Aboriginal and Indigenous Digital Art in Australia and Beyond

In Judith’s reading, Big hART said:” they do this through animation and new media in ways that are not exclusively defined by their Aboriginality and that open up opportunities for them to connect with Asian and Western imaginaries”. I do a research about an online gallery, which does same work.

Skawennati is a Mohawk multimedia artist, most famous for her online work and exploring contemporary indigenous culture and what will be the future of indigenous life inspired by science fiction.

Skawennati is the co-founder of Nation to Nation and serves as a director with Jason Edward Lewis of the Aboriginal area in AbTeC cyberspace. AbTeC is a research network of artists and scholars who research and create aboriginal virtual environments. AbTeC's goal is to ensure that the web pages, online environments, video games and virtual worlds that make up the cyberspace are indigenous peoples. She served as the 2019 Indigenous Knowledge Holder at McGill University.

The artist, writer and curator Skavennati and Concordia professor Jason Edward Lewis decided to work in cyberspace in 2005. Cyber​​PowWow is an online gallery decided by locals. It was founded in 1996 and paved the way for Concordia's Indigenous Cyberspace (AbTeC). This network of artists, scholars, and technicians was established 12 years ago, dedicated to research, creation and comment on indigenous virtual environments.

Skawennati’s first major online project was CyberPowWow, which was an online gathering held several times between 1997 and 2004. Skawennati explained that the overall goal of AbTeC and IIF and their "ancestors" CyberPowWow is to build the capacity of indigenous communities. The main goal of Cyber PowerWow is to create indigenous territories in cyberspace. It's a chat room that acts as an interactive digital art gallery, allowing people to form communities online and in real life, it provides "a means for indigenous artists and storytellers to gain a foothold in the digital city." Skawennati Artists and writers who work with indigenous people to customize spaces with images, scripts and indigenous avatars. She said: "For me, this is our most important advantage." "Many indigenous people feel that they have nothing to do. They feel like they are forbidden to enter. This is something that needs to be overcome." The exhibition will show the history of activities dedicated to the development of aboriginal space on the Internet. It mainly showcases new and old works through multimedia installations, videos and applications, including games, machine learning and aboriginal storytelling and documents in video game skin seminars, VR works by Scott Benesiinaabandan and post-commodities, and "Explaining Future Imagination" Debug the series, and restart CyberPowWow. In 2011, she was awarded the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Scholarship, which made her one of the "best and most relevant local artists". Indigenous artists, researchers, educators, designers and community activists create and use new media in a variety of ways to strengthen and supplement their culture and communities.

Reference:

Bessant, J., & Watts, R. (2017). Indigenous Digital Art as Politics in Australia. Culture, Theory and Critique, 58(3), 306–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2016.1203810

Photo reserved from: https://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/stories/2017/10/30/indigenous-digital-art-leonard-bina-ellen-art-gallery.html