Shimmering Screens: making media in an Aboriginal community

How does the introduction of modern media influence a community? How does technology coexist with tradition? How do reality and imagination converge in the creation of documentary? Jennifer Deger addresses these questions in her compelling study of one aboriginal community's relationship with media. Deger spent several years working with the Yolngu community in Gapuwiyak, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, both as an ethnographic researcher and as a collaborator in the production of media. Shimmering Screens explores the place of technology in Gapuwiyak through discussions about the influence of mainstream television, the changing role of photography in mortuary ceremonies, and the making of local radio and video. A rich ethnographic study, this book examines the productive, and sometimes problematic, conjunctions of technology, culture, and imagination in contemporary Yolngu life. Deger offers a new perspective to ongoing debates regarding "media imperialism." Reconsidering established assumptions about the links between representation, power, and "the gaze," she proposes the possibility of a more culturally specific and, ultimately, a more mutual relationship between subject, image, and viewer

Koriam's law: film, ethnography and irreconcilable accountings. [Review of "Koriam's Law - and the dead who govern"]

[Extract] Koriam's Law - and the Dead Who Govern begins in a pause in the middle of a conversation. There are no wideshots to set the scene; no maps to say 'you are here', or perhaps, more conventionally 'they are there'; no time for viewers to settle back into our chairs. From the first frame we are made to lean forward - made to watch, to listen and read (the subtitles) closely. The effect is abrupt. Demanding. Disorienting. Yet apt. For this film with a different kind of epistemological imperative than most ethnographic film (and, arguably, most ethnography)

Book Review: "Radio Happy Isles: media and politics at play in the Pacific" by R. Seward. Honolulu, USA, University of Hawaii Press, 1999. ISBN: 978-0-8248-2106-7

[Extract] In his descriptive and readable account of radio in the Pacific, Robert Seward turnes into an arena of cultural production in which local narratives and musical beats contribute to the tone and rhythm of life across a number of island nations. Writing in detail about radio production and consumption - from the Solomon Islands, to Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga and Hawaii - Radio Happy Isles charts the contours of this Pacific mediascape. 'The map I have come away with is not a big blue sea with specks of brown, but a full space of overlapping voices heard on the radio.' (p.7

A digital humanities experiment

[Extract:] What if the revelatory potential of the digital humanities rested less on computational power and more on the breadth of perspectives that a website might be designed to hold and gently jostle together? Feral Atlas is an experiment in opening a transdisciplinary space for the study of the Anthropocene. In an orchestrated dance of form and content, the project takes advantage of the aesthetic and connective affordances of the digital to bring a plurality of epistemic registers into relationship. In this way Feral Atlas performs its argument, delivering an iterative, multisensuous, and multiperspectival account of the ways imperial and industrial infrastructures make Anthropocene worlds

Curating digital resonance

[Extract] What if, rather than creating an archive of the already gone, digital media were used to orchestrate a renewal of life? To thicken and deepen time beyond the present? To fill the world not with data, but with a multisensory pulse of poetry and possibility? How to extend such worlds of sensuous kinship to others? How to use digital light and colored pixels not just to draw strangers close, but to disrupt categories and easy assumptions and so to clear the way for new affinities

Book Review: "Timothy Asch and Ethnographic Film" edited by E. Lewis, London and New York, Routledge, 2004. ISBN: 0-415-32774-1

[Extract] The pioneering American ethnographic filmmaker and photographer, Timothy Asch, made more than fifty films in collaboration with anthropologists working in Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Indonesia. This collection of papers by colleagues and critics brings together a number of valuable perspectives on a life dedicated to visual anthropology

Michael Riley: Sights unseen

3 page(s

Imprinting on the heart: photography and contemporary Yolngu mournings

This article examines the ways photographs of the recently deceased have come to occupy a central place in Yolngu grieving practices. Harnessing the potentially traumatic ontological qualities of oscillating absence–presence that are inherent in such images, I show how Yolngu in Northern Australia use this affective force as a way to refigure and reconstitute embodied and sensuously mediated relationships between the living and the dead. With vision simultaneously allowing corporeal permeability and expansion, mourners impress the image of the deceased within them, through the eyes to the heart as the fleshly organ of affect, associative recollection, and lived intersubjectivity

Call-and-Response

[Extract] In 2008 the introduction of Telstra's 3G mobile network generated a wave of creative energy across the bush communities of Arnhem Land in Australia's tropical north. New genres of video, photography and performance flourished. Travelling at lightningspeed via satellite and Bluetooth, this digital culture rode the energy of the new and the cheeky. Moving hand-to-hand, kin-to-kin, community-to-community, it drew inspiration from both the Internet and the ancestral. It was made to be watched, to be shared, and then deleted to make way for the next

Constellations of us: backstories to a bark TV

This paper is concerned with the intercultural production and reception of images, new methodologies, new forms of research, and new forms of visual culture. It takes up these issues by telling stories about the production of an art installation made possible by a long-term collaboration between a Yolngu family and an anthropologist and deeply informed by the ways that Yolngu use images to enliven relationships and amplify the field of vision beyond the strictly see-for-yourself veracities and the surface allure of the visible. This article attempts to point towards, and re-enact even, these dynamics as they operated within the exhibition. Against an established artworld discourse that privileges the "ancestral" as the source of meaning and motivation in Yolngu art, these images and stories provide a sense of how a particular constellation of lives, ambitions and disappointments not only gave rise to this project, but shaped the way we understood its potential. For those of us involved, the work of this collaboration was to activate certain intersecting intercultual and biographic vectors, rather than to produce an image object embodying "tradition" or even "invention", independent of context and moment, complete and stable in itself