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.
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.
You make some very important points about the ways in which Maskegon-Iskwew combines sound and image in the early piece of Indigenous web art and I think there is much more to be said about how the piece decolonizes knowledge reception. Good work. This post would benefit from some more explicit examples from “Spiders” used in support of your arguments–which are a little too abstract here without evidence. Specificity is the soul of narrative–I think you could do more to bring Maskegon-Iskwew contribution into focus here.