Cultural Complicators

[First of: here are some sweet tunes I found while researching Indigenous Futurisms. I’m sure you’ve heard this mixtape before, but here it is, one more time, in all its cybernetic glory.] A few weeks ago, when I first started thinking about this blog, I realized I found the task particularly difficult. How can we sensibly write about indigenous futurisms? My first thoughts ran along the lines of: haven’t we changed indigenous people’s lives enough already? We are even going to imagine their future? My second line of thought started by asking myself: what future,…read more

An interesting way of looking at screen sovereignty is through the diverse and complex layers that conform its performance. In this blog, I will look at Kevin Lee Burton’s God’s Lake Narrows, which won the 2011 ImagineNATIVE award for Best New Media and compare it to Kristen Dowell’s ideas of screen sovereignty as argued in “Vancouver’s Aboriginal Media World” in Sovereign Sreens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. Imagine a piece of cloth whose fibers are woven thick enough for you to see each separate part conforming the whole….read more

When I first read McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, a few of years ago, I was struck by it. I felt it so aware of today’s technology and the possibilities it opened for us as a society. This time around, almost every single page presented a problem for me. Regardless, I think McLuhan’s work, although incredibly problematic in many instances, can also be very insightful in the possibilities that new media opens for people to present and re-present themselves, in their own terms. In the following post I want to…read more