In Isi-pîkiskwêwin-Ayapihkêsîsak or Speaking the Language of Spiders, sound and image come together to create an immersive sensory experience. The set up of the website mimics a spider’s web. When using the website, the viewer moves through narrative space around the web instead of favouring a linear model. It is a circular experience, with sound, colour and images all serving as a guides for how one should interpret their experience. The use of bright colours and images against a black background work to subvert pre-existing understandings of how written knowledge is shared. This approach defies the norms of clinical, mechanical webspaces where viewers navigate between separate pieces of content. Speaking the Language of Spiders is a complete immersive experience, the content is unified through sound and imagery so that the viewer is encourages to follow intuitively through non-linearized space. Information is not clearly laid out, or at least not in the way we have become accustomed to reading it in a settler-colonial context. The complex and dreamlike imagery relate to the conceptual nature of the site and its extremely personal and emotional significance to its makers.

indexmap

The imagery of Speaking the Language of Spiders encourages a more intuitive approach to the content. You are not given the answers, but are encouraged to undertake your own exploration, using the spiders as guides. The autonomy of the viewer to engage with the content allows us to fully immerse ourselves in the sensory experience of the website. Information is not separated and laid out for us on a black and white background. We much follow the pace and rhythm of the website. It is unique in its tone and innovative for the time. Speaking the Language of Spiders was a way for indigenous artists to decolonize online space even as those spaces were still being developed.  The website is a warmer and more interactive experience than what we usually experience online. We are not given any kind of hierarchical view of the content, we can only follow the circular structure of the website until you have returned to the beginning and there is still more to experience

The pace of the site requires that viewers take their time and move according to the prescribed tempo. Although the site is not completely unreadable to a non-indigenous audience, this model clearly challenges established conventions about how websites are structured and how information is shared.  Subversion of a more hierarchical and mechanical web page ensures Speaking the Language of Spiders asserts itself as an indigenous webspace. It sets itself apart from colonialized spaces through its approach to intuitive storytelling and imagery. This decolonization of web space marks the websites establishment in 1996 as an important moment in indigenous resurgence.

The Renaissance Legacy

The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement,

The Detached Observer.

No Involvement!

The view of Renaissance art is systematically placed outside the frame of experience. A pizza for everything and everything in its piazza.

The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.

(p.53)

Francesca Woodhouse, Nude Self Portrait with Mirror, 1974

This passage from The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan drew my attention because it speaks to the breaking down of barriers between the perceiver and the material that is being perceived and encourages our own critical engagement with the mediums through which our information and experiences are perceived and expressed.  McLuhan addresses the myth that there is a detachment or lack of involvement between viewer and material and asserts that the division between the individual and media does not exist in the same way as it has in the past.

Me, No Involvement! 2015

The next page in McLuhan’s book includes a quote by John Dewey. This passage is written backwards and can only be read with the use of reflective surface such as a mirror (or, in my case, a laptop). This section demands involvement from the reader and so places our critical engagement at the forefront of our experience with the material. In reading this passage we are also likely confronted with the reflection of our physical selves. At the time this book was published reader’s would have probably used a mirror to interpret the passage as mirrors were at the time the most prolific tool of engagement with and physical awareness of the self. In the most literal way we as readers cannot separate ourselves from the medium or the process in which we interpret the passage. This encourages readers to think more critically about the ways in which we interact with media, and examine ourselves as producers and products of the media we consume. This also means that we need to be acutely aware of the mediums through which we express ourselves and we have a physical, active engagement with the book.  Along with the actual quote, the action that this passage requires from its readers is what illustrates MacLuhan’s point from the previous page.

Lora Mathis, 2015

As social media websites and apps become the dominant means of personal expression we have unprecedented control over how we mediate our image and what tools we use to communicate our ideas. The boundaries between our intellectual and bodily selves and our online projections become very blurred as time passes. We now use social media to strengthen our “personal brand” as much as we used it for pure communication. I feel like the actions we perform through these platforms are beginning to become so natural to us that we can’t really differentiate our bodily selves from our online selves with such strict divisions as we once thought. We are more obviously present in the transfer of information and our past conceptualization of the frame dissolves leaving us to question where the boundaries are between ourselves, what we produce and the means through which we choose to communicate.