. We watch its landscape unfold in drive-by images, but when we touch the screen of one of the monitors soldiers begin to dot its landscape. On an adjacent screen, a photograph of Kashmiri children seems to be conveying an innocent scene until we discover, via interaction, that they are laughing about their discovery of a bomb. Moving around the installation we find that our touch initiates the smashing of glass across the image of a window of a traditional Kashmiri


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house. In a strategy drawn from both children’s puzzles and interactive design, the participant’s hand has to literally drag together the broken pieces of glass to “reset” the image on the screen.

Information and media circuits are already saturated with the “faraway” and exotic place. Internet tourism, holiday-themed reality television and news and current affairs in Western media all contribute to a kind of exoticising and desensitising of locale. Aware of this, Gupta gives us only glimpses of and limited haptic interaction with Kashmir as place in terms of its traditions and histories, its politics and its social fabric. Yet just as Untitled (2006) retains a sense that this world and place are impassable to remote audiences such as those attending the Biennale, it also exquisitely conveys the fragility through which the Kashmiri peoples somehow survive a tumultuous landscape of violence and political conflict. Gupta is here working with the potentials of new media to asynchronously situate people within two places—Kashmir and its specific history of political and racial conflicts and the “global” art audience wherever that may happen to be.

Aesthetic praxis in the network runs the gamut from deploying its protocols in hyperbolic and intensified modes in order to underscore its placeless logic, to slipping below the operational threshold of its sprawling system and finding hiccups of fluctuation and differentiation. Of course networks are not simply technologically constituted; we can also consider festivals and biennales to be part of an internationalised art network/market. Likewise “net art” itself can no longer afford to simply remain located online if it wants to continue working through networks and using network flows for purposes other than simply shoring up the system. Cultural praxis within the network is increasingly positioned across varied networks that carry them away from the specificities of local points of production and reception. The question, however, for networked media arts practice is one about holding and working at these tensions in the performative production and interpretation of signs. The cultural “net-worker” can deploy the global functionality of the system in located modes—whether these involve foregrounding the conditions of cultural, social and political production of the art work or by engaging audiences in performative and embodied work in order to extract new kinds of signification. In diverting networked flows through the bump and grit of variation, the fantasy of a seamless “space of flows” delivered



via global aesthetics begins to crumble. Instead, we start to grapple with the productive inflections and friction thrown up by the vibrancy and heterogeneity of actual clusters of social and affective practices. The challenge for new media artists of networked culture lies with working across global-local antagonisms. Global networks themselves—as with any outage within the American telecommunications industry—are always poised to incorporate fluctuation as mere variability within the continuing expansion and operation of their systems. New media art and cultural praxis, then, must explore the immanent potential of material, geopolitical, signifying and embodied variation that constitutes actual networked cultures.

References:

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.

Appardurai, Arjun. 1997. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bey, Hakim. 1991. T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Broekmann, Andreas. 1998. “Networked Agencies”. http://isp2.srv.v2.nl/~andreas/texts/1998/networkedagency-en.html

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.

Crandall, Jordan. 2000.Heatseeking. http://jordancrandall.com/heatseeking/index.html

Critical Art Ensemble. 1996. Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Federal-Standard-1037C, Telecommunications:Glossary of Telecommunication Terms, 1996 (hypertext version), http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/

Galloway, Alex and Thacker, Eugene. 2004. “The Limits of Networking”, nettime mailing list, 24 March, 2004. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0403/msg00090.html

Novak, Marcos. 2001 [1991]. “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace” in R.Packer and K.Jordan eds, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. New York: Norton.


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NITRD website and its report “From Research to Reality: Federal IT R&D Technologies Play Key Roles in Disaster Response” (updated 2007), http://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/bluebooks/2003/research_to_reality_01.html

Pierce, James. “Mobile Content—is it the Next Big Thing?” ZDNet Australia, 27 May 2003, http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Mobile_content_is_it_the_next_big_thing_/0,130061791,120274785,00.htm

Raqs Media Collective. 2003. “X notes on Practice: Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage in a Networked World”. http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/texts1.html

Tuters, Marc and Varnelis, Kazys. “Beyond Locative Media”, Networked Publics research weblog, Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California, http://netpublics.annenberg.edu/locative_media/beyond_locative_media

Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext(e)), p.84

Wray, Stephan. 1998. “On Electronic Civil Disobedience”, paper presented to the Socialist Scholars Conference, March 20—22, New York. http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/oecd.html.


New media are often associated with “data”, an abstract form of information storage and retrieval. However, in real life, the meaning we understand from data is also relational—the storyteller influences how we understand the story. Within indigenous knowledge systems this relational dynamic is made explicit. The role of the storyteller has an important social and political function. The stories themselves are in a state of flux and dynamism “always already individualized and communal, original and replicated, authored and authorless”. Tradition is often misinterpreted as something static and conventional, but Hopkins shows how indigenous new media artists have a consistent aesthetic agenda of “making things their own”, adapting and hybridising cultural content in order to add to a cultural tradition of exchange and circulation networks that has a different set of operating principles and goals than the computer networks treating data as objects. In these ways she uses the characteristics of oral storytelling to define indigenous perspectives on narrative, providing a framework to interpret video and new media art created by Zacharias Kunuk, Nation to Nation’s Cyberpowwow project and Paula Giese’s Native American Indian Resources.

Making Things Our Own: The Indigenous Aesthetic in Digital StorytellingCandice Hopkins

They say that we are the carriers of history; the storytellers and artists must express their visions for the people to see… how will we create our history together, now, in this time and space? — Marjorie Beaucage (1995, 216)

Cherokee writer Thomas King (2003, 1) begins his book The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative with these lines:

There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice


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of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details… But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away.

While they might not appear so at first, these initial lines in a book about storytelling are calculated and revealing. It is fitting that King would begin his book with a creation story—a tale of beginning. It is also fitting that he would choose lines that at once define and expand upon what storytelling is in indigenous communities. Even the book’s title, The Truth about Stories, points to one of the pivotal conceptions of oral and written literature: that stories—often regarded as fictitious and aligned with myths and legends—are viewed as “the simplest vehicles of truth” by their tellers (Minh-ha 1989, 120–122).

In stating this, I am not arguing that the earth was formed on the back of a turtle. That would be too simple. Rather, I would like to put forward the notion that truth, like the stories told in indigenous communities, can have a more nuanced definition. One of the most succinct statements of this idea that I have read comes from Penny Petrone. “Myth,” Petrone (1990, 12) reminds us, has a very specific literary history. It is when this category is applied to the oral tradition of storytelling—which exists outside of this history—that a disjuncture occurs. Traditional narratives categorized as myth are not regarded as untrue by their native tellers. “All Indian traditions,” Petrone writes, “are valid guides to reality.” In other words, as filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989, 120) states, “Each society has its own politics of truth.” What I propose is simple: that stories, specifically those originating in oral traditions, be understood, and defined, according to the ideologies from which they originate.

Tradition and Change

A re-reading of the first lines of King’s book suggests that the very foundation of stories is built upon a series of contradictions. By their very nature, stories that are passed down orally over the course of innumerable generations are continually changing (King: “Each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details”), yet they remain the same (“But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away”). These


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stories are always already individualized and communal, original and replicated, authored and authorless:

In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring… No repetition can ever be identical, but my story carries with it their stories, their history, and our story repeats itself endlessly (Minh-ha 1989, 122).

Reading across these contradictions in storytelling is generative, as it reveals a worldview: one in which truth is considered apart from fact, where originality exists within the copy, where change is an inherent part of tradition.

This last point—the idea that change is inherent to tradition—is contested. Tradition is often misinterpreted as something static or conventional. Cherokee artist and activist Jimmie Durham (1993, 108) (someone whose own identity as a Native person has been challenged) characterizes this well, writing:

There is a nefarious tendency to consider material manifestations as traditions. If we accept such absurd criteria, then horses among the Plains Indians and Indian beadwork must be seen as untraditional. Traditions exist and are guarded by Indian communities. One of the most important of these is dynamism. Constant change—adaptability, the inclusion of new ways and new materials—is a tradition that our artists have particularly celebrated and have used to move and strengthen our societies.

Durham notes that, in the 18th and 19th centuries,

every object, every material brought in from Europe was taken and transformed with great energy. A rifle in the hands of a soldier was not the same as a rifle that had undergone Duchampian changes in the hands of a defender, which often included changes in the form by the employment of feathers, leather, and beadwork.


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Stories straddle past and present, as each enactment is original but also layered with voices of the past. “The story is me, neither me nor mine,” writes Trinh. “It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring.” In art, since the dawn of mechanical reproduction, the copy is understood as subversive: Its very presence (particularly if there is potential for infinite replication) challenges the authority of the original. Replication in storytelling, by contrast, is positive and necessary. It is through change that stories and, in turn, traditions are kept alive and remain relevant. In the practice of storytelling there is no desire for originality, as stories that are told and retold over time are not individual but communal: they are made by, and belong to, many.

Storytellers in indigenous communities are continually embracing new materials and technologies, including video and digital media. I would suggest that this shift does not threaten storytelling traditions in these communities but is merely a continuation of what aboriginal people have been doing from time immemorial: making things our own.

In Search of an Indigenous Aesthetic

In 1980, in a story that has since become almost iconic, Zacharias Kunuk—an Inuit carver, and at the time a producer for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation—brought the first Sony Portapak to the Arctic1. Kunuk saw something different in video: He later stated that he was initially drawn to the medium because of the similarities that it shared with Inuit oral traditions. From the beginning, Kunuk, his longtime collaborator Norman Cohn and his colleagues at Isuma Productions2 recognized the potential of this medium for the telling of stories—stories that offered an alternative not only to the non-Inuit television programming that had begun to infiltrate their communities in the early 1980s but also to the way in which the Inuit had been portrayed in film and television for nearly half a century3.

Consider Nanook of the North, for example. A chronicle of Inuit life in the 1920s, the film, directed by Robert Flaherty, is considered the first feature-length documentary. The film’s main character is Nanook the Bear, and it follows him and his family as they hunt for walrus, seal and



fish; build igloos; and barter with non-Natives at local trading posts. Aside from its moments of blatant racism (this was the 1920s), the film has drawn criticism for the artistic license Flaherty exercised during its making, including the building of an oversized igloo, with windows for interior scenes (actual igloos were too small and dark), and the staging of certain events, particularly hunting scenes, that in the end appeared more spectacular than real life. The film has also drawn criticism for portraying Inuit as primitive in the face of new technologies. In one instance, Nanook the Bear is seen encountering a record player. He bites the record with his teeth to get a sense of the material. While this scene further establishes the divide between primitive and developed cultures, it is interesting to note that Flaherty turned to the same Inuit to repair his film equipment when it broke down (which was frequent owing to the extreme weather conditions). The criticisms of Nanook of the North are understandable when documentary is understood as based on or re-creating an actual event, although admittedly the genre was only beginning to be defined when Flaherty made this film. It is the very idea that documentaries authentically portray another culture that is challenged by Kunuk’s videos.

Kunuk was not alone in seeing this potential. Since the late 1960s (and largely because of the availability of the Sony Portapak), activists, community and cultural groups, documentarians, those involved in guerrilla television and others have used video to give voice to the underrepresented and to challenge (with varying degrees of success) the authority of broadcast television. Instant playback and freedom from cumbersome electronic editing equipment, as well as the immediacy, spontaneity and relative affordability of the medium, all contributed to video’s allure. Artists were also seduced: Video opened up a largely unexplored artistic terrain—one that in its very materiality, its impermanence and reproducibility, challenged the unique and precious nature of the art object and, in turn, the authority of the art institution4.

The fact that Kunuk was one of the first Inuit to experiment with portable video is not what makes his story relevant—what he did with it is. In an essay entitled “Indigenous Experimentalism,” Hopi filmmaker and videographer Victor Masayesva (2000) discusses the value of what he calls “the indigenous aesthetic.” Careful to avoid the generalization that all Native film and video producers are “knowledgeable about and


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committed to working from within the structures and conventions of traditional expression, including the use of the mother tongue as the narrative voice,” Masayesva writes that it is the accumulative experience (all the experiences, traditional or not, that inform our lives as native people today) that “refines and defines the indigenous aesthetic”—an aesthetic that, I would suggest, influences the work of Kunuk and countless other indigenous artists.

In producing work out of his experience as an indigenous person, Kunuk creates videos that defy simple categorization. Kunuk’s works do not aim to document, but instead creatively depict, Inuit life through a combination of improvisation, drama, storytelling, ajajas (traditional songs) and reenactments—in much the same way in which Inuit life has been represented and experienced within Inuit communities since time immemorial. This logic, which could be considered an “indigenous aesthetic,” upholds the importance of community, acknowledges how much the past continues within the present (in Inuit culture the past and the future can coexist; children, for example, are commonly given names of the recently deceased and through this naming are seen to take on their identity) and recognizes the vital role of oral tradition in defining the work of Isuma Productions.

Kunuk’s videos are made first of all for an Inuit audience, and nearly the entire community is engaged in their making. With this audience in mind, the videos incorporate many long shots, with an emphasis on action rather than dialogue. The videos are, in a way, a direct reaction to the criticism of non--Inuit-produced television programs put forth by an Inuit elder who pointed out that the Inuit are never seen to do anything on television from the South; they only talk. Because of the very fact that they are not documentaries, Kunuk’s videos offer a more authentic and nuanced representation of Inuit life.

Narratives in Cyberspace

What Kunuk and his community have achieved is no simple task. Masayesva rightly states that “the tribal person today—who uses new technologies—must have quantitatively more knowledge than the traditionalist and be more facile than the colonizers in order to be understood in the world community”. The success of experimental films and videos, he adds, can be ascribed to the “degree to which they subvert



the colonizer’s indoctrination and champion indigenous expression in the political landscape” (231).

This gauge is not to be limited to films and videos but is applicable to all technologies, from the aforementioned “Duchampian” rifles in the hands of the Plains Indians to new media and storytelling in the digital age.

In her 1996 essay “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace,” filmmaker Loretta Todd put forward a number of considerations regarding the relationship of native people to cyberspace. Several of them concern the need to subvert what Masayesva terms “the colonizer’s indoctrination.” Writing as she was, before aboriginal people had begun making serious use of digital technology, the possibilities and dangers of this new space were still very much imagined. Todd saw a number of problems with severing the relationship between the body and the physical world. From an aboriginal perspective (if such a common perspective can be argued to exist), Todd asserts that there is no disconnection from the material world: All relationships—mind and body, human and nature, hunter and prey—are interconnected and symbiotic. Cyberspace, she argues, is driven by a much different ideology: Born out of the climate of late capitalism, the need for cyberspace stems from a fear of the body, an aversion to nature, and a desire for salvation and transcendence of the earthly plane. With this in mind, Todd’s central question was whether native worldviews could find a place in cyberspace (179-181).

Writing nearly 10 years later, I would say that they have indeed found a place. Cyberspace has been occupied, transformed, appropriated and reinvented by native people in ways similar to how we have always approached real space. Like video, digital technologies have become a medium for speaking and telling our stories. The Internet, for example, was recognized almost immediately for its ability to bring people together and communicate across large geographical divides. One of the first practitioners to make use of these abilities was Paula Giese, who started creating web sites for native audiences in 1993. Her most ambitious project, Native American Indian Resources5, is not merely a resource but an extensive map of Native American life. The site contains everything from traditional stories and ideologies to information on the plight of Leonard Peltier. From the beginning, Giese saw the Internet for what it was—one of the most advanced information storage and retrieval


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systems available. Although not maintained after Giese’s death in 1997, Native American Art Resources at its peak of activity contained links to over 300 other web sites that, taken together, tell a story of contemporary Native America.

Nearly every site created by native artists reflects back to real people—to communities, to traditions and to stories. For example, Nation to Nation’s project Cyberpowwow6 was created as a means to gather virtually—a place within which participants can take on new identities, view artworks, read critical writings and meet and speak with people from around the world. What makes the project successful is not the virtual gathering, but the physical gathering of people at different real-world sites during the two days when the “powwow” takes place. Throughout all such gatherings in which I have participated there have been constant reminders of real places, of lived experiences. One of the first questions I am always asked upon logging on—even though I am represented by an avatar in cyberspace—is where I am located and where I am from. In the end, Cyberpowwow is not an experience of shedding identity but an exercise in reaffirming it.

In a history of native Internet use, Masayesva recounted,

The earliest use of computer technology by indigenous people was by Yupik Eskimos in the polar north, selling their arts and crafts on the internet. We take it for granted today that the modern technology has prompted a virtual community of the World Wide Web, but the radical position would be to acknowledge that northern people, in their vast landscapes, were among the first to experiment with these web links, creating virtual communities through communication technologies as a means for physical and cultural survival (233).

Operating through networks and across great geographical divides is a concept and an action that has always existed in aboriginal communities—enacted through such things as storytelling, the moccasin telegraph and ancient trade routes. It is this unique sensibility performed since time immemorial in these alternative spaces that informs an understanding of tradition, which, in this context, becomes fluid and dynamic.



Which brings us back to where we started:

There is a story I know. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details… But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away.

Appendix: Essential Links

Nation to Nation and Paula Giese’s sites are just two of a host that subvert Western indoctrination and champion indigenous expression in the political landscape. The following storytelling projects prove that the issue is not “what ideology will have agency in cyberspace,” as Todd wrote, but, How we can subvert that ideology from the inside and make it our own?

Cheryl L’Hirondelle, http://www.ndnnrkey.netCybertribe, http://www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/cybertribe/exhibitions.htmEdward Poitras, http://www.neutralground.sk.ca/artistprojects/in-x-isle/index.

htmlJimmie Durham, http://uinic.de/alex/en/durham/sie-sind-hier.htmlKC Adams, http://www.kcadams.netLisa Reihana, http://www.lisareihana.comMike Macdonald, http://www.snacc.mb.ca/projects/butterfly_garden/Omushkegowak Oral History Project, http://www.ourvoices.ca/Ahasiw Maskegon Iskwew, http://www.snacc.mb.ca/projects/spiderlanguage/Melanie Printup Hope, http://www.albany.net/~printup/

References

Beaucage, Marjorie. 1995. Aboriginal Voices: Entitlement through Storytelling, in Janine Marchessault (ed.), Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, Toronto: YYZ Books,

Durham, Jimmie, A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics, London: Kala Press, 1993,

King, Thomas, 2003. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press,.


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Masayesva, Victor. 2000. Indigenous Experimentalism, in Jenny Lion (ed.), Magnetic North, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Walker Art Center, and Video Pool, .

Minh-ha, Trinh T. 1989. Native Woman Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Indiana University Press,,

Penny Petrone, Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1990,

Loretta Todd, Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace, in Mary Ann Moser and Douglas Macleod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, New York: MIT Press, 1996, 179-194.

Notes

1. The Sony Portapak, initially marketed in 1968, was the first truly portable half-inch

video recording device.

2. Isuma Productions, http://www.isuma.ca.

3. I write about video not to create a linear historical trajectory from oral tradition to the

digital present, but because it is one of the first instances in Canada where storytelling

was equated with a medium outside of oral and written traditions. See Beaucage (1995).

4. One of the most comprehensive and engaging resources on the history of video art is

Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer’s edited volume Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video

Art (New York: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1991).

5. http://www.kstrom.net/isk/.

6. http:// www.cyberpowwow.net.


Is the new media agenda essentially colonising, or has it simply reflected a lack of participation to date from indigenous perspectives? Jason De Santolo sees a unique strategic opportunity to develop creative research interventions that enhance indigenous self-determination, and believes this can be achieved by giving attention to the indigenous cultural rights agenda. De Santolo’s evaluation of cultural rights emphasises the importance of context in the production and dissemination of cultural material. He shows how new media interfaces can provide an affective and inspirational dimension—the conditions for Friere’s “revolutionary leadership.” For non-indigenous peoples, such interfaces offer the potential to gain a closer understanding of the integrated sense of land, community, and politics that are characteristic of indigenous struggles—the “rhythm of rights.” Against an environment which is often thought of as terra nullius or empty, De Santolo shows that new media forms can provide a platform for an undeniable cultural presence.

…fluid lines…Jason De Santolo

Indigenous struggles are fluid in nature, and form around diverse aspirations, strategies and sites of engagement. Emerging nodes of protest and voice have activated exciting new media dimensions to these struggles—dimensions that still speak from the land and communities, and yet travel to new places in new ways. These digital trajectories have laid vast transformative networks of solidarity, and are now manifest within dynamic expressions of cultural heritage. The complex nature of these multiple convergences requires that disciplines and the general community rethink and reshape extant practices and perspectives (Nakata et. al 2005, Nakata 2003). This chapter explores Indigenous presence within an emerging new media environment, drawing attention to a critical Indigenous heritage rights agenda. The discussion is contextualised through key Australian manifestations of innovation within research-driven agendas for change.


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New media dimensionsA place both is here and there—from outstations on traditional lands to the steps of the local post office. But these engagement lines are blurred, often silenced and subject to remarkable systemic influences. A danger lies in a continued perception of emptiness—a certain lacking of “deadliness”1, the so-called empty space—turned empty land, terra nullius, simple yet effective lies about the lack of “Indigenous presence”. Indigenous forms of new media are unique and evoke challenging aspects within the recognition of presence and the development of cultural principles and protocols within negotiated space/s of undefined potential (Janke 2002, 2006). This is why Indigenous heritage rights are articulated here at the frontline of the digital frontier. These intersections continue to stimulate debate and dynamic Indigenous engagement despite significant “digital divide” issues.2

Indigenous flavours traverse and imbue virtual realms. The National Indigenous New Media Labs have held substantial residencies for Indigenous peoples in new media, providing participants from around the country with engaging learning environments in digital media and new media arts skills.3 From such backgrounds, an artist such as Jenny Fraser continues to produce innovative collaborative works. A recent interactive work celebrated the lives of Yugambeh family members who were moved north from South East Queensland to Gulf of Carpentaria properties to work. This exploration of how many Aboriginal people experience family histories provided viewers with opportunities to experience this “fragmentation” of history and how “they might think about their own relationship to place and times”4. Fraser founded and is online curator for Cybertribe, an online gallery that promotes Indigenous art internationally. Cybertribe provides a window into the work of some of the most dynamic Indigenous new media artists from around Australia, including work from Destiny Deacon, r e a, Cameron Goold, Jason Davidson, Christian Thompson and many others5. Projects such as these evoke contemplation of place, identity and belonging. In speaking from the land—Indigenous country/s and communities, many of these works provide insight into complex manifestations of Indigenous place as it morphs alongside virtual realms. New media’s hybrid nature seems to hold an innate facility for a deep reflection on Indigenous perspective, especially in terms of its fluid collaborative capacity.


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Scholarship in this emerging field critically explores the nexus between art and emerging science and technology fields, as for instance between “performance, digital technologies and cross-disciplinary artforms [and how they come] to produce a range of performance, installation and screen based artworks” (Janke 2006). This convergence of disciplines has led to innovation around forms of transmission, representation and material culture. Transmission of knowledge and experience is strongly connected to aspirational and knowledge-centred Indigenous rights strategies. Indigenous heritage rights strategically reflect this urgent agenda and hold influence in developing new media protocols and principles of engagement. Reciprocity is fundamental to this celebration—exchanging, sharing, nurturing. As Terri Janke (2002, 1) has pointed out, Indigenous heritage transcends mundane perceptions of knowledge, but rather encapsulates “all objects, sites and knowledge transmitted from generation to generation” for “Indigenous people’s heritage is a living heritage.”

There are important protocols and principles to be respected when dealing with Indigenous Heritage, and indigenous new media practitioners are well aware of the intricacies of working in a hybrid form. Their perspectives are critical for a number of reasons including the obvious fact that artists and practitioners have on-the-ground—hands on experience of new media processes and community dynamics. Janke (2002, 1) also recognises that “[w]riting, performing, song, the visual arts and more recently, new media, are ways of transmitting cultural heritage’” This articulated multiplicity reflects a powerful convergence of interest across the community. Elders, lawyers, anthropologists, geographers, biologists, economists (amongst many others) all realise the different cultural, social and commercial implications of this ancient heritage.

True protection of Indigenous heritage rights requires recognition of diverse manifestations of dynamic Indigenous cultures, and a number of writers have highlighted the complex issues at stake. Janke’s report Our Culture Our Future, Proposals for the Recognition and Protection of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property provided Australia with significant articulation of issues and strategies for the recognition of such rights referring to them as “Indigenous people’s rights to heritage”—heritage including everything from literary, performing and artistic works to human remains and tissues (Janke 1998, 25). Marcia Langton (1993) has


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also provided some of the key intellectual catalysts for recognition of Indigenous cultural values and protocols when dealing with mediums such as film, video and new media. Others have also highlighted the role of the media in the context of political culture. Hartley and McKee (2000, 12) discuss the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations on media, pointing out that they see this as a “calling for the establishment of an Indigenous public sphere in the context of mediated political culture”.

Systemic issues also influence the ability of local communities to fully exercise Indigenous heritage rights. Janke (1999, 632) highlights that:

commercialisation of Indigenous intellectual and cultural property has often been done without respect for Indigenous cultures, without consent or legal Indigenous control and without sharing of benefits with Indigenous communities. Indigenous cultural heritage has been distorted for commercial interests. This in turn is leading to its erosion.

In 1999 she advocated for the sharing of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property based on the legally focused principles such as informed consent, right to negotiate and full and proper attribution. These principles have subsequently been developed into an important set of protocols that act as a foundational framework for working with Indigenous communities and/or heritage. The most pertinent articulation of these is specifically written with new media cultures in mind (Janke 2002). In this changing world, technologies are providing both tools for cultural revitalisation as well as catalysts for digitised exploitation in a globalised marketplace. Customary law protections continue to be critical in maintaining a harmonious balance within communities and ensure that only appropriately “qualified” people are privy to key knowledge systems. These levels of access are being recognised and implemented into some of the more innovative database design projects happening in Australia.

The violence of colonisation has disrupted customary law in Indigenous communities. Continued failure to fully recognise and protect Indigenous heritage rights is akin to what McHugh (2004) terms “a wilful blindness”. Posey (1996) points out that the responsibility



for developing and implementing equitable and effective sui generis (unique) systems that support Indigenous peoples, traditional peoples and local communities lies with nation states. The benefits of recognition will inevitably transcend Indigenous interests and potentially impact on sustainable future ecologies. This remains dependent on effective change and reform. At a broader level Behrendt (2003) argues for outcome-focused liberalism and effective participation that allows for institutional forms to take on the recognition of difference and hence alter institutions imbued with “psychological terra nullius” or what could be termed as a denial of unique Indigenous status and presence.

New media’s interactive nature enhances the ability for sharing worldviews. Indigenous peoples have been utilising these tools to develop diverse strategic language for rights recognition. It is here also where some take up the challenge of seeking to articulate and negotiate collaborative new media principles and protocols within innovative research approaches. Creative research practice holds true potential in enhancing research and project outcomes for the benefit of participating communities. Creative processes hold innate ability for dynamic transformation and transmission of information. These fresh approaches allow for greater epistemological diversity in the process of research. Photography and video installation are two common creative mediums that have been infused into research processes and project outcomes (Banks 2001), with implications for considering decolonising methodologies and collaboration with Indigenous communities. Academic spaces have historically fuelled knowledge economies, often to the detriment of Indigenous communities. However, strategic responses have emerged to reclaim space and authority for Indigenous-driven research agendas. From within these intellectual camps we now see a proliferation of Indigenous work that influences and informs theory, methodology and enhanced research methods.

Expression, reclamation and voice

Communities are now realising the true implications of evolving new media environments. For those operating within academic and research spaces it necessarily involves the navigating of research and collaborative practice within Indigenous protocols and principles. Nakata (2004: 2) has carefully pointed out that: “understanding the theoretical and


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methodological issues are critical to producing new and more effective approaches to negotiating the intersections of different knowledge systems as they converge, circumscribe and condition possibilities for both understanding the past and its legacies, and improving indigenous futures”. The growing body of discourse on Indigenous research methodologies is critical for researchers undertaking studies within or about Indigenous communities in Australia, providing guidance in overcoming some of the limitations of more traditional methodologies. This discourse is not confined to purely theoretical paradigms but forms part of a long fought “on the ground” struggle for the right of Indigenous communities to be in control of our own destinies. This includes asserting the right to define ourselves, and our cultures, as well as maintaining control of research agendas involving or influencing community.

Kera (2002) has further highlighted some of the issues arising in the search for new media methodologies stating that the question is more about “how to identify and how to do justice to creativity and becoming”. Performative terminologies may be important to consider in this context (Manovich 2002) and foster development for performative methodologies for new media. These considerations provide a greater impetus for amplifying critical Indigenous perspectives and actions towards political change Nakata’s Indigenous Standpoint Theory highlights the importance of understanding the political nature of taking an Indigenous position within the context of contemporary society. He suggests that Indigenous peoples should be developing not just a view of the world but a critical view of the world, that is able to engage politically with knowledge that has formed around Indigenous positions (Nakata 1993: 9). Indigenous Standpoint Theory assists in the mapping of these influences and environments through articulation of what he has termed, the “Cultural Interface.” This interface places unique demands on the researcher/s that manifest as particular puzzles that need to be solved through theoretical strategising, particularly in the context of new media practice. Hybrid interactions and manifestations of that process are complex to navigate in terms of communal rights management. It is here at the cultural interface that these intersecting discourses are politically positioned in relation to culturally respectful research approaches:



At the interface, traditional form and ways of knowing, or the residue of those, that we bring from the pre-contact historical trajectory inform how we think and act, and so do Western ways, and for many of us a blend of both has become our lifeworld. It is the most complex of intersections and the source of confusion for many. For in this space there are so many interwoven, competing and conflicting discourses, that distinguishing traditional from non-traditional in the day-to-day is difficult to sustain even if one were in a state of permanent reflection (Nakata 2003, 23).

Although daunting, there is also a degree of excitement building as these historical trajectories weave and mesh within freshly networked virtual spaces. If this is to form a new and enduring interface then there is an urgent need for critical literacy alongside effective, strategic engagement.

International developments also hold powerful implications for protection of localised knowledge systems. The World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) Declaration states: “In the evolution of the Information Society, particular attention must be given to the special situation of Indigenous peoples, as well as the preservation of their heritage and their cultural legacy”.6 Teanau Tuiono concludes in his report that Information and Communication Technologies “are a means for us to achieve other ends. Efficient and appropriate use of ICTs can support the international work that is happening on national and local levels”.7 Tuiono speaks from Aoteaora/New Zealand, where Maori have provided leading examples of both theoretical development and successful and appropriate use of ICT’s.

Kaupapa Maori discourse (with a Maori purpose and agenda) articulates inspirational strategies around notions of critique, resistance, struggle and emancipation (Smith 2004). Inherent cultural hierarchies are present in theoretical constructs. For example, even though some feminist theories are emancipatory in nature, they may also hold potential to silence Indigenous women’s voices through universalising issues around gender (Pihama 2005). As Pihama, Smith and many others have highlighted—there is a need to take strategic control of theoretical spaces and allow our Indigenous stories to be heard within changing new media environments.


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Special nature and emptiness

Indigenous heritage is magnificent in its ability to transcend and inform common perceptions of knowledge and ways of exchange. It is special in nature and as such manifests within unique spaces for this nurturing and sharing. Unfortunately this nature is often undetected by many who lack experience or understanding of its uniqueness in both context and form. In 1993 the Australian Law Reform Commission reported how difficult it is to use existing laws to protect Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights or Indigenous heritage rights.8 These issues include copyright law limitations that favour individualistic authorship rights of artworks and recognised timeframes that span only fifty years. Authenticity is also a critical issue given the increased ability and economic viability of fake reproductions.

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a part of the Indigenous way of being, an experience of being a part of nature since time immeasurable. It is a dynamic body of knowledge and is strongest and perhaps most relevant when localised. Posey affirms this perspective noting that “the basis for TEK is holistic and forms the basis for local-level decision making in areas of contemporary life, including natural resource management, nutrition, food preparation, health, education, and community and social organisation” (Posey 1996, 110). Traditional ecological knowledge emerged in the literature of the 1980s and 1990s now informs diverse disciplines such as geography, social sciences, agriculture, pharmacology, ecology and ethnobotany (Berkes 1999, 1). Sciences were perhaps discovering what Indigenous peoples have always understood—the interconnected nature of life. It was in the post Enlightenment era that Western thought became trapped into Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, and humans distinct from their environment (Berkes, 34). Even now it seems that traditional ecological knowledge is susceptible to Eurocentric interpretation and viewed as a resource rather than a way of living, a view that is evidenced in the growth of knowledge-based trade economies, bioprospectors and genetic modifiers. Indigenous heritage is all too often rationalised as a valid “subject” of study because it can be used for environmental assessment, social development, conservation and health. Disturbingly, there is often a lack of consideration given to the custodians or owners of this knowledge and the impact of exploiting this knowledge. This is a genuine



issue at the digital frontier where innovative practices can involve anything from digitising of Indigenous heritage to genetic sampling. For example, in an audit of 38 Indigenous Knowledge Databases in Northern Australia it was found that only two organisations had “clear policies on returning data to the Aboriginal owners” (Scott 2004, 4).

One the flipside it is important to recognise the work being done in Australia that has shown commitment to building long term successful working relationships with Indigenous communities and elders.9 The School of Australian Indigenous Knowledge Systems at Charles Darwin University has been involved in research that explores digital technologies and the intergenerational transmission of traditional ecological knowledge. In developing a system called TAMI they describe the various projects as being “arranged along a continuum with at one end, official archives with all their formal structure and metadata protocols, and at the other end a completely fluid file management and database system which bears with it no western assumptions about knowledge or the ecology”.10 Flexibility is clearly a prerequisite to any interface in this period of rapid growth and technological change.

Collectively owned, socially based, and continuously evolving Indigenous heritage rights, are a potent consideration for Indigenous new media. Danny Butt (2005) has critically highlighted that “embodied” aspects of oral traditions actually pose a threat to the Creative Commons and open source “movements” that have firmly based themselves within Euro-US epistemology. He goes further, asserting that anti-IP critiques which use class-bound abstract languages are doomed to fail as social movements. There is clearly much to be realised and negotiated in understanding and creating productive space/s for Indigenous peoples as we navigate complex Western legalese and languages of property (Anderson 2005). This brings us to the imperative for effective Indigenous-driven research agendas.

Indigenous engagement and a critical rights agenda

Creative research practice is providing new frameworks for Indigenous engagement and participation in enhanced research processes and outcomes. This is especially significant given that the history of research for Indigenous communities is fraught with disrespectful encounters. Positivist epistemologies produced research


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outcomes aimed at continuing the status quo power relations for Indigenous communities. Bauman (2004) has spoken of a shifting from heavy to light modernity—a territorial expansion throughout “uncounted ‘hearts of darkness’ clamouring for light”.

There is a growing body of work, which seeks to incorporate Indigenous knowledge through participatory research approaches. Sillitoe and Narr (2003) advocate this incorporation through strategies that involve collaborative and interdisciplinary methods, producing a catalyst for rights recognition and effective interventions in communities. Innovative creative practice interventions are emerging in the Australian academic landscape new media research visible,in localised manifestations such as the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre. Gumbala has noted the levels of complexity bound to Yolŋu knowledge systems and the issues apparent in strategic digitising of the Gupapuynu Yolŋu and the importance of research partnerships (Gumbula 2005).

The Jumbunna Enhanced Research Media Project (JERMP) is a pilot project that utilises new media and creative research practice to appropriately enhance research and project outcomes for Indigenous peoples. (JERMP) is located in the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning Research Unit focuses on developing Indigenous research-driven legal and policy advice and interventions. Jumbunna and Ngiya created a short documentary as a strategic response to the encroaching practical reconciliation policies of the Howard government in Australia.11 Our Rights moves to experience creative research practice as a process that demystifies the fundamental tenets of the Indigenous rights agenda. A new media collaboration was devised as a way to reflect on the standard documentary experience and its interventionist outcomes. This Creative Cut reveals the “rhythm of rights” as it manifests within the documentary—Our Rights and its articulation of Indigenous struggle in Australia. Rhythm is explored through a reflective collaboration with performance artist (Ray Bud) who featured in the stylized dance and running man sequences of the original documentary.12 Within this experimental five minute piece we see the struggle for rights in its fluid form, timeless and without shape—existent and nonexistent. This takes place in physical form as a reflective process—a kind of post (post) production. A spliced editing approach draws fluid timeless natural



forms from the documentary (ocean and sky). Ray Bud then composed contemporary beats and marks this flowing, silent narrative—giving light to the dynamic nature of Indigenous activism and its intersections with innovative art forms. Ray Bud is free styling with microphone in hand—eyes wide and painted up for dance. The viewer is forced to contemplate culture, dance and movement as a political expression and assertion of heritage. Ultimately the Creative Cut aims to inspire political and cultural action, recognising that Indigenous rights have powerful rhythms. It reached out from a collective vision—through a collaboration that speaks globally and in a strategic language of rights, evoking movement along a fluid line of engagement. Reflective expression echoes a reclamation of voice and the re-assertion of a hybrid presence in this conflicted and evocative atmosphere.

Fluidity and place—the blurred line

Indigenous struggles often fight for the ability to create or reclaim space and voice, or what Tuan (1977) refers to as freedom associated with spaciousness. These contested locations are not delimited by nuclear boundary lines. These blurred lines also become evident in, for example, the interwoven lines between protest, activism, and terrorism. Globalised convergences are constantly shifting and bearing influence to forms and methods of political engagement. These intersections involve human action, reaction and communication. At the end of virtual networks are our people, and the priority is to nurture wellbeing and support youth as visionaries for tomorrow. In filling the digital void with the light of Indigenous knowledge we have to be mindful of the dangers in moving into a “blinding” overload of information. Indigenous knowledge is shared at appropriate times and often through processes, regulated by reciprocity and the careful nomination of beneficiaries.

This notion of beneficiaries has become important in the face of globalisation and the continued oppression of minority groups, refugees and the poor in Australia. Memmi’s (1974) investigations into the “beneficiaries of colonisation” highlight an important dual aspect to the illegitimate status arguments that many of us have alluded to. He points out that not only did the coloniser come to a land by the accidents of history (here in Australia by way of penal colony) and succeeded in creating a place for himself, but in the process has granted “himself


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astounding privileges to the detriment of those rightfully entitled to them” (Memmi 1974, 9). Global markets have also influenced the actions of world powers in their self-anointed roles as “world police”. The tragedies of the world have led to a newly defined terrorist threat that can never be attributed to the West. This is because the West is always (media) portrayed as the victim. Memmi might not have been surprised at this, pointing out how when the coloniser (or perhaps the State) uses terrorist style tactics the leftist coloniser is embarrassed (Memmi 1974, 31). Linda Smith (2004) has articulated this shifting of “the line” as having very real impacts on Indigenous leadership and activism.

I can also relate to Memmi’s “cheeky” assertion of the right “after so many disastrous and useless colonial wars, to think that his book could have been useful to the coloniser as well as to the colonized?” In one instance Memmi (1974, xvii) equates the end of colonisation with the rebirth of the leftist coloniser—asking if the imagination can go that far? It is certainly an apt question for the parliamentary Left in Australia—who in supporting the demolition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services (ATSIS) have landed themselves in entrenched and unimaginative political position in terms of Indigenous affairs.13 Indigenous places are under constant attack. The regimes and systems that are supposed to protect and support these “places” are vulnerable because they are often established within western legal frameworks, which continue to deny and revoke Indigenous people’s, rights to self-determination.

Nurturing the creative spirit

All over the world, many indigenous peoples live away from their traditional homelands, and yet survive within vibrant cultural communities that continue to show patient understanding towards a colonial society struggling for a legitimate identity. Colonisation has shifted understandings of localised place and perceptions of traditional or historical connections to land and waters. People are connected through relationships, stories and various modes of presence. Presence can be random and diasporic as reflected in resistance, struggle and the forced movement of peoples and their items of heritage. These powerful globalised linkages and exchanges are also realised in a virtual web



of relationships, altering ways for connecting and sharing while also attracting powerful systemic assaults.

Sometimes, these influences operate in a virtual vacuum, manifesting as colonising forms of digital governance. These issues are strengthening Indigenous voice and gaining recognition for the therapeutic qualities of sharing Indigenous experiences of survival and dislocation across community, academic and creative practices. These voices hold true auras of “deadliness”, ultimately imbuing space/s and place/s with a creative spirit that has often been labeled as radical. Martin Luthur King Jr, for example expressed disappointment with “white moderates, white liberals and white Christians’ defining himself as a ‘creative extremist’ who stood paradoxically in ‘the middle’” (Bennet Jr. 1976, 147-148). These convergences must be dealt with in a strategic and positive way. Youth are the future for all of us and it seems that there is a need for creatively inspired strategies to engage and support them in their critical role as custodians of the future. Nerida Blair (2005) eloquently notes that our peoples have already created “powerful tantalisers, which demonstrate Indigenous people’s creativity and our ability to envisage and craft dynamic local solutions” (173). And yet these initiatives are often found in liminal spaces, transcending regular boundaries and emerging as a fluidly “organised coincidence”.14

Innovation in the new media environment will encapsulate both a commitment to Indigenous standpoints and research methodologies but also to the appropriate use of emerging technologies and processes that highlight broader dimensions to the research platform. This is reflected in part through creative research practice and its integration with culturally appropriate new media processes and outcomes. Hybrid forms provide a necessarily fluid engagement tool for action across contested spaces. It is suggested that creative research practice has genuine potential in supporting what Paulo Freire talks about as revolutionary leadership—a premise that exists in all of Indigenous communities for the very fact that we continue to assert our communal identities and cultures. Friere (2000) explains: “Both cultural action for freedom and cultural revolution are an effort to negate the dominating culture culturally, even before the new culture resulting from that negation has become reality” (65). There is no frontier that colonisation will not seek out and we are already aware of its history of feeding on


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Indigenous lands, waters and bodies—both physical and in the realms of knowledge (Battiste, Marie and Youngblood-Henderson 2000). The kind of timelessness that is experienced in this virtual space is perhaps alluring for peoples who strategically assert contested rights and aspirations in constantly shifting, politically fragile environments. Multiple convergences of our living heritage manifest complex issues around protection and respectful recognition of ownership. If creative research practice is able to harness new media in appropriate ways, then we will fully witness the powerful role of Indigenous new media in our fluid, rights-driven struggle for change.

References

Atkinson, Judy. 2000. Privileging Research Methodologies, Cairns. [Unpublished]

Australian Law Reform Commission. 1993. Designs Issues Paper 11, http://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/publist/ip.htm

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Battiste, Marie and Youngblood-Henderson, Sakesh. 2000. Protecting

Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage, A Global Challenge. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Ltd.

Behrendt, Larissa. 2003. Achieving social justice: Indigenous rights and Australia’s future. Annandale, N.S.W: Federation Press.

Bennet Jr, Lerone. 2003. What manner of man? A biography of Martin Luther King. New York: Pocket Books.

Berkes, Fikret. 1999. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management. Philadelphia, PA: Taylor & Francis.

Blair, Nerida. 2005. Treaty review of Achieving Social Justice, by Larissa Behrendt. Balayi: culture, law and colonialism. 7

Brady, Wendy. 1992. Beam me up, Scotty!—Communicating across World Views on Knowledge, Principles and Procedures for the Conduct of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research. Paper presented at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Conference, Harvey Bay. Australia.

Butt, Danny. 2005. Contested Commons/Trespassing Publics—A Public Record. Delhi: The Sarai Programme.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Cultural Action for Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard Educational Review.



Grossman, Michele. 2003. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press.

Janke, Terri. 1998. Our Culture Our Future. Canberra: Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

—. 1999. “Respecting Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights.” University of New South Wales Law Journal 22: no. 2.

—. 2006. “Captured Images: Film Archives and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights”, Journal of Indigenous Policy. 6.

Janke, Terri. and Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board. 2002. New Media Cultures: Protocols for Producing Indigenous Australian New Media. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Australia Council.

Johnson, S. 1997. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: Basic Books.

Kera, D. 2002. The Genius Malignus of Methodology of New Media Research. Southern Review 35: no.3.

Langton, Marcia. 2003. Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television: an essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission.

Manovich, L. 2002. TheLanguage of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.McHugh, Paul G. 2004. Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law: A History

of Sovereignty, Status, and Self-Determination. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Memmi, Albert. 1974. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Trans. Howard Greenfeld. London: Souvenir Press.

Nakata, Martin. 1998. Anthropological texts and Indigenous Standpoints. Journal of Aboriginal Studies. 2.

—, 2004. Indigenous Australian Studies and Higher Education (The Wentworth Lectures). Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

—. 2003. Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. (reprint). In Hudson, Anne Hickling, Julie Matthews & Annette Woods (eds), Disrupting Preconceptions: Postcolonialism and Education.

—. “Ngoonjook.” 1993. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues. 9.


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Nakata, Martin, Byrne, A. A., Nakata, V. S. & Gardiner, G. 2005, Indigenous Knowledge, the Library and Information Service Sector, and Protocols, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, .36: no.2. 9-24.

Pihama, Leonie. 2005. Mana wahine theory: creating space for Maori women’s theories, in Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action, ed Leistyna, Pepi. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Posey, Darrell A. 1996. Traditional Resource Rights, International Instruments for Protection and Compensation for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, The World Conservation Union.

Radoll, P. 2005. “Information Communication Technology—Evidence from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey”. Indigenous Socioeconomic Outcomes: Assessing Recent Evidence. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Canberra: ANU Conference.

Rigney, Lester. 2001 “A first perspective of Indigenous Australian participation in science: Framing Indigenous research towards Indigenous Australian intellectual sovereignty.” Kaurna Higher Education Journal. 7.

Scott, Gary. 2004. Audit of Indigenous Knowledge Databases in Northern Australia, (Draft). School of Australian Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Charles Darwin University, Darwin. 7 April.

Smith, Linda. 2004. “Activism, Leadership and the New Challenges for Indigenous Communities.” Presentation at Dr Charles Perkins AO, Annual Memorial Oration and Prize. University of Sydney.

Smith, Linda. 2004. “Kaupapa Maori Methodology: Our Power to Define Ourselves,” Seminar presented at the School of Education, University of Columbia, New York.

Smith, G H, “Kaupapa Maori Schooling: Implications for Educational Policy Making” Paper presented at the Royal Commission on Social Policy, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington, New Zealand.

Sillitoe, Paul and Julian Barr. 2003.“A Decision Model for the Incorporation of Indigenous Knowledge into Development Projects: Investigating Local Knowledge, New Directions New approaches”, In Negotiating Local Knowledge, ed. Pottier, Johan, Alan Bicker, Paul Sillitoe, London: Pluto Press.



Tuan, Yi-fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tuiono, Teanau. 2005. Report on Indigenous Thematic Planning Conference for Tunisia (WSIS Phase II) and National Connecting Aboriginal Peoples in Canada Forum, April, Ottawa, Canada.

Notes

1 The term “deadly” is a term commonly used in indigenous Australian culture, and could

be defined as effective, terrific, fantastic, or impressive. See http://www1.aiatsis.gov.au/

exhibitions/conference/libconf05/conf05.htm

2 There are a number of aspects to the “Digital Divide”, in a definitional sense it can

encapsulate gaps in access to ICTs (users), gaps in ability to use ICTs (skills), gaps in

actual use (time use), and gap in the impact of use (economic returns). See Radoll, P,

“Information Communication Technology—Evidence from the National Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Social Survey”. Indigenous Socioeconomic Outcomes: Assessing

Recent Evidence. Canberra, August 2005.

3 See National New Media Labs, 1 June 2006 http://www.anat.org.au/inml04/.

4 See Jenny Fraser, Other[wize], 1 June 2006 http://www.geocities.com/dot_ayu/

5 See Cybertribe, http://www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/cybertribe/index.htm, and Blackout

http://www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/cybertribe/blackout/ Examples include Destiny

Deacon, http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/2/Destiny_Deacon/profile/ r e a, http://

www.ozco.gov.au/arts_in_australia/projects/projects_new_media_arts/rea_-_gins_

leapdubb_speak/ Cameron Goold, Indiginet website and links to “Propaganda Klann”

and “videovault”, http://www.indiginet.com.au/ Jason Davidson, “belonging” http://

www.fineartforum.org/Gallery/2000/belonging/index.htm and Christian Thompson

“kangaroo and boomerang jumper” 1 June 2006, http://www.nga.gov.au/Exhibition/

Tactility/Detail.cfm?IRN=120311.

6 Tuiono, Teanau, Report on the Indigenous Thematic Planning Conference for Tunisia

(WSIS Phase II) and the National Connecting Aboriginal Peoples in Canada Forum,

Ottawa, April 2005. At another level agencies like UNESCO have recognised the “digital

divide” and the impact of corporate driven media and have developed programmes

for creative content that aim to boost local content in both traditional and new media

disadvantaged communities of the developing world. See UNESCO Portal, 6 June 2006

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3981&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_

SECTION=201.html

7 Ibid. At another level agencies like UNESCO have recognised the “digital divide” and

the impact of corporate driven media and have developed programmes for creative


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content that aim to boost local content in both traditional and new media disadvantaged

communities of the developing world. See UNESCO Portal 6 June 2006 http://portal.

unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3981&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.

html

8 Australian Law Reform Commission, 1993. Designs Issues 11.

9 For example Dr Richard Baker has built up a strong relationship with Yanyuwa and

Garawa peoples. http://sres.anu.edu.au/people/richard_baker/research/yanyuwa/index.

html

10 Software Requirement Document, Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management in

Northern Australia (IKRMNA)—ARC Linkage Project, (School of Australian Indigenous

Knowledge Systems—Charles Darwin University, Jan 2005).

11 The Ngiya National Institute of Indigenous Law, Policy and Practice has a commitment

to bringing together Indigenous researchers and Indigenous people with experience

in the public sector to discuss matters of importance for policy makers on Indigenous

matters 1 June 2006 http://www.jumbunna.uts.edu.au/ngiya.html

12 The Creative Cut collaboration involved Craybob Productions, Creative Combat,

Jumbunna (UTS) and Ngiya.

13 For detailed analysis and discussion of ATSIC please refer to Jumbunna Research Unit’s

Submission to the Senate Inquiry 1November 2005 http://www.jumbunna.uts.edu.au/

research/ngiya/papers.html

14 See interview with Creative Combat, TVNZ, November 2005.


Mike Leggett and Laurel Evelyn Dyson are non-indigenous Australians interested in the potential of designing new media applications that are sensitive to and productive for indigenous peoples. Their research has focussed on development of new media systems that reflect indigenous world-views, particularly with relation to established knowledge-sharing protocols. They demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to culturally specific knowledge systems, but questions of control and governance are critical.

Strangers on the Land:Place and Indigenous Multimedia Knowledge SystemsBy Mike Leggett and Laurel Evelyn Dyson

Audio-visual storage mediums, such as the ubiquitous handycam, offer new potentials for the representation of information about

the natural environment and the events that have occurred there, and thus for the way the history and significance of place are discussed and disputed, extending oral and written language traditions.

A number of projects in recent years have sought to construct means of navigating video movies concerned with conveying knowledge and experience of place, without recourse to text (e.g., Laurel and Strickland 1994; Naimark 1998; Shipman, Girgensohn and Wilcox 2003; Girgensohn et al. 2004). During this period there has been a growing interest in the representation of Indigenous knowledge and culture through multimedia. Increasingly, Indigenous Australian communities are diversifying their approaches to recording their cultural heritage. Multimedia systems have provided a method of storing these recordings and sharing digital copies of artefacts held in museums and other collections back with Indigenous communities. Several practice-based research projects in this area are currently exploring the way of best achieving this through a-textual, purely graphical interfaces based on video or virtual reality images of the places where the Indigenous cultures originate (Leggett 2005a, 2005b; Leavy 2007; Chesselet n.d.).


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In addition to the challenge of moving away from textual mediation, there are also many other issues that need to be addressed in developing multimedia systems for use by Indigenous communities. One of the most important is the issue of governance and control, ensuring that the translation of Indigenous communities’ knowledge into digital format does not infringe on their knowledge protocols and does not result in significant losses or transformations. Another issue is that each Australian Indigenous culture is connected to a specific place, with traditional knowledge related to specific landscape features. Generic multimedia system developments may not accommodate appropriately such specificity. Each community requires its own system that has the power to represent the intricacies of a culture as it has arisen in a place.

Some interactive computer-based systems that accentuate the importance of place and belonging in Indigenous culture have shown interesting potential and may acknowledge the oral and graphical expressive powers of many Indigenous peoples better than text-based modes of expression.

Our initial investigations commenced in the mid-90s with seed-funding from the Australian Film Commission for Strangers on the Land, an “interactive multimedia documentary” of a landscape on the New South Wales South Coast. Here we evaluate the project and describe a subsequent prototype system, PathScape. We outline current objectives and planned approaches to advancing the development, in collaboration with a specific Indigenous user group. We wish to move a step back from the design of the Indigenous multimedia knowledge system itself, and instead consider the design of authoring software which will allow Indigenous people themselves to create their own systems for storing and viewing their culture and knowledge. In this way we believe that differing requirements for the representation of place across Indigenous communities may be accommodated.

Place is an important concept in many cultures, and particularly for Indigenous peoples in Australia, in contrast to non-Indigenous Australians, whose sense of place in Australia dates from 1788 and is often mixed with connections to ancestral and religious homelands elsewhere. Aboriginal Australians have been in Australia from time immemorial and therefore their culture has grown out of this place ab origine, “from the beginning”. Moreover, place is a central issue in


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Indigenous peoples’ struggle for recognition and identity in the current era. As Matutjara author Jessie Lennon (2000, 147) puts it:

We’re the people that have been here longer. I’m an old woman now and I been here… I’m the one who know everyway. Ngura nyangatja nyayuu—This is my home!

A repository of history and events, the landscape for Indigenous Australians is a “hallowed place of worship and the vehicle for the livelihood of all aboriginal clans” (Leavy 2007, 161). It takes on a deep religious significance since across the land the travels of the ancestral beings are recorded in dreaming tracks or songlines, forming a great network of history, spiritual power and resources to which people are connected through a system of mutual obligation. “Country”1 is not inert, but a living being who knows and hears, is happy or sorrowful, is conscious and has a will to life (Rose 1996). Connection to place relates particular groups or individuals to particular tracts of land (Smith et al., 2000).

Importantly, connectedness involves responsibilities to sustain the land through artistic representation:

Aboriginal culture was passed on through oral traditions, art, dance and rituals. Aboriginal legends served an important purpose for teaching, understanding and interpreting the connection of aboriginal people to the land they relied upon to survive in the world they lived. (Leavy 2007, 160)

In traditional culture representations of place were either oral/performance-based (song, dance, story telling, ceremony) or graphical (painting, sculpture, maps). Often more than one mode of representation was employed at the one time, each serving as a reinforcement for the others:

A story was always linked to learning tracks, parts of the land itself and often also to animals, none of which changed fast. The physical features of the land thus functioned as mnemonics. In some cases, the story was also accompanied by illustration, a piece of rock art or a carved tree.


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This supported the storyteller’s memory. Also, the story was generally accompanied by a dance and a song, which would provide further reminders for a forgetful storyteller. (Sveiby and Skuthorpe 2006, 55)

For Aboriginal artist John Moriarty (2000, 250), Indigenous artistic representations of place have major implications for everyone, not just Indigenous Australians:

Not many people can truly understand the spirituality of Aboriginal culture, how it relates through design to people and the formation of the land… I have been trying to impress on people (in my case for nearly forty years) that this is something all Australians—white and black—can relate to, so they can understand this country and feel more a part of it than they do if they think of themselves just as transplanted Europeans.

Another significant factor is an urgency to retain Indigenous culture in the face of the passing away of elders. Some urge that accommodation needs to be made for young Indigenous people who would like to combine their heritage with Western values and the mainstream culture (Leavy 2007). However, the traditional and the modern should not be seen as antithetical since the expansion of Indigenous art has often found expression in new oral (film, country and western singing, rock music, hip-hop) and graphical (acrylics, watercolours, photography, printmaking, batik) forms. Indigenous Australians have also explored the potential of multimedia technologies, CD-ROMs (examples include Moordidj; Yanardilyi-Cockatoo Creek; Lore of the Land), and websites, as new means of representation and memorisation (Dyson et al. 2005, 2006).

Indigenous multimedia knowledge systems (also commonly referred to as Indigenous living cultural archives) are an advanced form of multimedia technology. Indigenous communities in Australia and elsewhere have been exploring these systems as a way of preserving their culture, passing it onto the next generation and, more rarely, sharing it with non-Indigenous people. The design of these systems is complex, involving issues of control over intellectual property stored in the system, restrictions as to who can access material, the ordering of material in the database according to Indigenous knowledge categories,



and the search for an interface that is culturally appropriate. To date, a number of approaches to their design have been investigated. One of the most common has employed a cross platform database package such as FileMaker Pro linked to an interface based on the familiar desktop metaphor. Nyirti, used at the Wangka Maya Centre in the Pilbara in Western Australia, is an example of this type of system and has the advantage of being cheap to implement and maintain, even if too heavily text-based to be fully adequate for users coming from oral cultural traditions (Injie and Haintz 2004). While still retaining screens of text, Hunter (2002) has successfully produced a database which acknowledges Indigenous knowledge concepts of access and intellectual property through rights management features.2

It is important for the design of these systems to reflect the context of use. Ara Irititja, a system developed for the Anangu people of Central Australia, exists on a mobile workstation called the niri niri, which can be placed on the back of an all terrain vehicle and taken where it is needed, outdoors or in. The niri niri is also heatproof, dustproof, mouse-proof and with an uninterruptible solar-generated power supply (Hughes and Dallwitz 2007).

However systems designers have attempted to introduce stronger ideas of place to interface design, working from the conceptual model of a “walk through country”. Systems under development, such as the video-based PathScape and the virtual reality (VR) Digital Songlines, allow cultural items to become available as the user moves through a representation of the landscape (Leggett 2005; Leavy 2007). Another prototype being developed for the Himba people of Namibia in Africa, the Fountain of Stories Living Knowledge Archive, also allows access to cultural recordings through a graphical landscape setting based on the Himba homestead or kraal (Chesselet n.d.). These three prototypes still face many design and technological challenges before they become fully operational systems that are ready for adoption by Indigenous community groups.

There are three constraints that need to be addressed. The first is economic. Indigenous peoples are amongst the poorest in Australia, where information technology is expensive (Dyson 2005). Though the off-the-shelf database software tools are simple and cheap, they are not necessarily culturally appropriate. VR prototypes, in particular,


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pose issues because of the high cost of development: systems utilising these advanced technologies require development teams from outside the community, often at considerable cost. Secondly, Indigenous communities have specific needs in relation to storing and accessing cultural material (McConaghy and Snyder 2000). Hard-coded, one-off implementations, such as Ara Irititja (Hughes and Dallwitz 2007), do not provide the flexibility to be adopted successfully by other communities or even to be modified through time. Thirdly, as part of Indigenous people’s desire to achieve self-determination, there is a need to exercise control over the multimedia knowledge system. Computerised systems “can never be completely extricated from the language, culture, and context in which they are designed and implemented” (Schoenhoff 1993, 10). Systems designed by Indigenous people may have the best chance of being consistent with Indigenous cultural and social goals. PathScape assumes that video is intuitive to use and could provide an appropriate tool to involve people without specialist IT skills. Many communities already have skills and resources in video and sound recording through remote area television production (Langton 1994).

The design of systems for media files centres on the problems of multimedia organisation and retrieval (Kuchinsky et al. 1999). Memory industry research projects have been primarily concerned with the rapid and “automatic” storage of visual media using text for classification and thus retrieval purposes. This approach is inappropriate for systems storing and displaying Indigenous cultural items, which are likely to be visual or audio files rather than text files. A non-textual interface should retrieve items from visual displays rather than from items defined by descriptions in text.

More promising, although often derived from less formal research approaches, have been explorations that move the representation of the storage system away from the textual toward a time-space representational system. Software tools such as ArcView, employing a topographical metaphor capable of recording time and place, are used widely in disciplines like archaeology and industries related to environmental planning, water and land management, urban layout, national parks, mining and agriculture, etc. These are specialised tool sets based on data derived from the scientific method of measurement using GIS satellite data combined with media files.



The City of Fairfield in Sydney, for instance, commissioned a system in 2001 based on this tool for relating the area’s history, Peopling Fairfield. While enabling retrieval of information and stories layered into locations and places, the system still relies heavily on the conventions of text and book. For example, the home page is almost pure text and most of the linked pages are also heavily embedded in text. However, it does use a soundtrack about the Darug and Gundangurra peoples of Fairfield, with excerpts of interviews from local representatives of these two communities accessed via an interactive map of the area. Links to this recording on the map are textual though and navigation to the map is also via text hyperlinks. Thus we have a system which employs representations of place but relies heavily on text-based augmentation, which reduces its usefulness to potential users for whom written text of tradition is a significant distortion as well as exclusionary.

In an attempt to move away from text more completely and to explore more thoroughly notions of place as an organizing principle for multimedia files, two prototype systems were developed by one of the present authors. Though the initial motivation for the first system was independent of Indigenous community needs, it was believed at the time that it would have a strong resonance with important aspects of Indigenous Australian culture. Because of this it was presented to an Aboriginal community and their feedback incorporated into the second prototype. In particular, the central conceptual metaphor of a “walk through country,” as interpreted in both prototypes through video, could provide more appropriate metaphors for Indigenous multimedia knowledge systems than those now in use.

Strangers on the Land is a prototype system produced by five collaborating media artists. The prototype has an interface and navigation system that gives access “narratives” by their association with a specific place or location, or series of locations. The objective for the prototype was to test the notion of “interactive documentary” whereby multiple layers of information would be associated with a particular place and series of locations within that place linked together by a Path, represented in this prototype by a video of a bush track. The artists, having researched and gathered a wide variety of material for inclusion, sought to provide for the audience a cinematic experience of a selected place. This experience would be extended through audience


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interaction to become a means whereby the audience could accumulate knowledge about the place, mediated by their choices. Each of the movies encountered in the interactive space of this prototype employ a range of genres and narrative content that set out to describe or tell a story about a location on the Path. In addition, layers of meaning emerge and co-exist within the present, future and past of the place.

The Strangers on the Land prototype has the idea of place deeply embedded in its design and construction. The conceptual metaphor of a “walk through country” is brought to life by a central image of a video representation of a Path through the Bush over a tract of beach-dunes-bush-wetlands-rainforest. This image takes centre stage at all times, except when the user chooses to access a media file attached to a specific location, so throwing insight onto the history, story, culture or background of that place in the landscape. The easy gestural navigation, using the mouse and cursor, facilitates this sense of engaging with the place as one would walking along a track, turning back, or sometimes looking around while standing on one spot. The coloured borders and realistic sound effects of waves, leaves rustling, insects, bird calls, etc., reinforce the sense of place and the transitions from one environment to another.

The prototype was demonstrated to many individuals and several groups, including an Aboriginal group resident near to where the images in the prototype had been gathered. It had been anticipated from the beginning that there would be crossover aspects between the project and Indigenous concerns. Emerging from the many responses from the Aboriginal community, the issue of specificity was of particular interest. The source and derivation of an image or sound needed to acknowledge its connection within the Aboriginal communities of the area and their ownership or custodianship of it. Whether this be a bird, a person’s recorded voice, a painting from a national archive, a plant—in short, just about any identifiable object within the “memory system” of the prototype—needed to be traceable within the belief system of the group and their concepts of intellectual property.

The decision was taken to provide users of the second prototype, PathScape, with a choice—to navigate the work as had been intended, applying the metaphor of the walk up and down a track between two points; or to cross into a domain of word-based indexing enabling



users to navigate as they would from the contents page of a book and so retrieving from the incorporated database all that was known about a sequence or image just seen. This would include source information, such as ascription to the Indigenous community to whom it belonged, and would assist with copyright administration. It was believed that the visual approach would not be compromised as accessing the source information could be achieved by adding one additional “hot-icon” within the interface on-screen layout.

The final prototype contained two major additional features to manage the data. Firstly, the image icons were removed and replaced with the more abstract colour circles, functioning in the same way (Figure 10-1). Secondly, “shadow” buttons were added behind the coloured circles and were linked to text-based metadata such as: title, source, text transcription, content list, etc. (Leggett 2005b).

Figure 10-1: Screen grab: the end of a node movie, with colour-coded circles.

The PathScape prototype enables the user to orientate within a given topography in a way not dissimilar to the mnemonic system a pedestrian might use to navigate a regular route in the country or the city. Interaction with the representation of the surroundings using the Point of View (POV) cinematic idiom reveals hidden evidence, concealed information and comment, delivered as stories and as samples of discrete information. It enables the interacting subject to put together


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knowledge of the place expressed through movies of its inhabitants, both individual and community, in addition to the added information made available through the colour circles and extra shadow buttons. The experience constructs meaning as part of a gathering process, thereby adding to the interacting subject’s knowledge base of the place. Under these conditions, meaning in the landscape emerges as a constantly shifting series of conclusions, the consequences of which flow on from the individual decision-making process about subsequent interaction.

It became apparent to us from our experience with PathScape that, in order to avoid the technology of text-based indexing of files, careful and incremental movement in the design process would be required. The proximity of the authoring and user functions for situating action were key to the design process. The need to develop an authoring tool enabling individuals and groups to design their own representation of place—a mnemonic system that could link their narratives recorded in video—became increasingly apparent. Moreover, the tools would need to respond to different representations of place in effecting links between videos as digital media files.

Responding to the diversity of need, our approach to design will be seeding rather than planning. In collaboration with an Indigenous community, the Indigitrax Project plans to avoid a “top-down” approach, taking a step back from the design of the Indigenous multimedia knowledge system itself and instead, collaboratively designing and developing authoring software which will allow each community to create systems for storing and viewing culture and knowledge. By placing the “authoring tool” into the hands of Indigenous people, each community will be able to create a multimedia knowledge system that reflects their particular culture and their community’s specific needs.

This “praxis of design” will later enable communities to develop a computer-based system or systems as an aid to sustaining, growing, preserving and transmitting their culture to successive generations. Our focus will be upon the early design stages, using meta-design as a conceptual framework. Meta-design is “…another species of design, where the artefacts being designed are themselves interfaces for designing” (Lieberman 2005). The collaborative project becomes a “…creative process defin[ing] a ‘seed’ able to generate endless variations



recognisable as belonging to the same idea but open to change” (Giaccardi 2005).

We plan to incorporate Indigenous protocols within our meta-design approach and, ultimately, in the Indigitrax tools. These protocols are well documented and cover both traditional cultural protocols, and more recent media and archiving protocols (e.g., Janke 2002; Museums Australia 1998; Byrne, Garwood, Moorcroft and Barnes 1995). The incorporation of protocols into Indigenous multimedia knowledge systems is essential, acknowledging cultural sensitivities regarding the display of traditional knowledge and artefacts. Indigenous people have concerns over who has the right to knowledge and do not wish unauthorized members of even their own community, let alone outsiders, gaining access to material that is seen as sacred or secret, viewable only by the initiated or by people of a certain gender (Radoll 2004).

Although Indigenous communities across the Australian continent share protocols of behaviour, they possess wide variation in cultural forms and knowledge specific to place. Whilst preserving artefacts and connections with place forms the basis of recent digital archiving projects, these follow systems of storage and retrieval based on librarianship and museology inappropriate to Indigenous concepts. Multimedia knowledge systems appropriate to Indigenous culture, particularly its oral and graphical strengths, need to be developed acknowledging Indigenous knowledge protocols. Key issues include embodiment of a conceptual model which is founded in Indigenous culture, security concerns over who has access to secret or sacred knowledge; protection of intellectual property, ease of use and navigation; cost-effectiveness. Any system importantly should allow for community diversity and cultural change over time and provide community control over content, design, development and implementation.

References

Chesselet, J. n.d. The Living Archive Project: Mapping Time and Space. Cape Town: Doxa Productions.

Dyson, L.E., and J. Underwood. 2005. “Indigenous People on the Web”. Collaborative Electronic Commerce Technology and Research Conference (CollECTeR LatAm 2005). Talca, Chile. 1-11.


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Dyson, L.E., et al.. 2006. “ICTs for Intercultural Dialogue: An Overview of UNESCO’s Indigenous Communications Project”. Fifth International Conference on Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication (CATaC), Tartu, Estonia, 28 June—1 July 2006. 340-359.

Giaccardi, E. 2005. “Metadesign as an Emergent Design Culture”. Leonardo 38.4. 343-349.

Girgensohn, A. et al.. 2004. “Designing Affordances for the Navigation of Detail-on-Demand Hypervideo”. ACM Advanced Visual Interfaces Proceedings. 290-297.

Hughes, M., and J. Dallwitz. 2007. “Ara Irititja: Towards Culturally Appropriate It Best Practice in Remote Indigenous Australia”. Information Technology and Indigenous People. Eds. L.E. Dyson, M. Hendriks and S. Grant. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.146-158.

Hunter, J. 2002. “Rights Markup Extensions for the Protection of Indigenous Knowledge”. Global Communities Track, WWW2002. Honolulu, USA.

Injie, L., and F. Haintz. 2004. “The Natural Development of Wangka Maya into the Direction of a Knowledge Centre”. Indigenous Studies—Sharing the Cultural and Theoretical Space. Canberra: AIATSIS.

Kuchinsky, A., et al.. 1999. “Fotofile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System”. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: The CHI is the Limit. Pittsburgh, PA: ACM Press. 496-503.

Langton, M.1994. “Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation”. Race and Class, 35.4. 89-106.

Lazarev, Y. N. 1994. “The Art of Metadesign”. Leonardo 27.5, Prometheus: Art, Science and Technology in the Former Soviet Union: Special Issue. 423-25.

Leavy, B. 2007. “Digital Songlines: Digitising the Arts, Culture and Heritage Landscape of Aboriginal Australia”. Information Technology and Indigenous People. Eds. L.E. Dyson, M. Hendriks and S. Grant. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing. 159-169.

Leggett, M. 2005a. “Indexing Audio-Visual Digital Media: The Pathscape Prototype”. Scan, Sydney: Macquarie University.



Leggett, M. 2005b. “Pathscape: Indexing Audio-Visual Media”. Creativity & Cognition 2005. Ed. E.A. Edmonds. Goldsmiths College, London: ACM. 236-39.

Lennon, J. 2000. I’m the One that Know This Country: The Story of Jessie Lennon of Coober Pedy. Compiled by M. Madigan. Canberrra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Lieberman, H. 2005. “Preface”. End-User Development. Eds. H. Lieberman, F. Paterno and V. Wulf. Dortrecht: Kluwer/Springer.

‘Lore of the Land’. 1999. CD-ROM, Fraynework Multimedia, Victoria.‘Moorditj—Australian Indigenous Cultural Expressions’. 1998. CD-

ROM, The Moorditj Consortium / Australia on CD, Australian Federal Government.

Moriarty, J. 2000. Saltwater Fella. With E. McHugh. Ringwood: Viking.‘Peopling Fairfield” Website. City of Fairfield. 1.9.2004. <http://acl.arts.

usyd.edu.au/projects/consulting/fairfield/index.html>.Shipman, F., A. Girgensohn, and L. Wilcox. 2003. “Hyper-Hitchcock:

Towards the Easy Authoring of Interactive Video” Interact Conference Proceedings.

Smith, C., H. Burke, and G.K. Ward. 2000. “Globalisation and Indigenous Peoples: Threat or Empowerment?” Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. Eds. C. Smith and G.K. Ward. Vancouver: UBC Press. 1-24.

Sveiby, K.E., and T. Skuthorpe. 2006. Treading Softly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World’s Oldest People. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

‘Yanardilyi—Cockatoo Creek’. 1998. CD-ROM, Tanami Network Pty Ltd, N.T.

Yates, F.A. 1966. The Art of Memory (1992 ed.). London: Pimlico.

Notes

1 “Country” is Aboriginal English for a clan’s traditional lands, the place to which one

belongs.

2 Hunter’s Indigenous Rights Management System protects Indigenous rights to the contents

of the database using XrML, or eXtensible rights Markup Language. This tags items with

conditions of usage, tracks digital content movement and also encrypts and decrypts

contents (Hunter 2002). The management system is compatible with museum archiving

standards such as Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, widely used to describe multimedia

materials (http://dublincore.org).


Graffiti has an indexical relationship to place, being a claim to and against property and territory. Both new media and graffiti are fundamentally urban phenomena, emerging from a complex range of signification practices that gather in the city. MacDowall draws analogies between the ways that new media practices and graffiti describe space, and also documents ways that graffiti have been influential on the spatial metaphors used to describe the new media environment. How does the digital tag relate to the graffiti tag? For MacDowall both function as a kind of map or locative interface, heavily customised for a particular user/viewer. However, the irony is that new media’s standardisation of data allows the maps to function in the service of both documentation of graffiti and for the development of anti-graffiti technologies. Perhaps it is by moving to less “open” new media systems that networks can be established for creative expression while avoiding surveillance? Graffiti artists are known for a performative identity based around a tag name and a distinctive style which seeks recognition among a specific community rather than an abstract “public”, even while the extent to which a particular piece is public is an important marker of its audacity or value.

The Graffiti Archive and the Digital CityLachlan MacDowall

Forms of new media have regularly appropriated graffiti as a model for their operation, either as an aesthetic device for the design and marketing of commercial hardware and software, or as a conceptual tool for understanding flows of information within contemporary urban environments. In this process, graffiti provides both content and concept.

On the one hand, graffiti offers a visual style and a certain sub-cultural cachet that gives emerging technology an illicit, anti-authoritarian resonance. For example, the website for Escape From Woomera (2005), a modification of the PC game Half-life in which players attempt to break out of an Australian refugee detention centre, argues that “the videogame is the most rapidly evolving, exciting, subversive and feared


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cultural medium in the world today. It’s akin to graffiti on the cultural landscape”. The subversive potential of graffiti and videogames was further reinforced by a decision of the Australian Government’s Office of Film and Literature Classification to refuse classification to the Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (2006), a video game depicting the activities of a novice graffiti writer in a futuristic city.

Graffiti also makes available models for thinking about writing, textual interfaces, visual literacies and forms of navigation, sociability and broadcasting in contemporary city spaces. Graffiti practices—particularly the tradition of tagging—model an individualised, highly mobile, geographically engaged subject that is not dissimilar from an ideal, late-capitalist consumer. As Iain Sinclair (1998) notes in his analysis of London graffiti, “the [graffiti] tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic” (26).

As Sinclair suggests, graffiti does not provide an escape from the conditions of late capitalism. Not only are graffiti forms now highly commodified and visible in art, design and advertising, the cleaning and prevention of graffiti is itself a significant growth industry, which has also harnessed new media technology. This chapter investigates the complex relationship between graffiti, new media and urban spaces, beginning with graffiti’s shift from a marginal cultural practice to a highly visible, global phenomenon across the twentieth century. Secondly, it examines the similarities in the contemporary uses of new media by a range of graffiti stakeholders across three related fields: tagging, archiving and mapping urban space.

Twentieth-century graffiti

In his 1960 book of photographs of Parisian graffiti, the Hungarian-born photographer Brassaï marvelled at the rapid transformation of graffiti from a minor, peripheral element of the urban landscape into an area of cultural and aesthetic value. “Objects first of horror, later of curiosity, and then of scholarly study,” he wrote, “in a single generation they have been transformed into prestigious works of art in their own right” (9). Brassaï himself played an important role in this process. From the early 1930s until the late 1950s, he made numerous excursions into


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the working-class districts of Paris, using his camera to document the signs carved into the “long, chalky walls” of old apartment buildings (5). His collection of photographs of disfigured faces, Aztec masks, hearts, crude skulls and menageries of beasts influenced a generation of the French avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Joan Miró and Jean Dubuffet (Brassaï 5; Varnedoe 79-80). As Kirk Varnedoe (1991) argues, Brassaï saw this modern graffiti as akin to the primitive rituals of cave painting, in accord with “a familiar Surrealist association between the glamorously “dangerous” mysteries of urban lowlife and the mysteries of the deeper psyche” (79).

In conversation with Picasso, Brassaï emphasised the role of the camera in documenting and producing graffiti as an object of aesthetic value. “More than any other form of artistic endeavour,” he writes, “graffiti are dependent on photography” (8). Brassaï’s photographs are but one famous example of the many ways in which anonymous, prolific, ephemeral graffiti forms have been transformed by other media. In his studies of the development of graffiti in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, Joe Austin notes the role photography, graffiti writers’ printed newsletters and later, video magazines, have played in the dissemination of graffiti as cultural practice (Austin 1996 and 2001).

A key aspect of the interactions between graffiti and media forms is the way graffiti is reproduced beyond its initial spatial context. After 1950, Brassaï realised the limitations of his early documentary method. He took to supplementing his photographs with small sketches and diagrams noting their location, allowing him to return and rephotograph them in various stages of decay. He also reported a conversation with Picasso about whether there are different styles of graffiti for each country. Picasso insisted that there were distinctive categories of national graffiti: “Italian and Spanish graffiti—I know them well—bear no likeness to Parisian graffiti” (Brassaï 1960, 137). While Brassaï’s photographs removed and abstracted graffiti from the immediate environs of Parisian laneways and culs-du sac, his collection opened up broader questions about graffiti’s relationship to other spatial categories such as the city, region and nation.

Following Brassaï, this question of graffiti’s relationship to urban space was taken up by another resident of Paris, the French philosopher and historian Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de



Certeau (1984) used an image of graffiti to illustrate his argument about the kinds of spatial practices that exist in modern urban environments. In a section titled “Walking in the City,” de Certeau argues that a subject’s movement through space forms a kind of grammar, a system of “pedestrian rhetoric” and “spatial phrasings” (102). For de Certeau, urban space is transformed by those who navigate through it. At street level, walkers change a “coherent and totalising” environment into a series of heterogenous zones, treated to “swellings, shrinking and fragmentations” (101-102). Though de Certeau argues this process of transforming space cannot be fixed, the image he chose as exemplary of this process is a form of graffiti, though one that, by the late 1970s, had displaced Brassaï’s Parisian scratchings in the popular imagination:

if […] an illustration were required, we could mention the fleeting images, yellowish-green and metallic blue calligraphies that howl without raising their voices and emblazon themselves on the subterranean passages of the city, “embroideries” composed of letters and numbers, perfect gestures of violence painted with a pistol, Shivas made of written characters, dancing graphics whose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the rumble of subway trains: New York graffiti. (102)

The city of New York became shorthand for the development of a new style of graffiti, based on spray-painted ornamentalised signatures. Echoing the earlier shift from Paris to New York as a centre of modernist art production, the development and international spread of New York-derived spray can graffiti in the 1980s played a significant role in the globalisation of graffiti as a cultural practice.

Despite the fact that much of this process was based on narrow repetition and, as Christopher Heathcote (2000) argues, “many teen writers… have no higher aspiration than to produce provincial copies of famous New York pieces” (7), there were also persistent adaptations, “localisations” and indigenous traditions which affirmed Picasso’s insistence on the distinctive national character of graffiti (Ganz 2004). This tension between the simple repetition and mindless mimicry of New York style graffiti and its adaptation and juxtaposition with forms of local graffiti exemplifies the complex flows of globalised culture, which, as Arjun Appadurai and others have argued, simultaneously


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generates homogeneity and difference. In spatial terms, this process can also describe graffiti’s de-territorialisation, in which images and styles of graffiti circulate beyond their original sites and become embedded, re-territorialised, in new contexts.

These processes continue to affect graffiti production itself, as practitioners adapt to the increasing circulation of images. Aotearoa graffiti writer Webs notes that the placement of his graffiti is important, not just the resulting photograph:

For me this is very important at the moment. This is also why most of my spots are done without permission. The photo tells the story of the spot and provides a memento of that night. Whether or not people will physically see my piece in front of their eyes, I paint for the photo, and to explore new terrain… I get very bored with legal walls because the spot provides no challenge and tells no story. I like when the photo makes you ask questions, like an unsolved mystery! (“Interview with WEBS” 2005, 14)

The abstraction from location present even in Brassaï’s careful cataloguing of Parisian graffiti and exploited by contemporary graffitists like Webs, is increased exponentially in an era of new media. The interchanges between contemporary graffiti and new media, encompass a range of technologies (digital photography and video, websites, mobile phones, locative media, gaming) and a range of interests (police, sociologists and criminologists, new technology companies, new media artists, cleaning companies, cultural institutions and graffitists themselves). These interchanges demonstrate the persistence of spatial categories, despite the mass circulation of de-territorialised digital images of graffiti. As a cultural practice, graffiti also enables a remapping of urban space, providing new media with fruitful models for the negotiation of actual urban spaces and decentralised networks of information. As Ivor Miller argues, “the Web is really an extension of graffiti” (142).

Tagging

Digital graffiti, defined as “public annotation of multimedia content” or a system supporting “contextual asynchronous discourse,” has been



another common appropriation of graffiti in the realm of new media (Carter; Griswold). Digital graffiti systems such as Grafedia or Yellow Arrow draw on the concept of a graffiti tag as an intuitive and individual marker of place and emphasize the role of communities of users in adding content. However much of his content is like street graffiti, a highly personalised or idiosyncratic response to place, more an archive of private memorials than a new form of public discourse. Typically using a combination of mobile and web-based technology, users can attach text or image to a particular geographic location, marked with a sticker and code, in the case of Yellow Arrow art project, or with a handwritten email address, as in John Geraci’s Grafedia project (Yellow Arrow; Grafedia).

In contrast, Jeff Rice has argued that the spray-painted graffiti of Detroit signify only a familiar modernity of urban decay, appearing on “the remnants of the industrial age: trains, factory walls, abandoned buildings, highway bypasses, and street signs” (Rice 2005). Gripped by another round of urban renewal, with campaigns like “Digital Detroit” placing new media at the centre of economic development, Rice argues for the potential of digital tags to act as a model for re-imagining the urban:

Whereas the industrial city was marked by graffiti tags, the information city is marked by the less familiar, XML driven tag...the meta-level mark-up used to categorise information in both referential and non-referential ways. Popularised on websites like the image sharing site Flickr, the social bookmarking system Del.icio.us, and the link hub Metafilter, tags allow writers to designate their own names and attributes to information (as opposed to relying on previous categorical systems in circulation).

For Rice, the meta-tag generates assemblages, rewriting the spaces of the city and generating digital networks. However, in contrast to the democratic, self-organising potential of these participatory digital tagging systems, more official, centralised version of the system have been instituted. An example is the E-graffiti application trialled at Cornell University, in which users are offered a list of text notes on portable computers, based on their location on the campus wireless networks (Carrier). Using Global Positioning System coordinates,


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E-graffiti checks the wireless network access points to work out which building users are in. Rice argues that, in contrast to centralised systems such as E-graffiti, new formulations of Detroit emerge out of collective discursive constructions that are in opposition to the government rebranding of the city.

In Rice’s nexus of new media and graffiti, graffiti is relegated to a disappearing industrial age from where it is unable to usefully remap the spaces of the city, signifying only in familiar ways. In contrast, for the Latvian artist Kriss Salmanis, graffiti functions as an innovative method for mapping the city (“Kriss Salmanis”). Salmanis’ 2003 piece Un Ar Reizi Nãks Tas Brîdis (And That Time Will Come) compiles stills of stencilled robotic figure spray painted across a city into an animated sequence, in which the figure marches towards the viewer, as city scenes flash up in the background. This work points to problems with Rice’s model, (in which new media supersedes and inhabits the supposedly outdated graffiti forms). Rice (2005) cites Jean-François Lyotard’s contention that a new form of narrative does not consist simply of “additional information” but instead “comes from arranging data in a new way… This new arrangement is usually achieved by connecting together series of data that were previously held to be independent.” By linking the disparate sites in a new structure, And That Time Will Come rewrites and reforms Latvian city spaces into a new assemblage through a combination of new media and graffiti forms.

Archiving

The sheer number of examples of graffiti in most contemporary cities, their geographic spread, and ephemeral character, makes any comprehensive archiving a near impossibility. Although no single store of images exists, graffiti practitioners, researchers and police in Australia have been selectively photographing graffiti since the 1950s, each with their own set of criteria. For example, graffiti practitioners routinely record their own work or other graffiti considered to have aesthetic value, while police photographers in many jurisdictions such as Victoria and Auckland record examples of graffiti as evidence of offences.

This uneven archiving of graffiti has been transformed by digital technology and the Internet. For example, Art Crimes was one of the first



graffiti websites and is now a major hub for graffiti on the Internet. It was established in 1994 by Susan Farrell with a few photos of graffiti in Atlanta and Prague. The site now contains thousands of images from 445 cities and attracts 30,000 hits per day. Art Crimes archives a particular type of graffiti deemed to have aesthetic value, with the site’s authors claiming that they want to “spread the truth that this kind of graffiti, called “writing” is being done by artists who call themselves ‘writers,’ not by gangs” (original emphasis)” (Farrell and Webb 2004).

However, the web has also been used to archive information for the purpose of reducing graffiti. Apart from private law enforcement data-bases, there is also a burgeoning network of anti-graffiti groups, such as GriT, the Graffiti Response and Information Team, a community initiative developed in Alberta, Canada. These groups store and share intelligence, statistics and photographs of graffiti with the aim of apprehending graffiti practitioners (Draper 2004). Electronic databases are commonly used to record graffiti damage and calculate the cost of cleaning.

Graffiti cleaning industries also make use of new media technology to archive the successful cleaning of graffiti. Workers at Melbourne company Glad Cleaning use a smart phone that includes web access and a digital camera: “When we see graffiti we can write down a description of it and take a picture. So if another graffito is done we can prove it’s been cleaned up” (O’Neill 2005). In the UK, Lewisham council are encouraging residents to report incidents of graffiti and other anti-social behaviour by sending picture evidence via their camera phone (Tripney 2005).

In all of these archiving activities, the documentation of graffiti remains problematic. Photography, far from resulting in a transparent system of representation, typically results in a generic series of images divorced from location or context. In the Art Crimes site, national, regional and city-based descriptors are used to structure the images. At a more detailed level, the Graffiti Archaeology project chronicles the evolution of graffiti in key sites around San Francisco by overlaying photographs of graffiti sites from the mid-1980s to the present, allowing the viewer to explore the visual evolution of specific locations such as the distinctive Belmont tunnel entrance. The effect is a timelapse collage that reconstructs a spatial and temporal context for the graffiti and highlights its collective, cumulative nature. (Graffiti Archaeology


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Web site). As the graffiti washes over walls like a tide, the spaces are animated as in de Certeau’s description, with “swellings, shrinking and fragmentations” (101-102).

In contrast, a project undertaken by Australian criminologists employs similar technology to different effect, representing graffiti as a minor phenomenon of the surface that has no effect on the solid architecture of the inner city grid. Researchers have used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, a system for storing and analysing spatial data, to map instances of graffiti in the city of Wollongong, as part of a study investigating the spatio-temporal links between physical disorder and fear of crime in urban spaces (Doran and Lees 2004). The result is a more abstract representation of the city, with instances of graffiti recorded without aesthetic distinction or weighting, appearing as colourful clusters of activity over a survey map of the town.

Urban space

Graffiti is a distinctively urban phenomenon, and in the case of the New York, one that is seen as arising as a response to the bleak spaces of the “concrete jungle”. While local councils and government implement graffiti cleaning programs, new media artists have used large-scale projectors to extend the reach of graffiti in new, but non-permanent, ways. The results of “Fi5e’s” Graffiti Analysis project—digital images showing the process of tags being drawn—were projected on the sides of buildings around New York (“Graffiti Analysis”). Similarly, the outdoor project titled Playground ZEDZbeton 3.0 by MUA projects graffiti images by local graffiti artist ZEDZ, chosen because his monolithic letters “emanat[e] architectural power,” producing urban space “as a variable, treacherous terrain” (Van Weeden 2003). Both Graffiti Analysis and Playground ZEDZbeton make use of graffiti in ways that highlight its ability to interpret urban space, rather than recycling graffiti imagery as a signifier of the decay of industrial modernity.

At the same time, graffiti appears in the more formal virtual mapping of city spaces used by urban planners and developers. Data from the Geographic Information System is combined with digital elevation data and stereoscopic aerial photographs to produce highly detailed simulations. Designers even have a database of graffiti from which to choose. Here, graffiti functions as a form of decoration guaranteeing the



authenticity of the simulations, a set of signifiers incorporated into the commercial re-imaginings of city spaces.

Conclusion

Far from confining graffiti to an industrial past, forms of new media have extended the existing media history of graffiti, of which Brassaï’s collection was an early part. Central to this history is the persistence of spatial categories, whether in the reconstruction of graffiti’s immediate location, its categorisation with reference to national and regional affiliations, and perhaps most interestingly, its reworking of official spatial accounts of the city.

The immediate similarities between the combination of graffiti and emerging technology in creative new media practice and their use in anti-graffiti initiatives suggest that, far from taking place in an autonomous sphere, new media practice is by necessity engaged with the material conditions of state and corporate power. For instance, in some cases it appears that the same impulses to mimic, document, archive or codify graffiti by new media artists may also be driving anti-graffiti uses of technology.

In other cases, new media projects mix graffiti and emerging technology in ways that are oppositional to dominant constructions of citizens and city spaces. An awareness of how the conditions of late capitalism drive and shape cultural production and the slippages between marginal artistic practice and governmental and corporate applications remains essential for the future of new media practice and its interventions in the world of truly flexible technologies, whose democratic potential is neither self-evident, guaranteed nor fully realised.Thanks to Joe Austin for conversations about graffiti’s media history and to Ally Warren and Elina

Poikane for the translation from Latvian. An early version of this chapter was presented at the Vital

Signs: Creative Practice & New Media Now conference, held at the Australian Centre for the Moving

Image, September 7-9, 2005.

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Farrell, Susan. and Brett Webb. 2004. “About Us: What We’re Doing and Why.” Art Crimes. http://www.artcrimes.com/index/story.html (accessed June 14 2006).

Ganz, Nicholas. 2004. Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents. London: Thames and Hudson.

“Geek Graffiti.” Parsons: The New School for Design Web site. 10 June 2006. http://a.parsons.edu/~geek_graffiti/ (accessed 15 June 2006)

Grafedia Web site. John Geraci. <http://www.grafedia.net/index.php> (accessed 1 Jan 2006)

Graffiti Archaelogy Web site. May 2006. Curtis Cassidy.<http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/about.html> (accessed 15 June

2006)“Graffiti Analysis.” Ni9e Web site. 2004. Fi5e. <http://www.ni9e.com/

graffiti_analysis.php> (accessed 15 June 2006)“Graffiti Taxonomy.” Ni9e Web site. 2004. Fi5e. <http://www.ni9e.com/

graffiti_analysis/ga_about.html> (accessed 15 June 2006)Graffiti Research Lab Web site. http://graffitiresearchlab.com/ (accessed

15 June 2006)Griswold, William G et al. “Using Mobile Technology to Create

Opportunistic Interactions on a University Campus.” Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego Web site. www-cse.ucsd.edu/~wgg/Abstracts/ubi-spont02.pdf (accessed Jan 9, 2007).

Heathcote, Christopher. 2000 “Discovering Graffiti.” Art Monthly Australia 133: 4 -7.

Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure Computer Game. Atari. (accessed February 14, 2006).

Miller, Ivor. 2002. Aerosol Kingdom. Minnesota: University Press of Mississippi.

O’Neill, Rob. “Local product is cleaning up” The Age (Melbourne). May 24, 2005. http://www.theage.com.au/news/Next/Local-product-is-cleaning-up/2005/05/23/1116700623790.html?from=moreStories (accessed Jan 9, 2007)


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Camera Phone.” New Statesman New Media Art Awards 2005 Weblog. March 10, The New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/nma/nma2005/dispatches/archive/2005/03/10/camera-phone-clean-up/ (accessed March 12, 2005).

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Zjawinksi, Sonia. 2000. “Graffiti Hackers.” Wired 13:12. December.


Long-held attachments to place are being transformed in the contemporary media context. How might interactive media contribute to our understanding of social change and civic participation? Within the broad field of interactive design and media, Salazar and Waterson examine the emerging, hybrid, speculative and liminal field of “Games for Change”. The four different projects they discuss—Blast Theory’s I like Frank, the Digital Street Game, The United Nations World Food Program’s FoodForce, and the Us Mob series from Central Australia—bring into play models such as participatory GIS mapping and database narrativisation. Proposing them as examples from which to rethink the capability of new media used for a consciously focused cultural purpose, they suggest that games and the notion of play have an important future role in understanding social engagement, cultural belonging and senses of place.

Play_Space:Participatory Communities and New Media Game SpaceJuan Francisco Salazar and Sarah Waterson

Video games and other forms of new media are yet to be fully considered as culturally relevant strategies for community

participation and social empowerment1. The social and communication sciences have not yet fully embraced ideas of how the interactive and multi-modal architecture of digital technology may be suitable for providing fresh opportunities for reformulating the role of participatory citizenship. Although it is not as engaged with participatory communication as a field, game design discourse, however, does currently address “community” and “the social” as part of delineating game play. At the same time, much current theorization of new media assumes that an incipient, global, complex and digitally mediated sphere of cultural production is increasingly determined by digital information technologies and computerisation. Further theoretical work is necessary to address the issue that access and interactivity in a new media environment does not translate necessarily or directly into participation. Also problematic is the fact that the term


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new media itself is often used to perpetuate a long-standing assumption that new technologies inevitably bring about new social changes, modernization and development. Much of the contemporary market-driven rhetoric on the interactive possibilities of new digital media assumes that progress is a value that transcends human existence. In many cases, the impact of interactive media outside of experimental digital art is measured on its promise to become a new revenue stream for already existing media conglomerates and networks. Furthermore, while video games are becoming as important as film or television in defining today’s popular culture, game design has only recently begun to develop a theoretical framework and a critical vocabulary. These are vital in order to analyse the social impact of video games on different levels, and, most importantly, their social construction within cultural, political and even religious frameworks. Therefore to understand better this new position of interactive digital media we must also look at the embedded political and economic considerations that often prevent such change. New media theory has begun to articulate the political significance of interactive media beyond entertainment or artistic experimentation. This involves a move towards constructive ways of crafting community participation, designing new media ecologies and configuring political experience. One of the keys to articulating this political significance is to acknowledge the role that the participant or player has as a citizen that enacts or exercises change and meaning. Another is the design process itself and the role of participatory design methods.

We wish to signal a new, liminal field of theorization and practice—namely interactive media for social change—by drawing on four international examples, through which to critically examine the conceptualisation of interactive digital media as places for citizen and community agency. Liminality describes a threshold experience, a transitional phase. Interactive games are a new terrain for new conceptualisations of place and belonging. Within this the focus is on play as a form of engagement and/or participation. Games are the place where participation takes an equal role in developing meaning and change. This form of participation through play has been widely discussed in game theory, from applied mathematics to macro-economics. However, we concentrate on what has been referred to as


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the “magic circle” (Huzinga 1955; Zimmerman 2003) implicit in every game. The magic circle generally entails the rules and boundaries that frame players to a specific time and space in which the game takes place. In new media contexts this feature of the game is reformulated and expanded through the ubiquitous nature of the media itself.

The question of participation

Participation has long been a critical notion in many fields of study and has received much attention in recent decades in a wide range of disciplines. It is important to note that in both communication studies and visual design, the question of participation has been at the core of the debate for years. The question of community and citizen’s participation showcases the concept’s role.

Participation is a kaleidoscope. As Alfonso Gumucio-Dagrón (2001) suggests, “it changes its colour and shape at the will of the hands in which [it] is held.” In fact, as Gumucio-Dagrón demonstrates through an extensive examination of a series of projects worldwide, communication and participation are actually two words sharing a common root concept. Etymologically the Latin communio relates to participation and sharing and it is only during the past fifty-odd years or so that the concept of communication has been equated, confused, and used interchangeably as a synonymous with the word information (Gumucio-Dagrón 2001).

Since the 1960s contradictory models and theories have influenced the field of development communication, with the full weight of diffusionist and functionalist models being strongly felt up until the 1980s. These theories were primarily concerned with modernisation and development following models that were rarely participatory in scope. The advent of dependency theories in the late 1970s and audience research in the 1980s were crucial in adding a political and cultural dimension to the analysis, but did little to consider critically the question of people’s participation. During this period, radio and later video were the primary technologies in play within participatory media projects. During the 1980s the communication sciences were absorbed by the study of mass media, yet since the mid 1990s there has been a newfound interest in researching and theorizing alternative media studies, also acknowledged as citizens’ media, radical media, médias libres, participatory media, community media, or grassroots media (Rodriguez


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2004). Simultaneously, community participation became a key aspect in many international cooperation agencies and international organisms and a whole new field of communication for social change began to emerge.

After many decades of development, the scope for re-thinking participatory media has now broadened and enlivened with the advent of digital media technologies from the early 1990s onwards, particularly online and computer media. Media participation is becoming an everyday occurrence for a growing number of the world’s population, expanding community networks and growing new networks based on interest rather than geographic locality. This is key to understand the rise of social media for the use, creation and networked distribution of new content forms that are specifically designed for community purposes (discussion lists, blogs, vlogs, open publishing forums). At the same time, the open source and Creative Commons copyright movements have reinvigorated community media debates, advocating and pursuing accessible, collaborative and participatory communication spaces.

“Podcasting”, or the distribution over a network of audio files (e.g. radio programs) that can be then listened online or offline, has grown considerably in the last three years. Today its being used by pirate radios, community radio stations and also multinational multimedia conglomerates, such as Apple. There is little published social research on the potential of this new medium for fostering new models of citizens’ participation, particularly in relation to locative media practices and also trans-local communities, although the debates around this topic are abundant in the blogosphere. This also applies to emerging new telephony technologies based on PBX systems, Voice over IP (VoIP) and open source software that can also be seen as becoming a new space for community media and cultural mobilisation.

In many ways, interactive multimedia assume a shift in the user’s role from observer to participant, where theoretically and technically she/he is able to control, combine, and manipulate different types of media, such as text, sound, video, computer graphics, and animation in different forms of narrative structure. While this is especially relevant in projects where the user experience is the producer of meaning in a real life social context, this way of looking at the situation says little about political power and cultural transformation and how politically



engaged interactive media could be conceptualized. Interactive television, for example, is comprised of applications and content that allows viewers choice of access to preformatted content delivered with and through the television. The viewers can interact with broadcast content, information, commercial ads and entertainment services, but cannot place themselves as protagonists of the program, nor creators of it. In other words, interactive television changes little about the political economy of commercial television. Thus, as Robin Mansell (2004) argues, it is timely to revitalise studies in the tradition of the political economy of media and communication in order to develop a critical and comprehensive analysis of the social and economic dynamics of the production and consumption of new media.

Many different initiatives are called participatory media ownership today. In our view, participatory media is first and above all a question of empowerment. It is about giving agency to the participant, the actor, the player. Within a community itself, it is intimately linked to the strengthening of an internal democratic process. Secondly, participatory media is a question of identity, particularly as it establishes a consciousness around cultural or social identity and difference. It reinforces the social text or weaving through the strengthening of local forms of organization. With the advent of Web 2.0 for example, we can see participatory media enacted online, particularly with such metadesign tools and social spaces such as flickr, YouTube, OhMyNews and SecondLife, to name just a few of many recent and popular examples. In these cases, users are no longer mere consumers, customers, clients, but become dynamic agents, actively participating in processes, in control of both the communication tools (owners) and its contents (producers).

Play as a form of participation in new media contexts

The question of what new media is has only been partially answered in the past two decades since the concept began to be widely used to distinguish digital media from what today is described as old media. Contested, articulated and inflexible definitions of interactivity, virtual reality, computerization, online networks, and hypertextuality have been some of the most popular defining criteria. We suggest that the notion of


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play has a role as a core concept in understanding participatory culture in new media ecologies.

It is only in the last decade, that there has been renewed social study of games, not only in their social impact, but also as forms of cultural production. In general terms, most game studies spring out of two canonical texts. One is Johan Huizinga’s (1955) Homo Ludens and Roger Caillois’ (1961/2001) Man, Play, and Games. As Kücklich asserts, “digital games studies, which are only beginning to be recognized as an independent discipline, could become the model for new media studies in years to come. This is due to the fact that this young discipline has developed theoretical concepts that do not discard traditional notions of play, while at the same time striving to adapt them to the challenges that arise out of the transposition of games into the digital medium” (Kücklich n.d.)

For a long time now, games and play have been the subject of debate in many disciplines. As contemporary game design theorist Eric Zimmerman (2003) writes,

“among academics, games belong to many domains and to none. For anthropologists, games are artefacts enmeshed in the fabric of a particular culture. For psychologists, games are enabling devices in the narrative of personal development. Among math theorists, games surface as evidence of the intricate strategies and thorny dilemmas of game theory, while scientists use game-like models to approximate real-world systems. And it hardly needs saying that the language of games supplies many post-modern metaphors of choice: language games, just gaming, rhizomatic games”.

We have chosen four examples that demonstrate a range of approaches to developing social and player narrative/s, and the use of new media to foster player engagement and participation.

i) United Nations’ FoodForce interactive online game. The FoodForce online Game was developed as part of the UN’s

World Food Program (WFP), and designed and produced by Deepend in Italy, with game programming by Playerthree in London. The game was launched at the end of 2004 and since then it has developed not



only as an online game with over three million downloads, but also as an online community with players from nearly 200 countries. The game’s architecture is divided into six narrative layers, or “missions”. Air Surveillance places the player as a helicopter pilot flying over a crisis zone in the imaginary region of Sheylan to locate the hungry. Energy Pacs allows the player to create a good balanced diet for the local population in Sheylan all within a tight budget. Air Drop puts the player in the situation of having to plan and perform a mission of dropping food from the air as the ultimate strategy. In Locate and Dispatch, the player’s mission is to buy food and transport it into Sheylan as quickly and cheaply as possible. In Food Run the player is required to guide a convoy of trucks safely to a WFP feeding centre in Sheylan with a series of “real-life” obstacles. And finally, Future Farming poses the task of distributing food aid within the Sheylanese community and assisting in activities such as farming and rebuilding the community

ii) Digital Street GameDigital Street Game exemplifies the virtual community development

that can emerge from social dislocation in an urban space. Digital Street Game is a hybrid game with both an online component and a physical one. The online component creates the place where the game progress is measured though the documentation of stunts (gameplay) and virtual community is developed. The physical streets of New York represent the game board where competitive creative play is enacted as players explore and generate expressions of their relation to place. The simple rules of engagement and participation in itself defines one relation to place and the aim of the game is to own “turf” virtually through the stunt performance and documentation. Through this an outcome of the game design itself is to develop sense of community identity.

iii) I like FrankI like Frank is a mixed reality game produced by Blast Theory in

collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. The game took place online, www.ilikefrank.com, and within the CBD of Adelaide, Australia in March 2004. Street (real space) players used 3G mobile phones to interact with the online (virtual) players in a mediated game of hide and seek—searching for the fictitious Frank. Participants


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used mobile phones to communicate both on the street and online. Clues/instructions were also sent via the mobile. Communication technologies mediate both the gameplay and teamwork for both sets of participants, and as such a level of technological competence and understanding by the participants is required to be fully immersed in the game.

iv) UsMob Series The UsMob project<http://www.abc.net.au/UsMob> was produced by

David Vadiveloo, Heather Croall and Chris Joyner, and developed in association with the Arrernte community members of Hidden Valley Town Camp in Alice Springs, Australia together with the Aboriginal organisation, Tangentyere Council. The project features members of the community, who are not professional actors, and was developed through a seven year process of community consultation.

These four games are examples of the ways in which games in general may positively and directly influence the ordinary life of the player, and are of critical importance to understand the shift from game space to place. As Williams (2006) claims, “the reason to study [games] has as much to do with what’s happening outside of games as it does with what’s happening in them” (14). This is critically relevant as it gives an important indication of how video and computer games are at the core of post-industrial cultures. In sharp contrast with the modernist assumption during much of the 19th and 20th centuries that work and play were mutually exclusive concepts (Kucklich 2004), new media is redefining that boundary.

In Homo Ludens for example, Johan Huizinga introduced the influential notion of the “magic circle” as a conceptually bounded space in which play occurs. This concept may also be seen in cinematic form in Jean Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu (1939) with its intricate construction of a social space of laws, rules and boundaries that the players inhabit and are determined by. In new media games this conceptual space may be mapped as a physical cultural space, or a virtual place, or layered combinations of both. While in an era of networked games and distributed participation, the notion of a magic circle may still be a vital concept to understanding play and participation within the



larger cultural structures, it is also relevant to signal the impact of what some have called pervasive games, or pervasive gaming (Montola 2005, Nieuwdorp 2005).

If in traditional games the metaphorical magic circle of play is a voluntary, contractual structure that is limited in time and space, pervasive games invoke a novel form of play based on the systematic breaking of these boundaries. This makes the game an all-encompassing, enveloping experience where the ambiguity of expanding beyond the basic boundaries of the contractual magic circle is consciously exploited (Montola 2005). Therefore, if the magic circle of play provided a conceptual space where players could construct identity, belonging and community within pervasive games, the situation becomes considerably more complex.

This will have implications for how we see the political economy of new media, particularly as in most industrialized and semi-industrialized countries video gaming and its associated notion of play are rapidly becoming a kind of “master metaphor for a range of human social relations, with the potential for new freedoms and new creativity as well as new oppressions and inequality” (Boellstorff 2006:29). Games do not exist in a social vacuum and if the rise of computer gaming has been directly linked to the decline in civic and shared spaces of community life, it is no less true that a new generation of “serious games” are redefining civic participation and signaling a shift in the location of social and civic space. A good example of this is the popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG or MMO), alongside social spaces such as SecondLife, which provide a virtual social space and place and offsets the lack of real/ local space. As games are often played by individuals from disparate geographical locations, the concept of place within the games implies new transnational social formations.

A clear example is FoodForce, an online Game developed as part of the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). The game was designed as a simulated experience, where players solve real life situations and issues. FoodForce is part of a participatory communication strategy to engage children aged 8-13 in issues of world poverty and hunger. It is a game for learning about a specific issue, rather than more generally fostering the playing of games for learning. The game has enabled an online community of young people who on a daily basis debate issues raised within the


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game that are directly linked to the UN’s Millenium Development Goals. In this way, the game is pervasive as it permeates every day life. As Kafai acknowledges, “for the past 20 years, education has ignored the promises and challenges of games for learning. The special role of games in contemporary children’s culture coupled with the deep sense of engagement common in game-related activities creates a new and promising context for games studies” (Kafai, 2006:39).

FoodForce follows more of a constructionist approach than a merely instructional one, where the game can be thought of being socially shaped by contemporary world economic and political crises. In this regard, FoodForce may be regarded as a pervasive game as “it includes elements of everyday life, subsequently also bringing rules of play into the public sphere of the street, the workplace and the like” (Nieuwdorp 2005), in this case, the complexities of development aid work. Online games like this foster a sense of global belonging, if not to a specific local place, certainly to a fluid and transnational sense of belonging; one that reminds us that geography and history are not necessarily definitive of our sense of cultural belonging. Although the FoodForce game space is represented specifically as a place (Sheylan), the sense of place for the player is pervasive and non-specific as a metaphor.

This game demonstrates the importance of recent developments in communications technologies and the new media ecologies in the field of communication for social change. It suggests a role for programming and design in communication for development. This role goes well beyond the mere informing and persuasion of people to adopt certain behaviours. It allows children (and players in general) to develop their conscience and to assess real situations, including issues like resources and funding, or making delicate choices about how to share the supplies against criteria of nutrition and diet, or the logistics involved in delivering food to people in remote areas; crossing hostile territories while also contemplating issues of planning. FoodForce allows and encourages the player to review some of the other long-term initiatives of the World Food Programme, not just in feeding people but also in assisting in the building of national infrastructures. Games like FoodForce consciously add a layer of ambiguity around the border between the “lifeworld domain and the semiotic domain” (Nieuwdorp 2005)—where the pervasive game is situated is made fuzzy. In this



regard, the player appeal of this game may lie in what Nieuwdorp calls the “liminal interface”, which is defined as that threshold space located in the mind of the player, which lies in-between, the lifeworld domain (of aid development work) and the semiotic domain of the FoodForce. In this way the boundaries of the magic circle are expanded into this liminal space.

Like FoodForce, the UsMob series in central Australia also challenges long-held views on belonging and mediated constructions of identity in a contemporary digital media context. UsMob is an immersive interactive multi-platform series that invites young people from around the globe to the small town of Hidden Valley in Central Australia. By looking at indigenous ways of constructing episodic stories, the project fosters traditional senses of place and history. Participants choose multipath storylines, activating video and text diaries, forums and games, of the real characters of UsMob. Young people from both within and outside of the community can engage with the particular place and sense of belonging in a outback community. Similar to FoodForce, UsMob aims to build an online community of young players, who learn many local experiences, from building bush bikes to hunting traditional foods, from skin name relationships to sacred sites, from child deafness, parental neglect and substance abuse to traditional ceremonies. UsMob explores the youth perspective and voice on all these issues with humour and drama inside a framework of Aboriginal community concern. As a fresh approach to social change, the project is directly concerned with fostering aspects of dialogue, participation, re-appropriation of communication processes and traditional knowledge systems for strengthening social change and cultural empowerment in Aboriginal communities. UsMob also invites Aboriginal children to play online as a way of promoting and validating culture, language and community structures. Within UsMob, the uploading of personal video stories, pictures and narratives facilitates a sharing of sense of place and personal identity. Young people from outside the community can engage as part of the UsMob community, and vice versa, building a dynamic cultural bridge between young viewers and Aboriginal teenagers featured in the stories. It is through the sharing of personal stories that UsMob generates and fosters both a cultural link to a specific place and an insight into a particular Aboriginal community fighting for cultural revitalization and social change. This is a good


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example of new media’s potential to move beyond entertainment to participatory communication for social change, as a new wave of “games for change” seem to be indicating.

Social change is defined as a given qualitative change in people’s lives as they themselves define such change. This change is mostly a process of empowerment of a given community or social solidarity and involves a participatory engagements with community members as agents of change. In this regard, the FoodForce points towards rising awareness in children of the principles of development work from an early age. That is, supporting dialogue and debate on key issues, emphasizing social policy issues and the need for negotiation and participation with those people directly affected by the issues and who become agents of their own change. Importantly, the educational content of FoodForce is closely tied with and integrated into the play of the game itself. As Zimmerman has demonstrated, play is the experience of a rule-system set into motion by the players’ choices and actions (Zimmerman 2003). Therefore, playing FoodForce allows for a whole new set of relationships among many thousands of players from around the world, which in turn becomes a complex system of intricate patterns aimed at solving the problem of hunger. Through this FoodForce recognizes the relevance of process-based gameplay (Zimmerman 2003) where content is not subordinated to form and where the process of playing the game is intimately coupled to what the game is really about: solving the issue of hunger. In the particular case of this interactive online game, the sense of place and belonging is not constructed around a physical space, but to a sense of global belonging into a conceptual social space. The virtual space of the game becomes place, and belonging is redefined through participation.

The design of game mechanics creates systems of exchange and engagement where the user is the participant that enacts meaning through exchange with others. Within games it is a given that players, become performers in order for the game to exist. To play a game is to enact a narrative form within the game as a closed system, or from the open system that cultural and personal context provide. Play as an activity is situated within the broader life context, and enacted in the game through which members display their identity and allegiance. To take part is to belong. The magic circle in this context can be seen



to extend beyond the game play itself, into the broader cultural issues, identity and the geopolitics of place. The demarcation of the magic circle within the game space is no longer easy to identify. Like FoodForce and UsMob, the Digital Street Game is a good example of this blurring of the magic circle boundaries.

The introduction for Digital Street Game online reads:

Digital Street Game is a hybrid game of misadventure set on the streets of New York. It’s a battle for turf, a contest of wills—in short—an excuse to explore the city. Players compete for turf by performing and documenting “stunts” on the physical streets of New York in order to claim territory on a virtual map. Stunts are comprised of a random combination of 3 elements: 1) an object commonly found in the city (e.g. bodega) 2) a street game (e.g. stickball) and 3) a wildcard/urban situation (e.g. happy hour). Players interpret these elements as they wish, then stage and photograph their stunt in order to claim a spot on the map. The more stunts players perform the more turf they claim. But of course some players may want to compete for the same territory. In order to hold on to territory, players’ stunts must score high with the rest of the game community.2

In many ways the game design and game play mirrors the social relations of engagement within New York generally. It is the development of the virtual community, mediated through ICT and linked back to place through location and play that is important to recognise here. While the narratives generated by the players are open-ended, the game rules and precepts provide an individualistic mapping of social relations that participants experience as play. The development of collaboration as a component of community is curtailed by the game rules themselves, though community is developed through the ICT component. Within this scenario, the magic circle of game play can be seen to extend well beyond the boundaries of the individual participant and physical place of the “stunt”. The magic circle in this case would include the player’s sense of belonging to the local geography, the existant social networks, and the networks delineated by the virtual community represented on the online “game board”. From this, the magic circle’s extent is fluid and exists to encompass particular game play events, players and onlookers at a particular instance. Thus the magic circle is a mode of analysis rather


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than a specific set of rules that are spatialised. Interaction is fostered online though players may never meet in the physical space of the game. Thus Digital Street Game’s game space is an indication of how a sense of place is extended and reformulated in new media contexts.

The game I like Frank is another example where the participants play out meaning and place within a designed system that has provenance in the traditional game of hide and seek. The affordances provided by hide and seek contribute to and inform the play of meaning and place for participants, and the reading of the game as a cultural event and artefact. The social aspect of the game play for participants both structures the live event of the game, and generates the narratives of place for the participants as a social grouping. As a result of this, place is enacted by the participants as an experience of the game design and system, not restricted by closed narrative. One player, Mitchell (2004) notes in her review of the game, when posed with the video message:

“Congratulations, you’ve finished the game. Do you feel any closer to the people on the street around you?” Truthfully, I had felt frantic and somewhat disconnected until the moment he asked the question. It was then that a transcendent affection for the people in this city gently drifted back into view. I quickly penned an answer on the back of the postcard I had collected and moved to return the handset to base. My short walk back to the university grounds was unhurried and contemplative. I didn’t find Frank in any kind of embodied sense, but his trace encouraged me to be a tourist in my own city and to keep seeking out those individual and uncommon details that struggle for recognition within the everyday experience of public life. (Mitchell 2004)

The “frantic and somewhat disconnected” feeling is important in thinking through the effect the mixed reality component had on participant’s sense of place. The mediation of the experience of play is also relevant here. The disconnection this player felt to place and the social aspect of the game could be seen as a direct result of the mediation of the experience through the virtual presence of the other players, and through a blurring of the magic circle with everyday experience of place. Pervasive gaming of this sort requires players to commit to the



game fully in order to experience immersion in the magic circle. Place and local knowledge (the game frame) are key to delineating the magic circle in mixed reality games such as I like Frank.

This game system can be transposed to any place,and the participants/players contribute their own personal histories through their mediated interactions with others in a specific location. The implication of this is that the game’s reading of place, and contribution to belonging can only be understood through participation. While the game is designed to be an open system for individual meaning and transformative experience of place, I like Frank is a case of participatory engagement that is horizontal rather than vertical. People become dynamic actors that take part in a process and in control of the communication tools and contents, rather than people perceived as passive receivers of information and behavioural instructions, while others make decisions on their lives.

Conclusion

Communication is a dynamic term determined by the interaction between people in a cycle of exchange and mutual interactivity. Communication is at the core of cultural relationships that arise and develop in particular spaces of interaction, whether physical or virtual. While many authors have persuasively argued how new media emphasize the virtual (real-time) over the physical (real-space), and how new digital technologies may actually indicate a loss of geographically localized communities, the examples we have discussed demonstrate the potential of interactive media for developing new media systems for community participation, through digital networks, educational games and culturally-authored databases.

These examples point towards a new field of transdiciplinary research and practice. New media systems and convergent technologies elicit and shape forms of understanding community and citizen participation that in turn influence the potential for communities to preserve cultural knowledge, share relevant information, and develop collective infrastructures that foster social change and cultural transformation.

The use of new digital ICT for community building, knowledge sharing, economic development, and electronic governance today is indisputable, as is their role in social inclusion, cultural empowerment


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and civic participation. What we have attempted in this brief chapter is to outline the critical interest arising in cross-disciplinary research about the cultural logic of video/virtual/online games within emergent forms of new media in today’s network society. We have delineated a cultural logic embedded in social change and cultural participation where new conceptual spaces or locus of participation are being constructed at an unprecedented pace.

We have underlined that the notion of play as cultural and psychological experience within new media ecologies takes place not only in either physical or virtual place, but rather in both sites simultaneously. The magic circle where play happens in new media games is thus multi-layered and temporal.

The case studies we have chosen construct a sense of place and belonging which in turn is embedded into the rules of the game and the narrative architecture of the multiplatform projects. In some cases the game system may be transposable to any place, which implies that the games’ reading of place, and sense of social belonging can only be understood through participation and an examination of the experience of the magic circle. It is there that space becomes place.

Games like these foster a sense of global belonging, if not to a specific local place, certainly to a fluid and transnational sense of belonging to a global civil society movement. The impact of games, particularly those labeled “Games for Change” is that geography and history are not necessarily key elements that completely define our sense of cultural belonging and civic participation any more, and that perhaps they will constitute an important cultural narrative in decades to come. For this reason, we have aimed at pointing out that the social and communication sciences have much work ahead in understanding the cultural constructions of games and their implications for building participatory communities.

References

Blast Theory, I like Frank <http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_ilikefrank.html> last accessed 10.02.06

Boellstorff, T. (2006). A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies in Games and Culture. Volume 1 Number 1, pp. 29-35.



Chang, M & Goodman, E; Digital Street Game <http://www.asphalt-games.net/>- now offline—last accessed Dec 2005

Callois, R. (2001). Man, play, and games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Fletcher, A. (2002). Why Play Games When There’s Work to Do? Fun, Games and Social Change, Freechild Newsletter 2:7, pp 2-3.

Fortugno, N. & E. Zimmerman (2003). Learning to Play To Learn: Lessons in Educational Game Design. Available online at http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/learningtoplay.htm

Gumucio-Dagrón, A. (2001) Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change. New York: The Rockefeller Foundation.

Gumucio-Dagrón, A. & T. Tufte (Eds.) Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings. New York: Communication for Social Change Consortium.

Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston: Beacon.

Jacobson, T. & J. Servaes (eds.) (1999). Theoretical approaches to participatory communication .New York: Hampton Press

Kafai, Y. (2006) Playing and Making Games for Learning: Instructionist and Constructionist Perspectives for Game Studies, in Games and Culture. Volume 1 Number 1, pp36-40.

Kücklich Julian (n.d) Play and Playability as Key Concepts in New Media Studies. Available online at http://www.playability.de/play.pdf. Accessed April 06, 2006.

Mitchell, S (2004) Are you real, Frank? Am I?” RealTime magazine, No.60, April/May 2004.

Montola Markus (n.d) Exploring the Edge of the Magic Circle: Defining Pervasive Games. Available online at, http://users.tkk.fi/~mmontola/exploringtheedge.pdf. Accessed July, 2006.

Nieuwdorp, Eva (2005) The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle, Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference, Vancouver, Canada 15—21 June 2005

Rodriguez, C. (2004) The Renaissance of Citizens’ Media, in Media Development 2004/2 special issue on Citizenship, Identity, Media. London: WAC.


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Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Servaes, Jan, T Jacobson, S.A White (eds.) 1996, Participatory Communication for Social Change. London: Sage.

Williams, D. (2006). Why Game Studies Now? Gamers Don’t Bowl Alone, in Games and Culture. Volume 1 Number 1, pp. 13-16.

Notes

1 While there is a substantial literature on participatory communication for social change,

its critical to point out that video games have not been considered within this tradition.

For reviews of this field see, Gumucio-Dagron and Tufte (2006); Servaes et.al (1996).

2 Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman http://www.asphalt-games.net/


A practitioner as well as a theorist, Fatima Lasay reveals that for the time being she has “postponed the luxury of ‘new media art’.” Her concern is with larger priorities, political and environmental, that emerge from particular local conditions. As an artist, though, it is through an aesthetic concept that she finds a way to think these problems and to imagine a way towards their solution. Working to find truths embedded in local linguistic practice, she proposes a redefinition of the Filipino concept diwà, aesthetic equilibrium.Academics have defined diwà as a body of internal rules governing the systematic ordering of ideas that the Filipino, whether on a national, tribal or personal level, employs for a conscious meaningful purpose. Lasay proposes an understanding of diwà as a self-determined system of aesthetic equilibrium, of the mind working to balance its experience of contradictions. Diwà, the author proposes, is based on the principles of buhay (life) and bisà (inherited life force) with knowledge, language and body as the parameters of equilibrium. Such a re-definition of diwà enables a reframing of these parameters, providing the basis for a critical analysis of media, technology and creative practice.

Diwà:A Filipino aesthetic of knowledge, language, bodyFatima Lasay

The concept of aesthetic equilibrium

Just a few weeks ago I was sitting on a rock in Sirpalesaari Island, a few metres off the coast of Helsinki, Finland. Blessed by the occasion of a warm Scandinavian summer I thought of the impossibility of a similar experience—of the right to life and living spaces—in my own city in Metro Manila. As a young child I was often told by my parents to inhale the smell of the sea whenever we passed along Manila Bay because it was supposed to be good for one’s health. However, in the space and time between Manila Bay and Sirpalesaari Island, I know now that what I was inhaling was the smell of a dead sea. Indeed, Manila Bay is best experienced through the tourist postcard. What an indictment for a people with an ancient tradition of animism, I thought.


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Two years ago I visited the ports along the Yangon River in Myanmar. There were a number of small boats each carrying at least a man and a woman together catching fish. Larger boats carried people to and fro across the river. Yangon was alive but life was hard; new bridges and ports were being built through forced labor. The environment—imagined and real—reminded me of another form of forced labor: poor children fishing for plastic containers in Pasig River in Metro Manila. Into the murky polluted water, children dived for plastic materials and such things that could be sold to recycling centres. The money earned from this form of labor would buy them a bit of food for the day.

I once had a conversation with a woman who owned a small island. She told me about the problem of poverty in her island where she employed farmers. She said the farmers had nothing to eat because they could not buy food. The money that they were earning was not even enough for their children’s education.

These reflections on changes in my mental and physical environment, motivated me to research how and why people organize their thoughts in relation to their sensed place; how and why people’s thoughts and behaviours change (or not) when either their sensed place or physical place is changed. I wanted to know what structural relationships might exist between the reality of Manila Bay and its representation in a colour tourist postcard. If the river or the sea was a source of life, then why are children fishing for dead objects in it for survival? How can farmers, who cultivate food from the land, have nothing to eat? All these questions led me to reflect on the concept of aesthetic equilibrium: my mind struggling to balance its experience of contradictions.

In the Filipino (Tagalog-based) language, “equilibrium” translates to pagkakátugmâ, from the root word tugmâ meaning “assonant”, “rhyming”, or “in harmony.” In his fieldwork and studies on the notion of balance in nature, Filipino anthropologist F. Landa Jocano (2001, 25-28) describes pagkakátugmâ as forming the basis of the existence of things, events and other phenomena in nature. To highlight the “ground view” of that pagkakátugmâ, I use the term “aesthetic”, bringing up the position of the aisthētēs, “the one who perceives.”

According to the woman who owned the island, the farmers are starving because they had no money to buy food. I said if they were farmers, then presumably they could grow their own food? But they need


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money, the woman told me, because they have to send their children to college. When I asked why would their children need to be “educated”, she said so they could lead a better life and not be like their parents. But, I asked, if there were no farmers then who will grow our food?

If the process of aesthetic equilibrium is a “making sense of things”, the farmers’ dilemma brings up a number of fundamental questions on our assumptions about food, education, better life and money that might be considered as aesthetic. One should also ask, “what is farming” from the position of a number of aisthetes in the discussion: the landowner, the farmer, the farmer’s children and myself. So, although the common ground was the greater possibility of survival, there exists a number of “aestheticizations” which can contradict each other. Which aesthetic position can best meet the possibility and sustainability of survival? How do we test these different aesthetic positions?

Diwà as an ideology of the self

A musician friend once talked about the role of Philippine folk music in the underground struggle after the imposition of Martial Law in 1972. In the discussions my friend would often reply with a song. One was about a couple who both belonged to the Communist Party of the Philippines. The song somehow reflected his own personal experience, the breakdown of the couple’s relationship that neither Marx nor Lenin nor Mao could resolve. The chorus (and conclusion) of the song was that love, not ideology, was important.

The song made me think about the concepts “ideology” and “love.” But what about those people who define and understand love only from the scheme of ideology, I thought, how can an ideology—whether political, social or cultural—not be able to take in “love”?

During the live news coverage of the Ultra Stadium stampede in Pasig City, I saw on television an elderly woman appealing to the viewing public for the safe recovery and return of her granddaughter. In the midst of her panic and confusion, she was able to describe the girl’s clothing and appearance, and added “pakibalik nyo na lang po sa akin yan, dahil karugtong po yan ng buhay ko” (“please return that to me, because that is the continuation of my life”). The few seconds that she spoke on television struck me on a number of levels. First was her vivid memory of her granddaughter’s clothing and appearance in spite of her apparent


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state of emotional panic and mental confusion. (Her granddaughter was later found and she looked exactly as described.) Second was her use of the word “yan” instead of “sya” to refer to her granddaughter. “Yan” (from “iyan”) translates to the demonstrative pronoun “that” (which is near the person addressed), whereas “sya” (from “siya”) translates to the pronoun “he,” “she” or “it.” And third, was her use of the metaphor “karugtong ng buhay ko” (meaning “continuation” or “connection of my life”) to describe the non-physical characteristics of her granddaughter. These points reveal to the ideology underlying this woman’s concept of “love.” It is an ideology that is congruent with the principles of buhay (life), and that aspect of life that is inherited, bisà (life force or biological endowment). Buhay and bisà establish the rules of this woman’s equilibrium, the balance between the inner world and the outer world, of the self within the universe.

“Ideology” begins with the concept idea, meaning “the appearance of things.” Idea and logos (or “word”) evoke the capacity to articulate the internal representation of external things. This involves “making sense of things” not only in terms of internalization or introspection, but also at the same time in terms of articulation or linguistic conscientiousness. The language used by the woman in search for her granddaughter declared her own internal logic of pag-ibig (love), of buhay and bisà, with such balance and precision that defied both their popular romantic conflations and their politically muddled meanings.

My musician friend may have been right. Marxist, Leninist, Maoist or Jeffersonian ideologies can’t bring us much understanding until we have by ourselves developed the rules of our own aesthetic equilibrium.

I believe that in the Filipino worldview, this aesthetic equilibrium is found in diwà.

Reframing diwà within aesthetic equilibrium

The Filipino word diwà translates roughly to “sense”, “meaning”, “substance”, “spirit”, “soul”, “vital principal” and “consciousness.” Diwà also relates to the Sanskrit word deva meaning “divine” or “a Hindu demigod.” The Filipino word diwata translates to “goddess”, “fairy” or “muse.”1 The ancient Tagalog word diwang refers to an old religious song honoring the spirits of dead ancestors. Diwang is now more commonly used to mean feasting, thanksgiving and celebration. The structure


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diwà, therefore, seems to have been bound together between Brahmaloka and Devaloka, between earth and sky, to provide the framework of local knowledge. In other words, diwà underlies the process of “making sense of things” and the articulation of a body of internal codes by which the propriety of that process and its effects is measured—not only within the “real world” but also more importantly within the ineffable and unimaginable world. Once whole, diwà provides the basis through which imagined experience in actual situations may be tested; diwà establishes and tests the positions of the aisthētēs, of those who perceive.

In an interview for a program celebrating the 20th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution in the Philippines, human rights lawyer and former senator Rene Saguisag lamented the loss of the diwà of the Revolution. Asked what this diwà was, he replied: sacrifice.

For Saguisag, who risked life and limb for “People Power”, this could be true. But diwà is not synonymous with such values as “sacrifice” that exist within the normative rather than the ideological dimension. What Saguisag laments is the fact that he was still willing to sacrifice while others were not. In my view, the observation of such external behavior as “sacrifice” does not constitute internal diwà.

If one is truly interested in exploring “the diwà of EDSA” then one should inquire into the tensions between one’s own constitutive rules of engagement with what one perceives as changes and appearances in Philippine society. Thus, the procedure is to step away from using diwà as a representation of anything, in this case, “sacrifice,” and instead to enact diwà through a dialectic of its internal parameters.

A crucial point of inquiry, for example, as far as the EDSA People Power phenomenon is concerned, is the religio-secular tensions that have never been given the kind of serious public discussion they deserve simply because the Catholic-led majority of elites, and even the mainstream media both local and international, assumed that sampalataya or faith (just as sacrifice) was the diwà of “People Power.” The perceived success and power of “People Power” has also never been publicly questioned outside of the terms of its parameters and assumed values because it has been elevated to the level of dogma.

The continuing presence of unquestioned dogmas contradictions in socio-political life reveals the displacement of our own diwà. Tensions and contradictions, not dogma or faith, forge the indigenous cognitive


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system, the worldview system that underlies the very concept of cultures. As an instrument of equilibrium, diwà allows us to recognize the tensions between people’s internal representations with the external world, diwà allows us to see how language can be replaced by slogans, how cultures degenerate into markets, how we have lost our balance.

The principles and parameters of diwà

Within the context of diwà, the principles of buhay (life) and bisà (inherited life force) are established through an equilibrium of three parameters: first is knowledge, which refers to a number of variables, namely, káluluwá (soul), pangingisip (cognition) and kamalayan (consciousness); second is body, which refers to both the physical body (katawan) and ginhawa or “breath”, “ease of life”; and third is language, which refers to wikà (internal-external language) and pagsasagisag or signification (whether biological or socially constructed).

When diwà is displaced, the values of these parameters are corrupted, through for example, the combined effects of social forces like education, religion, media, and economic and political systems.

In his discussion of ecological diversity and ethnic differentiation, Filipino anthropologist Jesus T. Peralta suggests that the Philippines as a nation is emerging at the cost of the disappearance of individual ethnic boundaries, because the parameters that led to the development of ethnic groups no longer exist, and have been replaced by new social factors. The national market system changed self-sustaining domestic economies; the national political structure infringed on traditional leadership forms; the western education system transcended ethnic boundaries and changed entire systems of ethnic knowledge, values, loyalties, perspectives; official emphasis on a national language degraded ethnic language; mass media created consumer-oriented tastes and “needs”; and western religion destroyed entire belief systems and indigenous values that bind members of a community (Peralta 2003, 8-12).

When we analyse these new social factors and their combined effects, we must first be in the position of the aisthētēs who knows that the sources of the interruption of diwà are structural but no less impervious. This way, we shall see that diwà may still persist and has simply been obscured by consent without understanding. This “consent without understanding” is sometimes referred to as “culture” in the sense that


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development and differentiation in cultures takes place as a kind of normal course of things, for example, the migration of birds:

The extremities of the hardships to be endured, or the terrors or dangers to be confronted, do not enter into the national question of expansion at all [but rather] the outflow of national energy obeyed the laws implanted in the national organization as blindly and instinctively as do the swallows the laws of their migration. (Scott 1982, 289-290)

In the terms of this 1898 justification of the American invasion of the Philippines, the “laws implanted in the national organization” by our people’s subjugation over a hundred years ago are still being obeyed today.

Peralta also writes, “The parameters that led to the development of ethnic groups no longer exist, and have been replaced by new social factors.” Assuming that this is correct, such information is of no empowering or liberating significance unless we develop the internal-external language (the diwà) to ask why and how this has happened, and whether or not such developments are in congruence with buhay and bisà. Moreover, it is not true that “the parameters that led to the development of ethnic groups no longer exist”, but rather, the parameters of knowledge systems (and thus body and language systems) are actually being re-defined by “new social factors.” It is now a question of whether or not these “new social factors” respect the principles of buhay and bisà. This is not merely a moral question but a question of equilibrium and survival. Furthermore, what we are yet to fully appreciate is that change operates both “within the limits of the ecological landscape” and the limits of the body’s own internal ecology. In other words, the evolution of the environment is the evolution of the species.

If we return to the farmers’ dilemma in this connection then we gain a very different understanding of the problem. Consider the words of the French activist José Bové:

… if we want young farmers to go on with farming, it’s not the economic problem that is primary for us. The main issue is with the social movement here. People begin farming because they want to live in that area. It’s the social issue which is the most important to them, instead of knowing if


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they have enough income to live. It is interesting to see the dynamics in the rural area. (Bové 2005)

If the farmers and the woman landowner I spoke to are to remain convinced that they need money and education, then could it be because of our detachment from diwà, or more precisely, the corruption of the values of its parameters? In Bové’s language, this would be a detachment from the concept of food sovereignty conditioned by the artificial division between social and economic needs. But with a deeper realization of the (re-defined) economic system as an ecological-social force in itself (an internal-external evolution), then a balance can still be regained.

Diwà and the problems of ontological holism and dualism

In his discussion of the babaylán2 in Philippine history and within the context of a Filipino psychology, the Filipino historian and leader of the Pantayong Pananaw (“from-us-to-us perspective”) movement in the social sciences, Zeus A. Salazar (1999, 15-17) presents a significant but incomplete, concept of pagkatao (a term which translates to “personality” encompassing concepts of “self” and “being”). He writes: “Sa teoryang ito, ang tao ay may katawan (aspetong panlabas o “katauhan” ng tao) na kinapapalooban ng kaluluwa at ginhawa. Ang pagkakaugnay nitong dalawa sa loob ng tao habang nabubuhay ang siyang “pagkatao” niya.” (“In this theory, man has a body (the external aspect or “personality” of man) containing soul and spirit. The connection between these two, inside man while he is alive, comprises his “personality.”)

In this model, kaluluwa becomes anito (spirit of the ancestor) when the body dies, whereas ginhawa dissipates with the expiration of the body. Bodily death is said to take place when kaluluwa is disconnected from ginhawa for a certain period of time. Thus, the body expresses the non-dualistic paradigm of body, soul and spirit.

However, the problem with this concept of pagkatao is that its connections with kaluluwa and ginhawa are formulated through cultural objects and events collected and observed in the process of anthropological, sociological, semantic and related field methods. Part of Filipino cultural anthropologist Leonardo N. Mercado’s criticism of Salazar is based on its structural binaries:


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Since most of the researches on kalooban have been done on Tagalog, the researches have used this special element of loob. Thus Salazar in his study uses structuralism as a methodology now uses binary opposition like “hina” vs. “lakas”, “lambot” vs. “tigas”, “bigat” vs. “gaan”, “sama” vs. “buti.” Naturally the opposite of loob is “labas” (outside). In the binary opposition of structuralism, things are considered as either-or… But the Filipino does not think in either-or categories. His is both/and in his spirit of harmony. We said that since loob (and buot, as well as nakem) has a holistic concept of the body, there is no dichotomy between the inside and the outside of the person. (Mercado 1994)

This criticism, however, is still incomplete. The focus on human interactions and the affective significance (that humans bear upon the world) as the object of studies in kaluluwa, ginhawa and katawan are not by themselves constitutive of the structure of being. The drawing of direct relationships between actions and experiences from which “mind” and “body” dispositions are concluded are actually trivial and cannot lay down the structure of thinking, learning and behavior. It would be anomalous to account for the external, through interviews, observation of behavior and surveys without establishing first the internal through a rigorous formulation of knowledge systems. Thus, the concepts of “loob”, “buot” or “nakem” cannot be privileged to account for the claim that “the Filipino does not think in either-or categories.”

What is needed, I believe—and this is implied by Peralta’s definition of language, as the medium by which concepts are internalized and externalized (Peralta 2003, 10)—is the articulation of knowledge/environment systems. By language and articulation, I do not mean a semantic or representational sense such as that upon which Mercado’s proposal is based—i.e. “we recommend that the counterparts of loob in other Philippine languages be studied in order to have a true Filipino view” (Mercado 1994). What I mean by language and articulation has basis on the principles of buhay and bisà, on the very basic tenet of survival shared by all living organisms through the universal language of electrical pulse activity: the process of anticipating environmental actions with precision, the process of bio-ecological computation, the process of aesthetic equilibrium.


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Part of the agenda of diwà is to allow transcendence in current philosophies that have been largely confined to “the manifestations of the values of the people in language, actions and customs.”3 We also need to transcend the limits set by the problems of ontological holism and dualism that has shaped our lives into either an unjust struggle for survival or a meaningless life of consumerism. The completeness of Salazar’s theory of pagkatao—as our own capacity to achieve balance—is visible once we surpass the surfaces of manifestations and values, and inquire into a structure composed of principles and their parameters. When parameters are established, values can be assigned and their shifts can be accounted for on the basis of connection and relationship rules. Hence, imbalance and corruptions become visible, and aesthetic equilibrium can be achieved.

However, in our current media environment and a life based on the global financial economy, the transcendence of firmly held beliefs is no longer easy even if such transcendence is crucial to our own survival. In a world where we have been increasingly conditioned to respond to artificial symbols as surrogate for biological signs, like the gradual and unnoticeable increase in particulate matter in the air or the bombardment of a mainstream media that has become firmly embedded in the market system, we are no longer easily alerted to those stimuli that oppose buhay and bisà. While in Finland, I learned that the shallow waters of the Baltic are in danger now more than ever of industrial waste and pollution. It seems that everywhere in the world, markets largely shape our environment and our expressions.

But, as we say in Filipino, “habang may buhay, may pag-asa” (“while there is life, there is hope”). If we look at language once again as completing the dialectic of knowledge and body in diwà, then it becomes clear that “the enormous advantage of organisms that are able to manipulate symbols over those who can only react to signs is that all logical operations have not to be acted out, they can be computed.” (von Foerster 1966, 60) That is, those organisms capable of articulation, of computation, of pagsasadiwà, are those most capable of aesthetic equilibrium and survival.


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Diwà and creative practices

Pagsasadiwà or “articulation”, the operational aspect of diwà, could be usefully considered as a cognitive-linguistic facility in art and the creative practices. In the process of articulation, as in diwà, the role of precise logic and grammar is necessary. In language or speech, whether mechanical, vocal or other, the rules of division into syllables or words characterize “articulation.” This makes it possible to distinguish articulate sounds from other sounds. “Articulation” entails “pagsasatinig” (to give voice to), “pagpapahayag” (to give discourse or declaration), thus, a “pagsasadiwà”(the diwà—essence, consciousness, the rules of balance in its externalized form). Together, “diwà” and “articulation” suggests a process that goes beyond romantic “expression.” In the arts and creative practices, this enlarges the creative universe or “sansinukob ng kalinangan at paglikha”, where sense and meaning (diwà’t kahulugán) flow into each other.

Diwà assumes a structure upon which meaning is created, rather than simply being a representation through which meaning is expressed. Thus, one can also say that pagsasadiwà entails a regard for the creative process as transcending the limits of representation and expression as it positions the artist outside the universe of two worlds, outside the traps of ontological dualism.

R.G. Collingwood claimed humanity to be a finite being and that the artist is not a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power (Ridley 1998, 44). Our facility for pagsasadiwà entails infinite exercise of finite power. Collingwood’s “hands-on philosophy” hold that the task of philosophy is to see. Here, he posed a very urgent challenge to artists, an ethical burden upon aesthetics, that the artist

must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts… The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death… Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness. (3)


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Aaron Ridley explains “the consciousness is corrupt whenever it seeks to discharge its service to self-knowledge through technical means. It is corrupt, for instance, when it misunderstands the medium through which its work is to be done as a mere vehicle for the thought or feeling it is attempting to clarify.” (36)

Here, the romantic conflations of “expression” are dismantled by the precise and demanding process of “conversion”, that is, because the exploration of one’s feelings and thoughts in art is necessarily mediated, art must therefore consist in the exploration of the medium in which the conversion is to be attempted. Just as I have expounded with diwà as an aesthetic equilibrium based on life, the creative act is a process of balance against corruption and extinction. This is more than just the artist learning more about paint in painting, or discovering more about video in video art and such things, because in pagsasadiwà, the artist’s medium is a cognitive-linguistic medium—it completes the dialectics of knowledge and body, of kaluluwa and ginhawa.

Interestingly, the history of the babaylán—the spirit medium—of Philippine society parallels this ethic of aesthetics, the need of a philosophy, and the process of aesthetic equilibrium. However, the babaylán has been dispossessed of this role, just as artists and members of a community have surrendered their powers of diwà to the institutions of media, business, education, politics and religion. Current celebrations of “new media” as technologies of liberation and empowerment may thus be gross and fatal miscomputations. We must remember the ethical burden of aesthetics, we must first re-acquire our sensitivity to “pulses.”

In Philippine folk medicine, one of the techniques of diagnosis is palpitation or pulse taking or what is locally known as pulso. The pulso is considered the outer manifestation of the inner equilibrium in the human body, connoting the idea of an “inner space.” The terms of this “inner space” are frequency, regularity and amplitude, with each having their hot-cold qualities. The conditions of major organs of the body are “read” through pulses on the radial artery at the wrist. The arteries radiate to the fingers, each finger indicating different types of pulse beats in relation to the major organs of the body (Jocano, 134-146).

In pulse taking, the element of environmental time (or space-time) is also very important. At night, the pulse is slower because the influence of the moon is stronger—much like the tide of the sea. In the daytime, solar


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energy is stronger and the pulse is faster and stronger. At dawn, the sun-moon influences are in a dynamic state of equilibrium, and therefore dawn is considered the best time for pulse reading. There is also a close relationship between pulses and the seasons: the seasonal conditions of alangaang-papawirin (the changing pressure in the upper and lower atmosphere) reflect specific pathological effects. These changes, which are caused by the movement of cold (amihan or north wind) and warm (timog or south wind) metereological fronts, and diurnal and nocturnal wind oscillations within a 24-hour time span, must be known by the careful practitioner of pulso.

Pulso is a very complex and rigorous method of diagnosis taking one year to study and over 10 years to master. It is very precise, comprising a computation method that can predict pregnancy, predict a person’s lifespan, predict the number of days a person with a terminal illness will live, the overall health of a person and the condition of individual organs, as well as spirit possessions. (It is important to note—with reference to creative practice—that pulse taking is actually not only diagnostic but also predictive.) Reading pulses serves as a method of divination; it is used, for example, in determining the future of business transactions, travel, family life and relationships.

Determining the pulse of the environment is likewise crucial to survival in general—it establishes rules relating to medicine, agriculture, engineering and travel. With panahón or a time-space continuum, the environment becomes “computable”, where its pulses may be likened to vectors or points in a given dimension. Survival rules are codified for the security of the life force of future generations.

In the creative process, the artist engages in a technique congruent with pulso. Like mastery of pulse taking, it takes much time and experience for the artist to develop a very high sensitivity to medium, self and environment. The artist has to listen carefully, to the frequency, regularity and amplitude of the pulses, that is, to the inner structures.

A farmer who tills the soil because he or she has decided to live in that place has intimate knowledge of the soil, the seed and the seasons. This knowledge is crucial to the farmer’s survival, and it is a knowledge that is passed on to future generations of farmers. But in the denial of life and life force from farm labour, the farmer is forced to see the


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soil and the seed as mere means to an economic end, as temporal and dispensable mediums.

I had a discussion once with a cab driver who being a native of Manila talked about the internal migration of people from the countryside into his city. I asked why people were moving into Manila even though they knew there would be no source of livelihood for them there. He said the lights attracted people. I asked if he would want to go to the countryside when he retires. He said he tried it before but he could never survive because he was no farmer and all his efforts at agriculture failed. I asked him about the old women begging in the streets who I have not seen before. Oh, he said, they are Badjao people from Mindanao, and the city mayor will soon send them back to where they came from. I asked what they were doing here since I assumed they were not simply attracted by lights. He said they were fleeing from the RP-US “war against terror” in Mindanao. One often sees images of the Badjaos in beautiful tourist postcards and television programs, never as old women begging in the streets of Manila.

The following day the women were gone. Perhaps Mindanao will become globally known for images of cosmopolitan cities, exotic resorts and international festivals, with articulate American ex-pats and their local companions Internet blogging from the islands of its rich diversity and progressive business climate? Mindanao will become “prosperous” after the life and culture of the indigenous people, those who sprung from the earth, have been destroyed.

I have no easy answers or solutions to the Philippine or the global problem. Until my own pagsasadiwà is established, I have also postponed the luxury of “new media art.” Diwà is not concerned with employing “new media” or “new technologies” for contrived ends. Diwà rather challenges the artist to recover a universe where aesthetic structures are made comprehensible, where the various positions of the aisthētēs may be made visible and can be compared with each other, where—as in both divination and biological computation—various logics can be simulated, computed and tested. If art is self-knowledge, then it should allow us to inquire within ourselves, re-visit our aesthetic equilibrium of knowledge, language and body, and—as much as the pain of the world is the pain within us—confront that pain from within and test it against buhay and bisà.


Lasay: Diwà 179

Thus, the challenge of diwà for me is the re-thinking of everything that I have been taught about the world, because the world speaks to me of a very different reality. We are taught, for instance, in visual art that images produce knowledge. The challenge of diwà is to stop and then to think more carefully how we might regain a balance more closely in congruence with the principles of buhay and bisà.

References

Bové, J. 2005. “Food Should Be Left Off the Free Trade Table”, Yale Global, transcript from a workshop at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization (http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5529) (accessed April 2005)

Jocano, F. L. 2001. Filipino Worldview: Ethnography of Local Knowledge. Quezon City: Punlad Research House, Inc.

Jocano, F. L. 2003, Folk Medicine in a Philippine Municipality. Quezon City: Punlad Publishing House.

Mercado, L. N. 1994. The Filipino Mind, Philippine Philosophical Studies II, Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series III, Asia, Vol. 8. Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp23599

Peralta, J. T. 2003. Glimpses: Peoples of the Philippines. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc. [Originally published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2000]

Ridley, A. 1998. R.G. Collingwood: A Philosophy of Art. London: Phoenix.Scott, W. H. 1982. “The Freedom”, 5 November 1898, Cracks in the

Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History. Quezon City: New Day Publishers.

Salazar, Z. A. 1999. Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas. Bagong Kasaysayan, Mga Pag-aaral sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas. Volume 4. Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi.

von Foerster, H. 1966. From Stimulus to Symbol: The Economy of Biological Computation. In Sign, Language, Symbol edited by Kepes, G. New York: G. Braziller.

Yamamoto, Y. 1998. “On the Meanings of Babaylan in Historical Perspective”, essays from the exhibition “Sino Ka? Ano Ka?”, September 20-October 21, 1998 at the Art Department Gallery, San


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Francisco State University. http://www.sfsu.edu/~gallery/babaylan/Pages/miko.html (accessed August 4, 2005).

Notes

1 According to Filipino anthropologist F. Landa Jocano, diwà represents the ideological

dimension of the Filipino worldview, the rules governing the systematic ordering of

ideas that the Filipino—whether on a national, tribal or personal level—employs for a

conscious meaningful purpose (Jocano 2001, 161-192).

2 Babaylan: A Tagalog term used to refer to spirit mediums with cognates prevailing

among the dialects of the Philippine languages and among a limited number of dialects

in Indonesia. The socio-political functions of the Babaylan have been lost since the

Philippines’ “flag independence” from the US in 1946. In recent years, however, the term

Babaylan has become closely associated with women, now becoming a pan-Filipino

term in the socio-cultural context symbolically associated with the artists praising a new

feminism (Yamamoto 1998).

3 Description of Leonardo N. Mercado’s “The Filipino Mind” on the Council for Research

in Values and Philosophy website. Online: http://www.crvp.org/pubs.htm#series3


In this chapter Soenke Zehle provides a succinct overview of the progress of the biodiversity debate. The right to self-determination, a key feature of virtually all the formal declarations made by indigenous peoples on intellectual property rights and biodiversity, places them in a conflicted relationship to ideas of open access, historically associated with a loss of control and ownership. He urges us to consider the ethical importance of pluralising the concept of the commons by way of a “cosmopolitical” reengagement with its manifestations, keeping in mind the irreducibly local nature of any commons.

Toward a Cosmopolitics of the Commons: When Eco-Politics meets Info-PoliticsSoenke Zehle

While the anti-rival digital commons of net.culture is indeed its own thing, much is to be gained by crossing back and forth between

“immaterial” and “material” commons traditions.The affirmation of the novelty of the digital commons comes at the price, perhaps, of also separating it from traditions whose viability as an effective system of resource management has been reasserted, and which pave the way for an encounter of concepts and perhaps even corresponding eco- and info-political movements. Focusing on how indigenous activists have engaged the politics of intellectual property in the context of the biodiversity controversy, the following survey explores the possibility of a cosmopolitical rearticulation of the commons.

Biodiversity—Nature in the Network Economy

Biodiversity is generally defined as the diversity of life on earth1. Since the 1980s, when this extraordinarily vague term entered into general usage, controversy over the extent of the current crisis of “biodiversity loss” and the appropriate means of conservation, maintenance, and sustainable use has continued. With the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity


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(CBD), “biodiversity” became an autonomous field of transnational ecopolitics characterized by competing approaches, variously treated as a matter of natural-scientific investigation, resource managerialism, eco-spiritual reverence, cultural survival, and campaigns for environmental justice and corporate accountability2.

One reason for the centrality of indigenous peoples to this controversy lies in the extent to which the rise of a biotechnological mode of accumulation, characterized by the increasing incorporation of the biological into a comprehensive intellectual property rights regime, has facilitated the commercial and scientific exploration of indigenous or traditional knowledges (IK/TK)3. On the one hand, as a consequence of the emphasis on sustainability, issues of conservation have become almost inseparable from concepts of “sustainable use,” pointing to the interest in biodiversity as a (genetic) resource and its transnational management. On the other hand, the interpretation of biodiversity in terms of fundamental properties of ecosystems, especially the interdependence between their diversity and resilience, also link it to the exploration and revitalisation of traditional environmental practices and thus to a much broader agenda of cultural survival. This is why indigenous communities have been able to mobilize it so effectively. Supported by the growing strength of a transnational indigenous movement that has successfully reappropriated new information technologies in its articulation and global diffusion of a shared idiom of self-determination, indigenous activists are organizing to subvert the trend toward “patents on life” and use the international interest in IK/TK in support of their own strategies for cultural survival.

The language and objectives of the CBD—the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources—have set the tone for much of the biodiversity controversy. Nature is, above all, a (genetic) resource whose “sustainable” use will be the foundation of future economic growth. And following the “molecular revolution” (Lily E. Kay), the textualisation and informatisation of the biological has facilitated its commercial appropriation. Serving as the “linchpin of the international trading system” (Sandra Brahman), IPRs link the informatisation of the biological—its subsumption under the information-form, the dominant commodity form of the network


Zehle: Toward a Cosmopolitics of the Commons 183

economy—to flexible accumulation and new transnational divisions of labor. Consequently, indigenous eco-activism often takes the legalistic form of challenging corporate patent applications, as well as the creation of alternative systems of property rights that favor local, communal process of knowledge production.

The Politics of Biocultural Property

By self-identification and popular assumption, many indigenous peoples maintain a relationship to “the land” that is considered distinctive, and the question of territoriality has been central to all attempts to distinguish between indigenous peoples and other ethno-cultural groups2. But while it is unclear whether the centrality of territoriality will give way to alternative criteria in the wake of the appropriation of the term “indigenous” by other “minority” groups across Africa and Asia, the ultimate point of contention is not the question of territoriality and its—as of yet—indispensability to official definitions of indigeneity. The key issue is the demand for self-determination, based on the claim that indigenous peoples are indeed peoples, with the right to the full protection of international law afforded to other peoples.

Most recently, this demand for self-determination has been articulated in the biodiversity controversy in terms of what might be called a politics of biocultural property. As the struggle over official definitions of indigeneity suggests, it is inherently problematic to talk about “indigenous peoples” and corresponding assumptions regarding a homogeneity of “indigenous” perspectives in general, and it is no less so in the context of the biodiversity controversy. However, elements of a general politics of “biocultural property” are shared at least by the indigenous activists and organizations that articulate their visions in international fora and put these views into circulation via multiple indigenous and non-indigenous networks. At its 1975 conference, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) adopted a “Solemn Declaration” which was, in retrospect, somewhat typical of declarations to come, suggesting that concepts of cultural and eco-spiritual integrity are core elements in overall affirmations of an indigenous identity. More recent documents include the 1992 Kari-Oca Declaration (Indigenous Peoples’ Earth Charter), the 1992 Charter of the Indigenous-Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests, the 1993 Mataatua Declaration on


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Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the 1994 COICA Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Biodiversity, and the 2002 Kimberley Declaration.

All of these declarations affirm the right to self-determination and proclaim indigenous peoples’ rights to their cultural and intellectual property. In a section on “biodiversity and customary environmental management”, for example, the Mataatua Declaration affirms that “[i]ndigenous flora and fauna is inextricably bound to the territories of indigenous communities and any property right claims must recognise their traditional guardianship”. But it also notes the vulnerability of indigenous communities: “A moratorium on any further commercialisation of indigenous medicinal plants and human genetic materials must be declared until indigenous communities have developed appropriate protection mechanisms”. States should “[p]rioritise settlement of any outstanding land and natural resources claims of indigenous peoples for the purpose of promoting customary, agricultural and marine production”. The declaration concludes by recommending that the UN support these provisions in appropriate fora.

While such statements by indigenous peoples are legally non-binding, they provide an important emerging “soft law” of principles for indigenous rights that is expected to guide and influence law and policy. And even if indigenous declarations tend to foreground non-commercial, eco-spiritual pleas and often give the impression that their opposition to the commodification of their heritage is unanimous, the affirmation of their rights to self-determination ultimately leaves decisions to the communities themselves. Even if it is by no means certain or even desirable that all indigenous communities adopt comparable or even commensurable stances on matters of cultural and intellectual property, the basic elements of a politics of biocultural property have so far been affirmed in virtually every international declaration and document.

In Defense of the Commons

Given the emphasis on cultural and intellectual property rights, indigenous activists have been criticized for embracing a logic of proprietisation, but what is often overlooked is that they have been



forced to respond to the de facto enclosure of knowledges and materials, and the turn to a politics of rights is often primarily an attempt to stave off the enclosure of customary commons. In the controversy over crop genetic resources, for example, where the continued existence of a customary commons in the form of farm-saved seed constitutes an obstacle to the expansion of a transnational seed industry eager to capture an enormous market, activists have made a case for “farmers’ rights”. This is done less to seek compensation for informal innovation than protect traditions of seed saving and seed exchange that have been a core mechanism of maintaining and developing local biodiversity. These would be threatened should new seed patents criminalize such basic practices. Other strategies to eliminate non-proprietary practices and various forms of a genetic commons include the development of hybrid and genetically-modified seeds that can grow to maturity but will not germinate when planted through so-called “genetic use restriction technologies” (GURTs). These are referred to as “necro”, “suicide” or “terminator” technologies by biodiversity activists because GURTs are a biological mechanism to extinguish the right of farmers to save and re-plant seeds from their harvest, and create greater dependence on commercial seeds markets. It is no accident that many activists have also articulated strong critiques of biotechnological agricultural modernization aggressively promoted by way of introducing patent-protected seeds. They fear both a homogenization of local ecosystems and a loss of autonomy through the subordination of traditional agro-ecological practices to the logic and instruments of proprietarization. At stake are questions of autonomy, livelihood, and cultural survival as well as the integrity of local ecosystems on whose diversity the development of future crops continues to depend4.

The issue of farmers’ rights, and the resistance to “anti-commons” technologies like GURT, demonstrate the extent to which natural resource rights in the form of customary commons and intellectual property rights on bio-materials are already meshing, linking the protection of knowledges to a broader agenda of resource rights. The assumption of an interrelatedness of biological and cultural diversity, substantiated by a growing amount of scientific research, reverberates with the self-perception of many indigenous communities5. Increasingly, these communities insist that their traditions be understood as systems


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of knowledge of their own that integrate cultural, ecological, economic, social, and spiritual elements. Tradition can contribute more to the protection of biological diversity than a patent system that isolates this diversity as a resource or attempts to “protect” it by way of its commercialisation. Not to be misunderstood as an emphasis on the immutability of collective identities, the centrality of “tradition” is a consequence of the necessity to actively maintain and develop the knowledge contained in these traditions as well as the need to resist cultural marginalization and environmental degradation. And as developments in Mexico, Ecuador, or Bolivia show, “tradition” may well include the revitalization of alternative models of organization and collaborative creation that resonate far beyond the field of ecopolitics.

From IPR to Hybrid Commons

The intersection between biodiversity and intellectual property has already become a central terrain of ecopolitical contestation, as the attribution of authorship or ownership is a matter of finding juridical concepts appropriate to the structure of traditional knowledges that are at odds with the orthodox logic of intellectual property rights. Legal theorists have argued for some time that the conceptual boundaries of authorship that define creativity and invention for the purpose of granting IPR are indeed cultural boundaries6. A number of efforts are underway to support indigenous claims to cultural, intellectual property, and traditional resource rights. While non-indigenous researchers like Graham Dutfield and the late Darrell A. Posey of the Oxford Working Group for Traditional Resource Rights have done much to draw attention to the issue of indigenous resource and property rights, indigenous activists have only recently created their own IPR-related networks and think tanks. One of the most ambitious projects is the “Call of the Earth: Ancient Wisdom for Sustaining Livelihoods” (Earthcall), an international cooperation between indigenous organizations that connects indigenous IPR-experts and seasoned activists to support the development of indigenous positions on matters of intellectual property rights7. Core thematic areas of Earthcall are “traditional knowledge relating to biological resources (e.g. traditional medicine, agriculture, bioprospecting); appropriation of expressions of culture (e.g. music, rituals, artwork etc); and the appropriation of human genetic materials”



(ibid.) This agenda—only one of these areas focuses on protection, two on the prevention of appropriation—also suggests that indigenous property claims are both a conscious strategy of cultural survival and a matter of resistance to “biopiracy” and less explicit forms of proprietisation8.

Even if “indigenous knowledges” are not considered as epistemologically distinct, the possible use of IPR remains controversial, not least because the granting of such rights may well transform the creative dynamic that underlies its development9. In addition to the possible protection afforded by IPR, measures to preclude the unauthorized commercialisation of indigenous knowledges include various forms of defensive publishing. The creation of IK/TK databases, for example, that could be included in the literature searches mandated by the review of patent applications—knowledge already in the public domain cannot be patented—has attracted tremendous interest, especially from “developed” countries. At the same time, “developing” countries remain understandably reserved about such technological fixes to the complex problem of IK/TK protection10. WIPO’s activities on IK/TK, for example, have met with suspicion among indigenous organizations11. Nevertheless, the use of databases receives support not least because legal challenges to commercial patents that have already been granted are complex and costly. Additionally, the creation of IK/TK archives as a means of “defensive publishing” and the creation of “prior art” would offer a measure of protection against appropriation12.

Whatever the future status of IK/TK initiatives at the international level, both defensive and positive protection require documentation of existing knowledges, and the issue of how exactly one might do so to advance indigenous interests continues to be controversial13. Martin Nakata, Director of Indigenous Academic Programs at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney, has outlined how the growing interest in IK is itself motivated and sustained by a number of sectorial interests, which have affected the way IK has been conceptualised. In a survey of common concepts of IK, Nakata (2002) notes that many of them fail to mention that indigenous peoples continue to refer to themselves as holders of collective rights in their knowledges. Indigenous definitions of IK also stress its management by way of rules regarding secrecy and sacredness, involving distinctly “indigenous” issues of ownership and protection.


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One of the models surveyed by Nakata is the work of Jane Hunter, a Senior Research Scientist at the Australian Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC) who is involved in the “application of multimedia metadata and rights management standards to the development of online collections of indigenous resources” (Hunter 2002)14. She is exploring how processes of codification should proceed when the interests of the community are primary, including the complex regulation of access to different knowledges by different sections of the (indigenous) population. Hunter and her co-researchers are part of the Indigenous Knowledge Management Project (IKMP), supported by the DSTC and the US Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Cultural Resources Centre (CRC). Commenting on her work on the creation of software tools for indigenous knowledge management, Hunter argues that “[d]ocumentation of indigenous knowledge and history has become an extremely important tool to ensure the survival and self-sustainability of indigenous tribes and cultures, and to provide evidence of past injustices and to support claims of original ownership.” Hunter knows that the growing interest in community-driven IK documentation is triggered not least by the spread of an international property rights regime that respects alternative ownership claims. Yet this respect arises only in so far as these rights have been documented as so-called “prior art”, a form of publication patent offices accept as evidence that knowledge can no longer be patented since it has already been made public.

In the case of IK, cultural survival meshes with the politics of biocultural property: (collective) ownership claims call for a corresponding documentation of knowledges to protect local knowledges from unauthorized appropriation and make possible its commercialisation on “local” terms. Both the suggestion that all biodiversity-related knowledges become part of the public domain by way of creating a “biodiversity commons” that offers “free, universal access to biodiversity information” and the enthusiastic embrace of a “utopian plagiarism” by media activists ignore the issues of secrecy and sacredness identified by Nakata. Hunter’s archive software (Hunter et. al. 2003), offering the tools of digital rights management (DRM) to indigenous communities interested in creating and maintaining differentiated levels of access, differs substantially from most open-



access archives like the Honey Bee Network or databases currently inventoried by WIPO.

What is often overlooked in net.cultural celebrations of the knowledge commons is the ambivalent relationship indigenous peoples have had to ideas of open access, associated with a loss of control and ownership that resonates with ideas of terra nullius. It was, after all, because access to local biodiversity remained open to all in the name of the principle of a “common heritage of humanity” that instances of biocolonialism and biopiracy continue to occur. This is one reason why the CBD returned to the concept of national resource sovereignty and encourages the creation of mechanisms to protect indigenous/traditional knowledges. The idea of “defensive publishing” to prevent the appropriation of knowledges already in the public domain would have to be modified to do justice to these concerns. Indigenous databases could be open to the literature searches of patent authorities but not to a general readership (Adams and Henson-Apollonio 2002). This is, anyway, one of the conclusions reached by Manuel Ruiz (2002), Director of the Biodiversity Program of the Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA), in a survey of issues related to the creation of IK/TK databases (see also Sullivan 2002).

This means that standard assumptions regarding the desirability of an open-access digital commons may have to be revisited, or developed to make room for multiple commons. Collective rights, however contradictory, weak, and possibly inadequate as a means of empowerment and resistance, are fundamentally misunderstood as mere acceleration of the “second enclosure” associated with an expanding IPR regime. Legal theorists like James Boyle have long been aware of the need to create and maintain spaces for alternative forms of (common) property within an overall critique of proprietisation. The 1993 Bellagio Declaration, issued by a diverse group of scholars committed to a politics of the public domain, already notes that “the main exception to this expansion of the public domain should be in favour of those who have been excluded by the authorial biases of current law” (Baxi et al. 1993). To re-imagine the international regime of intellectual property, one will also have to re-imagine the conceptual terms of possible counter-discourses employed to do so. And indigenous political concerns around biocultural


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knowledges cannot be dismissed simply because they appear to be at odds with efforts to reclaim and rebuild a generic commons.

Instead, I think it is crucial to remember that all commons are local(ized) commons, and any politics of the commons has to be explored in terms of the specificity of the commons its envisions. A careful “cosmopolitical” examination of different concepts of the commons might even come to the conclusion that, at least in the case of the current international regime of intellectual property rights, indigenous and non-indigenous positions are not as far apart as the idiom of a politics of biocultural property might suggest. Only a few media theorists have commented on the issue of biodiversity, and most of them do not support a mere extension of IPR to cover indigenous knowledges. Their arguments should not be misread as mere dismissals of a politics of biocultural property, but as opportunities to articulate its demands in different terms—those of the commons and collaborative processes of commons-based creation15.

The free software pioneer Richard Stallman (2003), for example, has rightly questioned the utility of the charge of biopiracy. By implication, this also calls into question any politics of bioproperty—since it cements the assumption of natural organisms as originary property. What is more, while indigenous peoples will receive no more than crumbs off the tables of transnational corporations, proprietisation of what ought to be in the public domain continues. A similar position—protect customary local uses, but do not offer monopolistic property rights—is also the point of departure for a proposal by the Indian media theorist K. Ravi Srinivas (2002), who envisions a two-way exchange between traditional farmers and software developers. For him, both engage in structurally similar processes of collective creation that create or cultivate common property. On the one hand, the General Public Licenses (GPL) could be adopted to protect the integrity of creative works, offer copyright, but limit commercial uses of free software. This would protect bio-materials from monopolistic forms of proprietisation. But in addition to his proposal of what he calls “biolinux”, he also compares the “participatory plant breeding” of farmers to the collective development of software and suggests that information and media theory have much to learn from exploring traditional methods of collaborative creation. And for Roberto Verzola (2003), collective rights are also closer to ideas of the



commons than they are to the monopolistic property rights implied in copyright or patents. They reflect indigenous cultures of sharing (along with a strong anti-proprietary stance) rather than a desire to maintain exclusive rights of access and use. Perhaps even more importantly, Verzola (2004) argues that even though “[t]oday, the global debate on bio-patenting, plant variety protection and seed privatisation is occurring separately from the debate on copyrights issues, which covers books, software, video and audio materials, and similar goods... the two are very closely related.”

These approaches signal the possibility of a creative exchange across divides that continue to separate fields of conceptual inquiry as well as corresponding social movements, maintained by the general but, in my opinion, mistaken insistence that (rival) material and (non-rival) immaterial commons have little in common. A possible encounter between eco- and info-political efforts is likely to take place on the conceptual terrain of the commons—but only if the concept itself is pluralized, its different genealogies retrieved into contemporary debates, and the possible tension between different manifestations acknowledged.

The Coloniality of the Commons

The questionable analytical value of a concept does not necessarily compromise its ethico-political utility, and this is no different in the case of IK/TK. For me, the various claims made in support of IK/TK are less epistemological than ethical, both in terms of support for indigenous politics as well as the limitations of official regimes of development and modernisation17. Their strength lies in their ability to encourage reflection on the locatedness of knowledge systems and their relation to a broader agenda of issues around a reclaiming and recreation of the commons. The aim of an indigenous politics of biocultural property is not necessarily a monopolistic form of proprietisation, but the protection of limited commons in the realm of culture, information, and knowledge as well as (natural) resources. These, in turn, are perhaps best understood in the context of the (limited) common property systems that have traditionally governed resource access and use in many indigenous communities. Rather than mapping indigenous efforts onto a single continuum from individual property to a global commons and


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interpreting the demand for collective rights as an extension of existing IPR regimes, it makes more sense to explore indigenous ecopolitics in the (historical) context of a pluri-cultural concept of the commons (Coombe 1998).

Such conceptual differentiations can develop further existing attempts to establish the commons as alternative paradigm to both state and market. Given the economic and political position in which many indigenous peoples find themselves, it remains doubtful that something like economic and environmental justice can be achieved simply by way of granting IPR-protection to indigenous knowledges. But the example of IK/TK serves as a reminder of how complex the relationship between “material” and “immaterial” commons is, and to recall the “coloniality” of concepts like biodiversity or indeed the commons itself.

Here coloniality needs to be understood in terms of the colonial, transcultural relations that structured its emergence and constitution, and it is this history terms like biocolonialism reassert over and against the often ahistorical idioms of resource management or property rights. More generally, a concept like biodiversity—at least when it is approached, as I suggest, in terms of nature under the conditions of the network economy—might also facilitate a re-opening of media-theoretical inquiry toward questions of colonial history on the one hand and political ecology more generally18. The biodiversity controversy offers a useful point of departure for explorations, in the much broader historical context demanded by its fourth-worldist register, of how eco- and info-politics intersect. Many of its questions on authorship, creativity, and knowledge resonate less across a strict divide between material and (seemingly) immaterial commons than a continuum of degrees and thresholds of materiality.

The question of indigeneity, and a corresponding “fourth world” ecopolitics, certainly cuts across standard distinctions of inquiry. Growing out of a general interest in the (global) environmental justice movement in general and the role of indigenous environmentalism in particular, my own interest in these issues began with rather simple questions about how to approach the contemporary resurgence of indigenous ecopolitics. This resurgence is sometimes dismissed as an identity-political trend likely to fade over time, sometimes criticized as a blood-and-soil conservatism in ecopolitical disguise. Yet neither cliché



can really do justice to the complexity of indigenous politics19. Instead I found myself immersed in alternative histories of the international system that rarely surface in net.cultural perspectives. And because of the centrality of the demand for self-determination to indigenous initiatives, indigenous political movements cannot be adequately understood by way of analogy with other (domestic) minority or mainstream “new” social movements. Instead, the attention to indigenous politics offers a way to explore a register of social and organizational innovation whose results have been, somewhat paradoxically celebrated far beyond indigenous politics, without prompting sustained engagements with the historical practices that made such innovations possible. Finally, the idea of a neo-tribalist counter-modernity organized around essentialist ideas of people- and nationhood seems conceptually at odds with an indigenous politics whose efforts call the very constitution of “modernity”—nation,—people,—and state-hood—into question. I found myself challenged to expand my own sense of state transformation and the role played by the demand for autonomy in arriving at institutional arrangements beyond state or market. This, however, is also the space re-claimed by the concept and collaborative practice of the commons. It does not come as a surprise, then, to suggest that the “digital commons” debate could also be opened toward these kinds of questions.

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Baxi, U. et al., “Bellagio Declaration”, Statement of the Bellagio Conference Cultural Agency/Culural Authority: Politics and Poetics of Intellectual Property in the Post-Colonial Era (11 March 1993).

CAE, “Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production,” The Electronic Disturbance, Critical Arts Ensemble (2000).

Coombe, R.J. “Intellectual Property, Human Rights and Sovereignty: New Dilemmas in International Law Posed by the Recognition of Indigenous Knowledge and the Conservation of Biodiversity,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 6 (1998), 59-115


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Hansen, S.A. and J.W. VanFleet. (2003). Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property: A Handbook on Issues and Options for Traditional Knowledge Holders in Protecting their Intellectual Property and Maintaining Biological, Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2003.

Hunter, J. “Rights Markup Extensions for the Protection of Indigenous Knowledge,” Global Communities Track, WWW2002, Honolulu (May 2002).

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Hunter, J. and S.Choudhury (2003). “Implementing Preservation Strategies for Complex Multimedia Objects,” Seventh European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2003, Trondheim (Aug 2003).

Kipp, M. E.I. (2005). “Software and seeds: Open source methods”, First Monday 10:9 (5 Sept).

Lovgren, S. (2003)”Map Links Healthier Ecosystems, Indigenous Peoples,” National Geographic Online. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0227_030227_indigenousmap.html (27 Feb).

Mignolo, W. (2002). “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101:1 (Winter), 57-96.

Moritz, T. (2002). “Building the Biodiversity Commons,” D-Lib Magazine 8.6 (June 2002),

Murillo, K. (2003) “Map Demarcating Central America‘s Indigenous Territoris Reveal Correlation Between Native Lands and Standing Forests,” Eco-Exchange (April-May)

Nakata, M. (2002). “Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems,” 68th IFLA General Conference and Council in Glasgow, Scotland (18-24 Aug 2002).

Ruiz, M. (2002) “The International Debate on Traditional Knowledge as Prior Art in the Patent System: Issues and Options for Developing Countries,” Center for Int’l Environmental Law

Srinivas, K.R. (2002) “The Case For Biolinuxes and other pro-commons innovations”, Sarai Reader 2 (2002), 321-8



Stallman, R. (2003) Biopiracy or Bioprivateering? http://www.stallman.org/articles/biopiracy.html

Stengers, I. 2002. “Un engagement pour le possible.” Cosmopolitiques—Cahiers Théoriques pour l’Écologie Politique 1 (June 2002).

Sullivan, R. (2002) “Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights: A Digital Library Context,” D-Lib Magazine 8:5.

Verzola,R “Community rights over biological material: property rights or moral rights?” (Manuscript 2003)

Verzola, R. (2004) Towards a Political Economy of Information: Studies on the Information Economy, Second Edition, Quezon City, Phillipines: Foundation for Nationalist Studies.

Endnotes

1 The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) defines “biological diversity” as

the “variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial,

marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are

part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems” (CBD

Art. 2).

2 For organizations that track biodiversity-related activism, see the Indigenous Peoples

Council on Biopiracy <http://www.ipcb.org>, GRAIN <http://grain.org> and the ETC

Group <http://www.etcgroup.org>.

3 See Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote The Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code, Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2000. The media theorist Eugene Thacker has coined the term

“biomedia” to argue that the question at stake is not merely a simple digitization of the

biologica, but the extent to which the biological is already informatic – an approach with

obvious implications for any critique of biopiracy rooted in naturalist arguments. See

Eugene Thacker, “What is Biomedia?”, Configurations (11) 2003, 47–79.

4 The Eighth Conference of Parties (COP-8) of the Convention on Biological Diversity

in 2006 agreed to continue a general moratorium on terminator-technology despite

industry resistance. See <http://es.banterminator.org>.

5 Luisa Maffi, ed., On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge, and the Environment,

Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001. Also see <http://www.terralingua.org>. For an

attempt to expand the concept beyond its (exclusive) association with indigenous

ecopolitics, see Michelle Cocks, “Biocultural Diversity: Moving Beyond the Realm of

‘Indigenous’ and ‘Local’ People,” Human Ecology 34.2 (April 2006), 185-200.


Chapter Fourteen196

6 See, for example, Keith Aoki, “(Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a

Cultural Geography of Authorship,” Stanford Law Review 48 (May 1996), 1293-1355, or

Rosemary J. Coombe, “Authorial Cartographies: Mapping Proprietary Borders in a Less-

Than-Brave New World,” Stanford Law Review 48 (May 1996), 1357-66.

7 For a survey of the pros and cons (from an ‘indigenous’ point of view) of individual

mechanisms - copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. - commonly subsumed under

the umbrella term ‘intellectual property rights’, see Stephen A. Hansen and Justin W.

VanFleet, Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property: A Handbook on Issues and Options

for Traditional Knowledge Holders in Protecting their Intellectual Property and Maintaining

Biological Diversity, Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of

Science (AAAS), 2003.

8 What is interesting about the Earthcall network is that its statements, unlike the

international declarations already discussed, contain multiple disclaimers that the

network does not ‘represent’ all indigenous views but facilitates the articulation and

expression of indigenous interests - with the growth of the transnational indigenous

movement, issues of accountability have definitely reached indigenous organizations as

well (<http://www.earthcall.org/>)

9 See Arun Agrawal, “Not Having One’s Cake, Nor Eating It: Intellectual Property and

‘Indigenous’ Knowledges,” MacMillan Center Working Papers #35 (2003), <http://opus.

macmillan.yale.edu/workpaper/pdfs/CAR35.pdf>. Agrawal argues that “intellectual

property rights, especially in the forms of patents and copyrights, are institutions that

are likely to fundamentally alter the existing social grounds from which indigenous

knowledge innovations stem, and in the process transform precisely those characteristics

of indigenous knowledges which currently mark them as different” (ibid.).

10 WIPO maintains a website on Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expression <http://

www.wipo.int/globalissues/tk/index.html>.

11 Which is not to say they are impossible. Vandana Shiva and her colleagues have succeeded

in challenging the patent on Neem, for example. See Research Foundation for Science,

Technology and Ecology, “Landmark Victory in World’s First Case Against Biopiracy!!

European Patent Office Upholds Decision to Revoke Neem Patent”, Press Release (08

March 2005), <http://www.navdanya.org/news/05march8.htm>.

12 See Stephen Adams and Victoria Henson-Apollonio, “Defensive Publishing: A Strategy

for Maintaining Intellectual Property as Public Goods,” ISNAR Briefing Paper 53 (Sept

2002), <http://www.isnar.cgiar.org/publications/briefing/bp53.htm>. The Traditional

Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a project initiated by the Indian government, is one

recent example of a massive defensive publishing initiative that aims at the creation of

prior art. See <http://www.sdc.gov.in/TKDLReport.htm>.



13 For the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), all of the issues related to the

protection of indigenous or traditional knowledges fall into one of two categories, either

defensive protection, i.e. “measures that ensure that other parties do not obtain IP rights

over pre-existing TK”, or positive protection, i.e. “the use of existing legal mechanisms

to protect and promote TK” (<http://www.wipo.int/globalissues/tk/background/index.

html>). An example of a defensive measure is the development of a database whose

contents serve as evidence of what intellectual property law calls ‘prior art’, knowledges

have already been in the public domain and cannot be patented. An example of a positive

measure would be collective or community rights.

14 <http://metadata.net/ICM/>.

15 My sense of the “cosmopolitical” is informed by Isabelle Stengers’ rearticulation

of the term. See, for example, Stengers, I. 2002. “Un engagement pour le possible.”

Cosmopolitiques—Cahiers Théoriques pour l’Écologie Politique 1 (June 2002).

16 K. Ravi Srinivas, “The Case For Biolinuxes and other pro-commons innovations”, Sarai

Reader 2 (2002), 321-8, Roberto Verzola, “Community rights over biological material:

property rights or moral rights?” (Manuscript 2003), also see his Towards a Political

Economy of Information: Studies on the Information Economy, Second Edition, Quezon

City, Phillipines: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 2004, as well as Margaret E.I. Kipp,

“Software and seeds: Open source methods”, First Monday 10.9 (5 Sept 2005). Also see

Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, “Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a

Common-Pool Resource,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66 (Winter-Spring 2003), 111-

45.

17 Observers of indigenous commons traditions like Arun Agrawal, for example, have

criticized efforts to single out IK/TK as epistemologically distinct. Instead they argue

that the real focus of those concerned about biodiversity loss should be a politics of

indigenous empowerment through new autonomy arrangements. See Arun Agrawal,

“Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Western Knowledge”, Development and

Change 26.3 (1995), 413-39, also “Indigenous knowledge and the politics of classification,”

International Social Science Journal 173 (2002), 287-97.

18 The notion of “coloniality” is a post-dependentist paradigm that has been introduced

and elaborated along different vectors by thinkers like Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo,

Arturo Escobar as well as Enrique Dussel. None of these are particularly close to—or

even involved in—media-theoretical debates about the digital commons, but the

concept it strikes me as more relevant here than some of the approaches associated with

“postcolonialism” in its more or less canonical versions (Said, Bhabha, etc.)., in part it

was elaborated in relation to the historical experiences of indigenous peoples in the

Americas, and could perhaps be explored in greater detail to facilitate the reinsertion


Chapter Fourteen198

of the commons-debate into a much broader historical/genealogical horizon. For an

introduction, see Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial

Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.1 (Winter 2002), 57-96.

19 Given the potential sustainability of local common property regimes, the link between

their maintenance and the status of collective rights is significant, and some have noted

that as support for collective rights deteriorates, so does the ecosystem previously

maintained under a corresponding common property regime—and vice versa. A

map of Mexico and Central America, for example, published by the US Center for the

Support of Native Lands and the US National Geographic Society in 2003, shows a

high correlation between intact ecosystems and indigenous communities. Indigenous

peoples are involved in what ethnocartographers call “participatory land use mapping”

to, quite literally, put themselves on the map, and according to Amílcar Castañeda, field

coordinator for the Center for the Support of Native Lands, it was one of the map‘s

principal objectives to formally recognize the region‘s indigenous people and help them

gain legal title to their lands. See Katiana Murillo, “Map Demarcating Central America‘s

Indigenous Territories Reveal Correlation Between Native Lands and Standing Forests,”

Eco-Exchange (April-May 2003). Superimposing maps of indigenous territories with

others showing forest cover and marine ecosystems, the ethnocartographic project

concludes that “natural ecosystems have a better chance of survival when indigenous

people inhabit them” (Stefan Lovgren, “Map Links Healthier Ecosystems, Indigenous

Peoples,” National Geographic Online (27 Feb 2003). The popular map has already helped

spark a widespread campaign for protecting and legalizing the territories of indigenous

peoples.


199

Contributors

Danny Butt is a writer, educator and consultant, and partner at Suma Media Consulting. Previously, he was Director of the Creative Industries Research Centre at Waikato Institute of Technology, New Zealand. He edited the book Internet Governance: Asia Pacific Perspectives (UNDP-APDIP/Elsevier, 2005) and has contributed to many conferences and publications on cultural politics and new media technologies. He coordinated the organisational group for the Cultural Futures symposium. http://www.dannybutt.net

Jon Bywater is a writer and critic and is Programme Leader for Critical Studies at the Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland. He is the New Zealand reviewer for Artforum International and a music reviewer for specialist music magazine The Wire; and has contributed to other Australasian arts and culture journals including Landfall, Art+Text, Artlink, Broadsheet and Eyeline. He has worked as a member of the curatorial collective Cuckoo since their inception in 2000, and was a co-organiser of the events Cultural Futures and Cultural Provocation.

Jason De Santolo graduated in law and currently works as a researcher at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at University of Technology, Sydney. Prior to working within Indigenous higher education research centres, he undertook various legal consultancies and worked on Indigenous documentary production. He has an interest in documentary and new media enhancement of research and project outcomes for communities through appropriate use of these technologies. Jason collaboratively produces ‘guerrilla documentaries’ and has coordinated a number of creative projects.

Laurel Evelyn Dyson is a lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She teaches computer ethics and information systems courses, as well as leading the Indigenous Pre-IT Program. She has published many conference papers, journal articles and book chapters, and has written or co-edited three books, including Information Technology and Indigenous People published


Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice200

in 2007. A full list of publications can be found at her website http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~laurel/index.htm

Ayesha Hameed is a Montreal-based video artist and writer. She has written about the relationship between media, migration and representation in publications like Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Public: Art/Culture/Ideas and Fuse Magazine as well as various catalogues and collections of essays. She is also a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University where her dissertation explores the relationship between modernity and the middle passage. http://www.ayeshahameed.net

Candice Hopkins (Tlingit) is Director and Curator of Exhibitions at The Western Front in Vancouver, Canada. She has an MA from The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY where she received the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for the exhibition Every Stone Tells a Story: The Performance Work of David Hammons and Jimmie Durham. Hopkins has worked with Aboriginal organisations in Canada and abroad and is currently collaborating with the Carcross Tagish First Nation on the development of an artists’ cooperative and craft store. She has spoken and published internationally and is a sessional instructor in the Critical + Cultural Studies Department at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design.

Fatima Lasay is an artist and writer based in the Philippines. She is interested in the social and political dimensions of technologies. Her writing has appeared in the book Tanaw: Perspectives on the BSP Painting Collection (Central Bank of the Philippines 2005), and her essay “No Carrier and Other Stories from Philippine BBS Culture” appeared in the book Read_Me: Software Art and Cultures (Aarhus University Press 2004). Lasay was professor of industrial design, computer art and art theory (1996-2004) at the University of the Philippines where she developed its first computer art elective courses and organized the Digital Media Festivals (2000-2003). http://www.korakora.org/

Mike Leggett has been working with media across the institutions of art, education, IT, cinema and television since the early-70s. Currently he is the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award and works within


Contributors 201

the PhD program of the Creativity &Cognition Studio in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney. He has film and video work in archives and collections in Europe, Australia, North and South America, and has curated exhibitions of interactive multimedia for many galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. He writes and lectures about media art, contributing to journals (Leonardo; Continuum), magazines (RealTime, World Art), and online ‘zines (FineArt Forum).

Lachlan MacDowall is a researcher and artist based in Melbourne. He is currently lectures in the Community Cultural Development program in the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. His most recent publications on graffiti include “In Praise of 70K: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style” in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 20:4 (2006) and the preface to Christine Dew’s Uncommissioned Art: An A-Z of Australian Graffiti (Melbourne University Press, 2007), which also contains fifty of his photographs. http://www.graffitistudies.info/

Allen Meek lectures in media studies and visual culture at Massey University, New Zealand. He is researching the postcolonial politics of contemporary media. His publications include articles in New Media and Society and Space and Culture, and essays in Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities (U Mississipppi P, 2003), Figuring the Pacific (U Canterbury P, 2005) and The Lord of the Rings: Studying the Event Film (Forthcoming: Manchester UP, 2008).

Anna Munster is a writer, artist and educator. Her book, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics was published in 2006 (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press). She works collaboratively as an artist on multichannel, interactive and responsive media environments primarily with Michele Barker. They recently exhibited the multichannel video work Struck in Sydney and Beijing. Munster is a senior lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.



Rachel O’Reilly is an independent writer and curator. She was Curatorial Assistant, Video and New Media at the Australian Cinémathèque, Queensland Art Gallery Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia) 2004 – 2007, and a member of the Place, Ground and Practice working group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit, ISEA 2006. Her writing on visual and media art and culture has been published in Postcolonial Studies, Leonardo, and RealTime.

Nova Paul is a film maker and senior lecturer in Visual Arts, at the School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology. Her films deal with the production of space and its representation on the screen. Recent projects include Pink and White Terraces (2006) and Our Future is in the Air (2007) She is involved in indigenous rights education and research and tino rangatiratanga action groups and coordinates the public forum Talk About Terror. She was a co-organiser for Cultural Futures. http://www.novapaul.net

Raqs Media Collective is a collective of media practitioners that works in art practice, new media, filmmaking, photography, media theory & research, writing, criticism and curation. Raqs is the co-initiator of Sarai: The New Media Initiative, which since 2001 has been a programme of interdisciplinary research and practice on media, city space and urban culture at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Members of the collective are resident at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi, where they work on projects interpreting the city and urban experience; make cross-media works; collaborate on the development of software; design and conduct workshops; administer discussion lists; edit publications; write, research and co-ordinate several research projects and public activities of Sarai. They are co-editors of the Sarai Reader series. http://www.sarai.net; http://www.raqsmediacollective.net

Juan Francisco Salazar is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, and a consultant for UNESCO on communication technology capacities in indigenous communities. Salazar is a member of Our Media, a global network of community media collectives and academics. He has directed a wide range of works, including documetaries and music videos. In 1999, he participated in


Contributors 203

the collaborative mixed media installation Monumental Anatomy about the Atacama desert, which was exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile. He received his PhD in communication and media studies from the University of Western Sydney, with the dissertation “Imperfect Media: The Poetics of Indigenous Media” and his video De la Tierra a la Pantalla was the audiovisual companion to his research. Salazar received a BA in anthropology and an MA in visual arts management from the University of Chile. He received an MA in communication and cultural studies from the University of Western Sydney. Salazar was born in Chile and has lived in Sydney, Australia since 1998.

Jo Smith is Lecturer in Media Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. She researches in the area of postcolonial media theory, indigenous media and new media studies.

Sarah Waterson is an installation/multiple media artist, whose work deals with the influence of electronic technologies on subjectivities. Over the past fifteen years she has exhibited her installations/interactive environments and digital works both nationally within Australia and internationally, including Germany, Finland and the USA. Her recent interactive electronic installations have included: subscapePROOF (collaboration with Kate Richards, Australian Centre for the Moving Image), subscapeBALTIC (collaboration with Kate Richards, ISEA2004) Mapping E~Motion (exhibited at The National Gallery of Victoria, The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia and Artspace, New Zealand), and trans.mute (a Sydney City Council public art commission) amongst many others. Her current interests include interactive environments for performance and data mapping techniques. Waterson currently lectures in digital media, and is the Head of Program for Design at the School of Communication, Design and Media, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Soenke Zehle teaches transcultural literary and media studies at Universitaet des Saarlandes as well as the Saar Academy of Fine Arts. He holds degrees in comparative literature, philosophy, and political science as well as certificates in Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies and



Literary Translation (ger<>en). For an overview of collaborative projects and publications, see http://tmsp.org.


Aboriginal 28, 42, 72, 96, 105, 123; Australia 48; culture 124; community 128-129, 158

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission 115

Activism 83 ; Cyber- 83-84; Networked- 84

Activist 94, 186Aesthetic 80-81, 84-85, 90-91,136,

166-169, 178; ethics of 176; Indigenous 93-94; information 83

Agriculture 110Ah Kee, Vernon 35, 40-42Aid work 156American Telecommunications 79Anangu people (Central Australia)

129Anonymous Digital Coalition 82Appadurai, Arjun 137Appropriation 31Ara Irititja 125-126Aravamudaran, Srinivas 64Archiving 135, 140-141 Arcview 126Art Crimes 140-141Articulation (Pagsasadiwa) 173, 175Artists 84, 175-176Asia Pacific 18Audio-visual 121Auge, Marc 79Auschwitz 68Austin, Joe 136Australia 103, 112-114, 122 Australian criminologists 142

Australian Film Commission 122Australian Government Office of

Film and Literature 134Australian Identity 157Australian Law Reform Commission

110Australian refugee 134Authoring software 129

Babel 66, 70Baltic 174Bangalore 86Barclay, Barry 21, 25, 27, 29-30, 32Bauman, Zygmunt 62, 64Beaucage, Marjorie 93Bellagio Declaration 189Benjamin, Walter 26-27, 54Bergson, Henri 24Bey, Hakim 83Bhabha, Homi 26Biculturalism 40, 46, 55Biocultural property 183Bio-diversity 181, 185-186, 189, 192Biological resources 186Biopiracy 190Biotechnology 182Bisa 171Blair, Nerida 115blessed-bandwidth.net 86Body 169-171, 173, 178Bolivia 186Bove, Jose 171Boyle, James 189Brassai 135-138, 143

Index



Brazil 61Buhay 171Burke, Edmund 72-73Butt, Danny 111

Cabrel 69, 71Caillois, Roger 153Canadian Gothic 71Capitalism 63-64, 74, 99, 143 Cargo cults 11-12Cartography see also Maps 10-11, 40

-41, 84-85Celan, Paul 68Charter of Indigenous Tribal Peoples

of the Tropical Forests (1992) 183China 86Cinema 67-68Clark, Nigel 28Codes see language 16Cohn, Norman 96COICA Statement on Intellectual

Property Rights and Biodiversity (1994) 184

Collingwood, R.G. 175Collaboration 130, 159, 190; research

107; practice 193 Collective 15, 26, 85; rights 187, 189Colonial 28, 61, 62, 66, 69, 74, 192Colonisation 46, 106, 113-114, 116,

South America 63, technology 23Commodity 82Common property 191Communal 96, rights management

108Communication 13, 26, 161, science

149, service 79, technology 156Community 98, 107, 147, 170;

imagined 21; knowledge 175; practice 148

Computation 175Consciousness 176Conservation 181Convention on Biodiversity 181-182Convergent technology 161Crandall, Jordan 85Creative Commons 16, 150Creative Cut 113Creative practice 175Creative research 107, 111Critical Art Ensemble 83Cross-discipline 105Cubitt, Sean 65-67, 71Cultural 87, 150; identity 55, interface

108, material 17, praxis 80, 90, property 184, survival 182

Cultural Futures 18Culture 171; location 21-22Customary commons 185; laws 106,

local use 190Customs 174Cyber-mythologies 37Cyberpowow 100Cyberspace 17, 80; Indigenous 99Cybertribe 104

Data 14Databases 111Dataflow 87Date line 13Davidson, Jason 104de Certeau, Michel 136-137, 143Dead Reckoning 11-12Deleuze, Gilles 48-49, 64, 67-68, 73Delhi 86


Index 207

Destiny Deacon 104Dialogue 69Digital, art 148; commons 181, 193;

connectivities 64; governance 115; imaging 45; information 147; media 96; video 42

Digital Detroit 138 Digital Marae 22, 31, 37-40 Digital Street Game 153, 159Displacement 67, 71-72Diwa 168-172, 175-176, 179Diwang 169Documentary film 98Documentation 188Doherty, Joe 85Dorian Grey 72Douglas, Stan 60, 62, 66-69, 71-74Dracula 71Duchamp, Marcel 95, 99Durham, Jimmie 95Dutfield, Graham 186

Earthcall 186Easter Island 9-10Ecology 110, 172; ecological diversity

170; social- 172Economic 80, 87, 125, 172; growth 183,

macro 148 Economy, speculative 14Ecopolitics 192Ecosystems 182EDSA People Power Revolution 169Education 167, 170E-graffiti 139El Niño/ La Niña 14Electronic database 141Electronic Disturbance Theatre 82

End Usage 15England 67Environment 177Escape from Woomera 134Ethics 17Ethnic groups 171Ethnobotany 110Ethno-cultural groups 183Ethnography 41European 71Experimental film and video 98

Fantasies of the Good 41Farmers 190, rights 185, farming 167Feathers of Peace (film) 28Federal Standard – 1037C 79Fi5e Graffiti analysis 142Filemaker Pro 125Film 70, and media New Zealand 47Flaherty, Robert 96Flickr 151Forced labour 166Fountain of Stories Living Knowledge

Archive 125Frankenstein 71Fraser, Jenny 104Freire, Paulo 115

Galiwin’ku Indigenous knowledge Centre 112 Galloway, Alex 82

Game design 147Games 155, for Change 162 Gaze 41General Public Licenses 190Genetic use restriction technology

185Genocide 74



Geography 20,100, 110, 156 Geopolitical 80Giese, Paula 99-100Ginsburg, Faye 21GIS 126Global 81, belonging 158, 162;

connectivity 87; culture 36; financial economy 174; market 86, 114; networks 91; standards 79

Globalisation 79, 115; and culture 137Glossary of Telecommunications 79Goold, Cameron 104Gothic 72-73Governance 122GPS 84,139 Grafedia 139Graffiti 135-143; New York 137; street

139; writing 135 Grafitti Response Information Team

(GriT) 141Graphic Information Systems 142Group participation and community

– see also media participation 149Guano Island Act 15Guerilla television 97Gumucio-Dagron, Alfonso 149Gunita, Andrea 63 Gupapuynu Yolnu 112Gupta, Shilpa 81, 86-90

Half-life 134Heathcote, Christopher 137Heatseeking 85Historical reconstruction 61-62;

subject 74Histories, alternatives 193;

personal 161

History 156, of babaylan 176; Chinese technology 21; local 85; Maori 23-25; Pakeha 47; Philippine 172, 174

Honey Bee Network 189Hopi Indian 97Hors Champs 68Huizinga, Johan 153, 154Hunter, Jane 188

I like Frank 153,160, 161ICT 109Identity 30, 151, 158; cultural 27;

mobility 36; politics 4 Ideology 167-168IK 192; IK/TK 189Imagination 69Immaterial 181Imperialism 71; British 47Indexing 129India 86, urban culture 81.Indigenous 107; activists 181; art 124;

Australia 121-123; Australian culture 127; communities 103, 106-107, 112, 115, 122, 125-126,131, 184-185, 188; creativity 115; database 1989; eco-activism 183; heritage 103, 105; knowledge 111-113, 121-122, 187; living culture archives 124; Maori 45; methodology 108; multimedia knowledge systems 124; peoples 183; peoples media 20; peoples land 183; politics 192; public sphere 106; research 108; silencing 61; standpoint theory 108; stories 157; intellectual and


Index 209

cultural property 106Indigenous Experimentalism 97Indigenous Heritage Rights 107Indigenous Knowledge Management

Programme 188Indigenous Knowledge see also

Traditional Knowledge 182Information and media circuits 90Information and theory media 190Information Communication

Technology 159Information, culture 81-82; society 17 Installation 71, 73, 88; practice 42Intellectual property 15, 110, 124-125,

128, 181-182, 184-186, 188-190Interactive 122, 147-148; documentary

127; media 89; multimedia 150; space 128

Interactivity 151Interface 157, design 125International law 183Internet 82, 99, native 100Inuit 98IP Enabled Voice Communication

and Public Safety Act 84IPR 192Iraq 84Isuma Productions 96, 98

Jackson, Peter 21, 29Janke, Terri 104, 105Jekyll and Hyde 72Jumbunna Enhanced Research Media

Project 112Jutel, Thiery 30

Kari-Oca Declaration (1992) 183

Kashmir 89Kaupapa 109Kimberley Declaration (2002) 184King Kong 21, 29 King, Michael 27King, Thomas 93 Knowledge 170-177, 184, 187;

commons 189; community 161; cultural 161; ethnic 170; information 11; locatedness 191; production 183; sharing 161; system 108, 106, 173

Korea 86Kula Ring 16 Kunuk, Zacharias 96-98

Lamoureux, Johanne 61Land 123; ownership 63Landscape (artwork) 36-37Landscape 72-73, 89Langton, Marcia 106Language 63, 65-66, 68-69,168, 170-

171, 173-175, 178Lauer, Mirko 63-64Lemuria 18Lennon, Jessie 123Liberalism 107Liberation 176Libertarian 82Lisa Reihana 35, 37-39, 42Lister, Aaron 49Local 81,188, communities 106-107;

ecosystems 185; identity 88; knowledge 161-169; place 114; practice 85

Local Commons 190 Location 37; media 83-85



Lovink, Geert 17Lyotard, Jean-Francois 140

Magic circle 149, 154, 159-160, 162Malinowski Bronislaw 16Mallard, Trevor 47Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan 32Manila Bay 165Maori 109, community 38;

epistemology 38; representation 23; filmmakers 21-22; history 23; mythology 37; Television 22; time 27

Mapping 99, 135, 159 Maps see also cartography 10-11, 41,

63, 85,127; Cartesian 37; urban space 138

Marae 37-39Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under

Pressure 135Marginality 66Market 78; systems 174Markets 88Marks, Linzey 39King Jr. Martin Luther 115Masayesva, Victor 97-98Mass media 170Massive Multiplayer Online Games

155Mataatua Declaration on Cultural

and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1993) 184

Material 181Materiality 81-82Mathematics 148Media 174; arts 18; files 126Media participation 150-151

Mediated space 26Mercado, Leonardo N. 173Mercer, Kobena 73Methodology 108Mexico 186Migration 178Miller, Ivor 138Mind 173Minha-ha, Trinh T. 94-95mise en abime 70Misunderstanding 66-67Mita, Merata 21, 30-32Modernisation 22, 148Modernist 74, 154Modernity 11, 62-64, 112, 193 Moriarty, John 124Multimedia 121, 126, 131 Myth 94

Nakata, Martin 108, 187-188Nanook of the North 96, 98Narrative see also stories 65-67, 127-

128; Aboriginal 99; grand 74; native 93; oral 68; painting 61

Nation to Nation 100National identity, Aotearoa / New

Zealand 46-47, Maori 49National Indigenous New Media Labs

104Nationhood 30Native American Art Resources 99Native film 97Native Portraits n. 19897 24Natives 70Natural resource rights 185Nature 72, 182Navigation 11-12, 37


Index 211

Neocolonialism 46Net art 88, 90net.culture 181, 189, 193 Network 80; economy 86Networked culture 85; flow 81Net-worker 90Networks 100New Media 112New media 20-21 ,134, 147-148, 151,

176, 178; body 42; ecological 152; ecologies 162; ecology 156; environment 115; hybrid 104; interactive 107; systems 161; theory 86, 148

New Media art 11, 80, 82, 91, 142-143New World 62New Zealand 45Ngai Sianne 72niri niri 125Nootka Sound (artwork) 66-67Nootka Sound, Canada 60Nous Venons en Paix: Histoires des

Ameriques 61Novak, Marcus 80Nutka 60, 62, 66-69, 71-74Nyirti 125

Obsolescence 12OhMyNews 151Once Were Warriors 50Online, communities 157; games 156Oral performance 123Our rights 112Outage 79Oxford Working Group for

Traditional Resource Rights 186

Pacific Rim 7; mythology 10Painting History 74Palm Island 41Panoho, Rangihiroa 31-32Pathscape 122, 125-126, 128-130Peltier, Leonard 99People power 169Peopling Fairfield 127Peralta, Jesus T. 170-171Perez, Juan 66Performing 105Perry, Nick 28-29Personality 172Petrone, Penny 94Pharmacology 110Philippine Folk Music 167; society

169Philosophy 175Photography 40, 107, 136Picasso, Pablo 136Piper Keith, 73Piracy 17, 26, 36, 40, 45, 89, 99, 104,

114, 121-123, 127, 154, 156, 158; gaming 155; geopolitics of 159; ground and practice 18; grounded 166; Indigenous 35; information 83; knowledge 55; narratives of 163; New Media Arts 35; Non- 79-80; politics 40; representation 127; sensed 166; social realities 54; sociological 37

Plains Indians 99Play 152, 162Poe, Edgar Allen 71Poetry 68Politic 80Politics 87, 150; political economy 155



Portraiture 40-41Portuguese 70Posey, Darrell A. 186Post-colonialism 48Post-industrial cultures 154Poststructuralist politics 66Production 81Proletarian 64Protest 103; 113Protocols 82, 86, 108; indigenous 131;

technology 105 Pulso 176

Queensland reserves 41Qui Zhijie 35-37, 42

r e a 104Raqs Media Collective 78Real time 161Reihana, Lisa 21-22, 24, 31, 33Renoir, Jean 154Representation 40, 42, 123, 127, 168,

175; Maori 23; of place 36Research methodologies 107Resistance 82Resource Management 110, 181Rice, Jeff 139Rickard, Eva 27 Ridley, Aaron 176Rifles 95, 99Ritual 87Romanticism 62Rennós, Rosângela 60, 62, 69-74Royal Commission on Aboriginal

Deaths in Custody 106Royoux, JC 68Ruiz, Manuel 189

Sacrifice 169Saguisag, Rene 169Salazar, Zeus A. 172Salmanis, Kris 140Scholz, Trebor 85SecondLife 151Seed saving 185Seepage 80Self-being 172Self-determination 126, 182-184, 193Settlement 29Settler nation 46-47Share ware 16Shaw, Nancy 72 Silicon Valley 10Sinclair, Iain 135Site-specific art 61Situatedness 86Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 23, 26-27Social change 148, 157-158Social justice 48Social media 150Social science 110, 172Sociologists 79Software development 190Songs 105Space 80, 104; cinematic 56;

conceptual 155; Indigenous 62; Inner 176

Spain 67Spatial 143, practice 37, temporals 22 Spirituality 23, 30Srinivas, K. Ravi 190Stallman, Richard 190Storage 126Stories 94, 96, 114, 157; traditional 38


Index 213

Storytelling 95, 98, 100, 123 Strangers on the Land 122-128Subject 65, 110Sublime 62Sundance Film Festival, “Native

Forum” 49Supernatural 71Sustainable Conservation 182Sydney Biennale 88

T.A.Z. - Temporary Autonomous Zone, 83

Tagging 135, 139 Tama Tu 44Tamahori, Lee 50Tangata Whenua (film) 27 Te Kaha 49-50 Telecommunications 80Terra nullius 104, 189Terrorism 113Thacker, Eugene 82The Phonebook Limited 84 The Piano 29The Practice of Everyday Life 136The School of Australian Indigenous

Knowledge Systems 111Thompson, Christian 104Time 26, 44, 48, past and present 96;

of Place 51, 53; space 177 Time-image 48Timelapse 51-52, 141Tindale, Norman 41Todd, Loretta 99Torres-Garcia, Joaquin 63Toxic waste 15Tradition 26, 95, 114, 186; ecological

knowledge and 110

Treaty of Waitangi 46-48TRIPS agreement 15Tuiono, Teanau 109Tuters, Mark 84Twenty-Four Dollar Island 85Two Cars, One Night 44, 48-56Ultra Stadium stampede 167UN World Food Programme 153United Nations 184United Nations’ FoodForce 153, 155-156,

157-159Urban 79, 139; space 135, 142Urbanisation 86Uruguayan 63 US Military 84US-Mexican Border 85UsMob Series 154, 157, 159

Varnedoe, Kirk 136Varnelis, Kazys 84Vera Cruz 60-65, 69-73Verzola, Roberto 190-191Video 70, 96, 107; technology 99 Video and computer games, 147-148

154Video installation 61, 63Violence 89Virno, Paolo 81Virtual 64, 73, 161, memory 24,

potential 48, space 109 Virtuality 35Waititi, Taika 44, 48Walking 85Wangka Maya Centre 125War Against Terror 178Wark, McKenzie 21, 27Webs 138



Western 101; Enlightenment 110; media 90; values 124

Whale Rider 46Whitefellanormal 40WIPO 187Wireless networks 140; technology 84 World Council of Indigenous Peoples

183World Food Programme 156World Summit on Information

Society 109Writing 105

Yangon River 165Yellow Arrow 139Youth 115YouTube 151Yugambeh 104Yupik Eskimos 100

Zimmerman, Eric 153


local knowledge and new media

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