Abstract
This article goes beyond considerations of digital media supporting identity and community to discuss the ways in which digital technology itself resembles and even parallels traditional indigenous means of producing and sharing knowledge and of experiencing time and space. Drawing from examples ranging from Aztec maps that represented time-space units simultaneously, through discussing indigenous codex and glyphs in which visual language is able to convey meaning using simultaneity rather than chronological narration, to the use of performance for durable cultural storage and transmission, this article points to the many areas of convergence between the multimodal communication that digital media increasingly enable and ancestral practices of indigenous peoples around the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Comprising the Heiltsuk, Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish cultures. It must be stressed that the use of potlatch varied widely among the different tribes.
- 2.
An app can be downloaded at http://www.codicemendoza.inah.gob.mx, accessed 8 November 2015.
- 3.
‘Expanded Expansions’ (1969) by Eva Hesse, is what the Guggenheim catalog describes as ‘a sculptural embodiment of opposites united. Both permanence and deterioration operate in the piece: fiberglass poles—rigid, durable entities—are juxtaposed with fragile, rubber-covered cheesecloth’ (Guggenheim 2015). Highly acclaimed in its hayday, today it is a rigid skin, wrinkled and decomposing in a wooden sarcophagus at the museum.
- 4.
A creature that can be considered Brazil’s Big Foot, extinct long ago but surviving on the oral accounts of Amazonian indigenous tribes. Paleontologists are allegedly beginning to accept other indigenous stories as valid sources of information on extinct species (Rinehart and Ippolito 2014, 168).
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de la Garza, A. (2016). Aboriginal Digitalities: Indigenous Peoples and New Media. In: Travis, C., von Lünen, A. (eds) The Digital Arts and Humanities. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40953-5_3
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