[-empyre-] Place Ground and Practice

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

Hi all,

I'll try and post something more evaluative about the Pacific Rim New  
Media summit later, when I leave the centre and get back to my part  
of the rim next week.  For the moment, here's a summary of the Place,  
Ground and Practice working group  <http://01sj.org/content/ 
blogcategory/75/93/>.

For me, the Place Ground and Practice WG came about from my growing  
awareness that there were certain kinds of spatial and temporal  
metaphors which were dominant in new media discourse, and that across  
the Pacific Rim there are another set of relations to space and time  
that are different - and these are most visibly contrasted in  
indigenous cosmologies. So everyone knows the history of the cowboy/ 
homesteading/frontier metaphors, and those have always had an other  
side, which is the indigenous. On the other hand the idea of the  
"indigenous" is often invoked and appropriated in white pagan  
technoculture in a very romantic and problematic way, perhaps along  
the lines of the way the "third world" operates in development  
discourse, as this figure which is constantly invoked but never  
really engaged with in agenda setting. So it's a move away from these  
representations. That's the theoretical version.

The human version is that there are a set of relationships that in my  
experience are quite common on the ground in Australia/NZ/Canada in  
the wider contemporary arts setting that seem to be less commonly  
visible in the new media arts sector.

Also, as has been pointed out by Raqs, the Pacific has an alternative  
history of exchange among the native pacific voyagers who travelled  
from probably Taiwan, eventually reaching as far East as the west  
coast of the land now known as the US, and to South America too, and  
as far south as Aotearoa New Zealand, in what was the greatest  
adventure of discovery of all time. They conceived of the Pacific as  
a continent itself, a "sea of islands", to use Epeli Hauofa's phrase,  
rather than arbitrary division into melanesia/micronesia/polynesia  
(or the black, small, many). It's a terrific example of how different  
knowledge systems are mapped onto a single location, something new  
media also supports.

So the working group combined indigenous and non-indigenous artists  
and practitioners, some of whom knew each other and some who didn't  
as a kind of experiment to see the role new media, and new media  
organisations like ISEA, play in discussions about place, land,  
belonging. The main thing we did was brought together most of the  
working group other people in the arts sector to Auckland in December  
2005 for the Cultural Futures symposium/event, which had isea  
participants Raqs, Rachael Rakena and many others. It was kind of a  
hybrid event that was partially held in  the context of the marae,  
which is a meeting environment used by Maori, and a European-style  
university/gallery environment.

For many various reasons, we were unable to get the members of the  
working group to ISEA. This is partially to do with funding,  
partially to do with certain absences that don't make new media arts  
conferences the most hospitable place for these discussions, and I  
also wonder about whether this is the right kind of environment for  
people working on these issues. But I guess for me it was a test to  
see how two very different worlds I engage with, the white frontier  
and the indigenous frontier, could develop new protocols for mutually  
productive exchange. And I think the answer is, with great  
difficulty, which won't surprise anyone who has studied or been  
engaged with the colonial dynamic. I don't think there are any useful  
lessons for me to represent here, but simply an invitation to  
engagement with the issues. I think the difficulties in the  
interactions we had raise a lot of useful questions for not only new  
media's reshaping of concepts like space and time, but less-commonly  
discussed issues like ethics, hospitality, and justice.

--
http://www.dannybutt.net