Category: iif_blog

Updates

(2019-03-05): We have some exciting news to share! As of today, the Contact project has been given a new title: Terra Nova. The decision to give the game a more formal name came from the project team’s desire to better encapsulate the meaning of what this game is about. Although the main conflict of the game’s narrative is indeed first contact, Terra Nova is truly about its two main characters, the worlds that have shaped them, and the future worlds yet to come.

Terra Nova also has its own website! There you can sign-up to receive updates on future play tests and release dates. Visit www.terranovagame.com to learn more.

She:kon! Maize Longboat and creating contact:

My name is Maize Longboat and I’m a graduate research assistant with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) and in my second-year of the Master’s in Media Studies program at Concordia’s Department of Communication Studies. Presently, I’m in the middle of working on the “creation” half of my research-creation thesis project that explores Indigenous videogame development. To do this, I’m making my very own game, from start to finish, to respond to the following research question:

“What makes Indigenous videogames and how will the game created as part of this project be informed by my own experience as an Indigenous person?”

I found a number of videogames made by or in consultation with Indigenous people that I will discuss in my research, all of which are unique in their own ways. It proved to be a challenge when my supervisor asked that I offer a hypothesis on what actually makes a videogame Indigenous. Indigenous identities are vastly diverse, so defining what is and what is not Indigenous is something that I alone cannot determine. However, I can offer what I feel are the most important qualities that an Indigenous videogame might carry with it. The following lines from my proposal clearly state where I stand:

“Whether an Indigenous videogame is made by an individual or team of Indigenous developers, or by non-Indigenous developers working in consultation with an Indigenous community, it is determined by Indigenous peoples. The development process, from beginning to end, must be Indigenous-led.”

This is exactly what I set out to do in creating my own game. The only challenge was that I had never actually made a videogame before. Instead of beginning with a game mechanic like running, or jumping, or shooting projectiles, I started with a central scenario that I frequently come across while studying Indigenous histories. I wanted to make a game out of a moment of first contact between an Indigenous and Settler peoples. These moments of encounter and communication are always the spark of larger events; only recalled to frame larger, more important narratives that come after. This game focuses on the lead-up and moment of first contact between Indigenous characters and Settler characters and how they react to one another’s presences.

Thanks to the generosity of the Hexagram Network and Social Science and Humanities Research Council, I have the funds to hire a small team to help fill in for my technical shortcomings. I brought in a Lead Developer, Mehrdad Dedashti (mdehdashti.com), to handle programming and integration tasks, an artist, Ray Caplin (portfolioofraycaplin.tumblr.com), to create visual assets and animations, and a sound designer, Beatrix Moesrch (framingnoise.com), to bring the game-world to life. It was really important for me to get people who not only had strong technical skills, but who also cared about working on an Indigenous-led project. I had to go through a few interviews before I could settle on a team that I could trust to support my research in that very specific way.

As I assembled the team, I was also designing a narrative that would speak to my central game scenario of first contact. The story takes place on Earth far in the future, long after an environmental catastrophe forced a number of humans to abandon the planet in an attempt to settle somewhere better out in space. The humans that were forced to stay on Earth adapted to their new environment and eventually forgot about the ones that had left them behind. Earth is still healing and high-water levels from melted polar ice caps cause erratic weather patterns. Earthborn humans live high atop the overgrown, ruined city-structures built ages ago to escape these unpredictable tides.

After several millennia of attempting to locate a habitable planet, Starborn humans have now unknowingly returned to their ancestral homeland to finally settle.

After several millennia of attempting to locate a habitable planet, Starborn humans have now unknowingly returned to their ancestral homeland to finally settle.

This moment of first contact between Earthborn and Starborn humans is experienced through the eyes of Terra, an elder Earthborn landkeeper, and Nova, a Starborn youth.

The game will offer a two-player, cooperative experience where each player plays as either Terra or Nova simultaneously. Both players can interact with each other, non-player characters, and objects in the environment to progress through the narrative. At first, each player starts in their own specific zones before the Starborn spaceship crash lands on Earth. The crash separates Nova from his community, while Terra witnesses the crash and sets out to investigate. The two eventually come across one another, sharing that moment of first contact between Indigenous and Settler peoples, and must then cooperate to help Nova find his people and ensure that Terra can find out what the Starborn people want.

I’ll be working with my team for the next several weeks to finish the game so that we can move into the playtesting phase. (Stay tuned in to AbTeC social media feeds for the exact date and time!) After the playtests I will be taking the reflections provided by players and making final changes right before I dive headfirst into the writing process.

Wish us luck!

Since beginning my PhD and starting as an IIF Research Assistant I have been super busy. 2018 was full of so many collaborations, performances and travels.

My 2018 began with a panel at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I participated in a lot of inspiring panels such as Traveling Against the Current at Concordia University, Artificial Imagination symposium with Artengine in Ottawa, the Material Turn Symposium at Concordia, MUTEK Montréal’s Keychange Panel , Punctures Convening performance and panel at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, Performance and Panel with Raven and Laura at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, and the Immersed panel in Montreal.

At the beginning of the year, I began a new artwork called Listener, which developed from my research and conversations at AbTeC. Listener was premiered at SAW Video Knot project space / espace projet Nœud in Ottawa, Ontario, and performed at Concordia as an Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents event. I am most proud of having performed and installed Listener at Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota to an audience of Lakota friends and family. Later in the year, I performed Listener at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and at 24 Hour Drone Hudson Basilica in New York. Since then a video version of Listener was screened at Echo Park Film Center in LA as a part of Art at Tongva. Listener was also installed as a video in the “Live Long and Prosper” exhibition at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

I made a second new work called Better Off Alone, an installation and internet chat room, where the typing of the audience is sonified into drum n bass. This piece was installed at InterAccess in Toronto, curated by former AbTeC RA Lindsay Nixon. I closed out the installation with a performance of a work addressing imagined and real space through jungle sample sounds in a piece titled, junglejungle at InterAccess.

I collaborated extensively last year with Nathan Young, who came to Montreal as an artist-in-residence at the Indigenous Futures Cluster, resulting in a completely new project called something is coming. In the fall, Nathan and I participated in a residency at the M:ST Performative Art Festival in Calgary, where we created and performed 12 new sound works for the project, all focusing on sonifying the electricity grid.

I also collaborated with my friends Adam and Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys as a part of the New Red Order. We participated as The Informants at Images Festival in Toronto and Human Resources Los Angeles. I wrote a new piece, for their project, The New Red Order Presents: The Savage Philosophy of Endless Acknowledgement, at Whitney Museum of American Art. My piece, Brighter than the Brightest Star You’ve Ever Seen, is a lecture on Lakota phrases, aliens, and murder.

Finally, my research into American mythologies of Indians and aliens was published by Un Projects, titled “Who Believes in Indians”. The research into Lakota ontology and Lakota concepts of nonhuman animacy, which I first lectured about at the Zooetics Symposium talk and panel at MIT, was then published in collaboration with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis as “Making Kin with the Machines” published in MIT Journal of Design and Science. In a similar vein, I am now the Coordinator for the upcoming Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence workshops!

2018 was a super productive year, and I am glad for my role as an RA for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

Waylon Wilson, Tuscarora Nation

MDes Student, Master of Design Program

Department of Design and Computation Arts

It was in the last few years of my Bachelor of Arts at the University at Buffalo (UB) that I really began exploring interactive forms of media. I discovered the digital world of 3D environments, video games, mobile applications, 3D printing, and even dabbled in wearable electronics. I come from a vast digital media background, but before UB I mainly focused on digital video and audio production. Now that I’m entering my second semester as a Master of Design student here at Concordia University, I’ve really begun to  focus on experimental game development and to explore the outcomes of designing for this technology as Indigenous people.

My work aims to embed critical Indigenous thought into interactive media by exploring various realms of technology and what these tools have to offer us as Indigenous media makers and consumers. The digital flood of technology immerses us daily in wave after wave of new gadgets and applications and it is up to us whether we want to embrace this technology or not. Indigenous people often have stigmas associated with using digital technology, especially when it comes to our more traditional knowledge and practices. I’m exploring how these technologies can enhance our ways of thinking as Indigenous people. My goal is to find useful ways to integrate this technology into our lives to as an ongoing practice of our traditional knowledge rather than have it act as an intrusion or hindrance to these ways of knowing.

In order to better understand where Indigenous-determined uses of technology can take us, I look to the ways Indigenous peoples have always engaged with media and technology. As a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, I draw on the visual and interactive designs in our Haudenosaunee beadwork, wampum, carvings, and other objects used to embed our stories and teachings. The media we use to document our teachings are never only media objects, but are used on a daily basis and meant to be interacted with. Some of these designs are kept with us on a daily basis such as the beadwork we wear or etchings carved into pottery. Other media forms such as wampum belts include more complicated interactive designs and can be interacted with in different ways; they can be read from the front, the back, upside down, and even looped around to connect back to itself in an infinite cycle.

Our grandmothers and grandfathers were intuitive visual and interactive designers. I often find myself referencing their complex work and the ongoing critical thinking and practices of our Indigenous peoples to ground myself and inspire my thinking as well. Working as a Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures has been a big help in directing my recent work. I hope that all of us as Indigenous media makers across Turtle Island can begin to level up this digital era we live in together.

Find more information on Waylon and his practice at www.waylonwilson.com

Tālofa lava ʻia ʻoutou, Bonjour à tous, Hello everyone.

Je suis passionné des langues, de la bonne nourriture, de l’océan, de la science-fiction et du futurisme autochtone. Je suis artiste, commissaire et chercheur australien issu d’origines samoanes, persanes et chinoises entre autres. J’ai terminé mon doctorat en histoires intellectuelles et esthétiques (pratiques de commissariat d’exposition) du Grand Océan en août. Je suis ravi de pouvoir travailler à l’élaboration d’une collection d’œuvres vidéo par artistes autochtones traitant ou s’imaginant les avenirs, des Amériques et du Grand Océan. Je crée des performances, installations, écrits et projets d’exposition centrés sur les savoirs incorporés, les structures cérémonielles-politiques, le renouveau des langues et les avenirs porteurs d’espoir. J’expose et publie régulièrement et sers de liaison entre nos zones au sein du comité d’administration du Collectif des commissaires autochtones du Canada. Je suis diplômé en commissariat d’exposition, histoire de l’art, cinéma et littérature comparé francophone et gestion culturelle autochtone. À bientôt au labo ou ailleurs !

I’m passionate about languages, good food, the ocean, science fiction and Indigenous futurisms. I’m an Australian artist, curator and researcher from Sāmoan, Persian, Chinese and other ancestries. I completed by PhD in intellectual and aesthetic histories (curatorial practice) of the Great Ocean in August. I’m thrilled to be able to work on creating a collection of video works by Indigenous artists set in or imagining futures, from the Americas and the Great Ocean. I make performances, installations, writing and curatorial projects centred on embodied knowledges, ceremonial-political structures, language renewal and futures that bring hope. I exhibit and publish widely and serve as a link between our regions on the board of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective of Canada. I hold qualifications in curatorial practice, art history, comparative Francophone cinema and literature, and Indigenous arts management. See you soon in the lab or around!

(You can find more information about Léuli here)

What a year!

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace sends you our warmest wishes this holiday season. Both in the studio and out in the world, 2018 was a phenomenal year for us! We wanted to take a moment to share some of our accomplishments and activities with you.

The new year began with AbTeC co-founder Jason Edward Lewis offering a brand new course, a graduate seminar on the Future Imaginary, in which students thought about what Indigenous life would look like in the future and the implications of this question. Students produced research papers and creative projects to articulate their own future imaginaries. Undergraduate research assistant Dion Smith-Dokkie’s contribution to our Illustrating the Future Imaginary series, Figure 4. Exclusion Zone Radioactivity, developed from this course.

In February, graduate RA Maize Longboat and co-founder Skawennati gave two workshops at the Good Hearts, Good Minds conference in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, showing over 30 Indigenous youth how to tell traditional stories in digital media and introducing them to the basics of Second Life. Skarù:re’ Awekwehstá:θe:’ founder Mia McKie and graduate research assistant Waylon Wilson joined in to help. Back in the studio, we were paid a visit by students from OCADU’s Indigenous Visual Cultureprogram, who came to learn about our research and ongoing projects. Through this, we reconnected with Illustrating the Future Imaginary contributor Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush. Kaia’tanó:ron joined us as an RA over the summer, offering her expertise in digital painting and design.

AbTeC and IIF hosted a number of other workshops this year too! In April, Maize and Skawennati, this time with Producer Nancy Townsend, went to Saskatchewan to give a machinima workshop at the Regina Public Library in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Over the course of the week, participants created a short machinima based on a Nehiyȃw (Cree) story: How the Loon Got Its Walk. Find Maize’s account of the workshop here.

From March to May, AbTeC and IIF collaborated with the Kahnawake Survival School to offer an in-depth version of our 7th Generation Character Design Workshop. In this five-week workshop, our team worked with high school students to help them imagine a descendant or community member at least seven generations in the future. Working with paper and pen, participants sketched their designs under the guidance of Jason Edward Lewis and Skawennati. Following this, undergraduate RAs Raymond Tqoqweg Caplin and Kahentawaks Tiewishaw gave lessons in 3D modelling, UV unwrapping and skin creation. Participants then created their own characters. Our lessons were punctuated by a visit from industry professionals Dominick Meissner and Vivian Herzog of Behaviour Interactive. We concluded the workshop with an in-community exhibition of 3D printed versions of the participants’ digital models! In one of our prototype Seventh Generation Character Design Workshops, graduate RA Suzanne Kite (aka Kite) developed the concept for her performance artwork Listener. An image from this piece, entitled L-Sys (Lakȟóta System), was added to the Illustrating the Future Imaginary series.

In July, IIF collaborated with Kanaeokana and Kamehameha Schools to facilitate He Au Hou 2, the sixth version of our Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design. Taking place in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, our team of seasoned pros and bright newbies worked with a marvellous cohort—who named themselves Ka Lei Milikaʻa—to transmediate Kanaka Maoli stories and knowledge into a video game format. A number of research assistants acted as facilitators and instructors—you can check out the test game they created in preparation for the workshop here. After three weeks of intense learning (and laughter), the cohort created Wao Kanaka, I ka Wā Mamua, i ka Wā Mahope. You can download the game for free at the Skins 6.0 website, as well as our curriculum, blog, documentation and participant bios.

Both AbTeC and undergraduate RA Lucas LaRochelle an Honourable Mention in the Digital Communities category of the Ars Electronica Festival! Additionally, Kite took part in the Hexagram Network’s Campus Ars Electronica group exhibition, Taking Care, with three performances of her iterative, multimedia performance artwork, Listener. Research assistant Sam Bourgault collaborated on Design and Computation Arts Masters student Augustina Isidori’s SOLA as the Unity Developer.

 In 2017, the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology introduced its Undergraduate Fellowship Program. Through this program, Milieux’s eight clusters nominate students to conduct personal research and contribute to its community. RA Dion Smith-Dokkie was our Fellow in the 2017-18 year. Currently, undergraduate research assistants Kahentawaks Tiewishaw and Rudi Aker are our Milieux Undergraduate Fellows.

The studio was abuzz with anticipation for the 19th edition of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, Ontario! AbTeC and our affiliates submitted four works. For our part, AbTeC and the Skins 5.0 cohort, Nā ‘Anae Mahiki, submitted He Ao Hou, the video game made during the Skins 5.0 Workshop, our first in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Skawennati submitted her sci-fi machinima retelling of the Haudenosaunee confederation story, The Peacemaker Returns. Our research assistants were in on the action too! RA Waylon Wilson, along with his collaborator Mia McKie, exhibited their game, Nu:ya! Nu:ya! A Tuscarora Exploratory Game. And, RA Travis Mercredi’s virtual-reality walking sim, ~2700, was also featured in this year’s festival!

In November, a bunch of us attended the Indigenous Comic Con—we had a blast! Jason Edward Lewis, Nancy Townsend, Suzanne Kite, Maize Longboat, Ray Tqoqweg Caplin, Valerie Bourdon and Kahentawaks Tiewishaw all flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the three-day event. We connected with fellow Indigi-nerds and met cool artists! We even took part in the Cosplay Contest. An AbTeC team put together a beautiful costume which Kahentawaks wore, playing Otsitsakaion from Skawennati’s She Falls For Ages!

All year long, at our virtual headquarters, AbTeC Island, we have been researching what it means to create Indigenously determined cyberspaces—and what it means to be Indigenous online. A number of guests have come to our weekly visiting hours to explore and talk about Indigeneity, virtual worlds and the future. In October, we hosted a Halloween party, and just last week, a Winter Solstice Wonderland party to bring virtual and real-world guests into our little slice of virtual paradise. The project has appeared on platforms like Canadaland’s The IMPOSTER and CBC Unreserved with Rosanna Deerchild.

The studio has been bustling with residents and special guests over the past 12 months! Artist-in-residence Scott Benesiinaabandan has been working on a variety of projects over the year; his virtual-reality artwork, Blueberry Pie Under a Martian Sky, toured Canada with the 2167 project. We have also welcomed a host of guests for briefer stays. Lenape-Kiowa artist and IIF artist-in-residence Nathan Young collaborated with Suzanne Kite on a site-specific digital listening artwork. He also gave an artist’s talk, and was interviewed for our Future Imaginary Dialogues series. Filmmaker Adam Khalil and MIT Arts, Culture and Technology Masters student Erin Genia also visited us in studio! During the summer, Achimostawinan Games joined us to create a prototype version of their forthcoming, Indigenous Cybernoir video game, PURITY & decay. Meagan Byrne, Tara Miller, Travis Mercredi, Colin Lloyd and Gabriela Kim Passos were in the studio in various capacities in May and June, pushing the project forward with the support of our team. Finally, Anishinaabe comedian, writer, media maker and community activator Ryan McMahon gave an Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents public talk where he shared experiences gained through his podcast, Red Man Laughing.

This is just a sampling of our projects throughout 2018. If you would like to see a full overview of our activities in 2018 and years previous, click here to access our IIF Partnership Activity Interactive Timeline.

As you can see, 2018 was a magical and hectic year! Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace looks forward to some regenerative rest and to a fruitful 2019. We thank you for your continuing support and interest in our mission and wish you the happiest of holiday seasons and a wonderful New Year!

Warmly,
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

My name is Kahentawaks Tiewishaw-Poirier and I am grateful to have been awarded one of the 2018-19 Milieux Undergraduate Fellowships. I come from the Kanehsatake Mohawk Territory, and I am a third year Computation Arts student at Concordia University. My research interests lie in exploring how Indigenous communities can use technology in an artistic way to pass on their respective cultures. I am primarily interested in the transmediation of traditional stories and legends.

As the use of mobile screens becomes an increasingly integral part of our lives, the way our children learn and play is changing. In order for our culture to be passed on successfully to future generations, we must invent new and interesting ways to engage with it. In a world where all media is grappling for a few seconds of our attention, we must remain relevant.

My expectation for this experience is that I will learn quite a bit about asset creation for mobile applications. Although the project that I have in mind is still a bit unrefined, I know for sure that it involves making an app that engages with my culture’s traditional stories.

My primary artistic practice is 3D modeling and I have both academic and professional experience in the field. My first professional experience came from teaching in the Seventh Generation Character Design Workshop that was offered by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) at the Kahnawake Survival School in the spring of 2018. In this workshop, participants imagined a character that is from a world seven generations in the future. The character was drawn, 3D modeled, textured, posed, and eventually…3D printed!

The second instance of my professional experience was in preparation for my role as 3D Lead for IIF’s Skins 6.0 Workshop on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design, which took place in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, this past summer. My fellow technical instructors and I were mandated to create a mini game of our own design as a test run … If we were going to teach other people how to make a video game, we had to be sure we could make one ourselves! Consequently, my last big project was my instructor role in this workshop. I taught participants all about 3D asset creation for video games.

I look forward to the things I will learn while utilizing this Fellowship!

ntoliwis rudi, wolastoqew-nil, sitansisk-nil.

my name is rudi, i am wolastoqew, and i come from sitansisk, so-called fredericton, new brunswick. Among many other identities i hold: i am a nitap, a multidisciplinary artist, a cultural worker, and a student. i am in the last years of my Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia and within this institution i co-organize the Indigenous Art Research Group and i am a research assistant at Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and Obx Labs.

It is important to acknowledge that i am a visitor here in tiohta:ke, meqewihkuk. I have and continue to benefit from being on this territory as wolastoqiyik. I persistently and actively think about the processes that allow me to be here, away from my territory and kin. I take time to consider what this means in the greater spectrum of placehood, visibility, and traversal of (un)colonized space—which underlies the subject of my research.

My Fellowship will work through some big ideas on contact, place, and memory. I’m looking at works like The Book of Touch (Constance Classen) and Maps and Memes (Gwilym Eades), using these works to (re)frame concepts of contemporary Indigenous placehood. I am interested in the practice of navigating and experiencing space through intimate intergenerational information. How has this information been disseminated in our communities? What does this information look like, sound like, and feel like? I will thoroughly investigate memetics (akin to genetics), and ground myself in the study of how information travels through peoples, unknowingly and otherwise.

I am deeply inspired by scholars like Dr. Julie Nagam and her writing on concealed geographies, as well as Mishuana Goeman’s work on mapping. These scholars have lead me to reflect on Native Space, embodied practices of space-making, and the systematic disenfranchisement of Indigenous people through violent, colonial spatial practices.

By synthesizing this work, I suggest that counter-cartography is a decolonial and sovereign act that moves through generations by way of memes (cultural information that translates to/from minds and bodies). Ultimately, I will formulate how this informs a nuanced understanding of an inherently Indigenized sense of place.

In addition to my synthesis paper, I will work on a creation project that brings together how I use representations of cartography as a process of undertaking my own emotive literacy and self-awareness. Throughout my practice, I use abstracted, map-like imagery to explore planes of surface. I have long been rooted in painting and beading though in the past few years, I have been engaging in a more materially-based practice. This has been a move to diversify my own practice to reflect the skills that I have gained and been privileged to be gifted with. This is also a pointed choice to dehierarchize the perception of art vs. craft and again, what it means for me to have access to various institutions that (de)limit my own making. The result of this aspect of the Fellowship will be cross-medium tactile explorations of space.

I am looking forward to working on a project so close to my interests and heart. I am so incredibly grateful for the support that I have been given in all of my life’s disciplines.

woliwon! psiw ntulnapemok! 🍓

She:kon! The leaves are colourful and the autumn chill has embraced us here in Montreal.

The big project of summer 2018 was a second Skins workshop held in Hawai’i! The game Wao Kanaka, I ka Wā Mamua, i ka Wā Mahope, developed by Hawaiians attending the Skins Video Game Workshop, is completed and ready to be downloaded and shared. We here at AbTeC thought it would be fun to have me, a Skins 4.0 alumni, play and review this newest creation. As I have not had the joy of participating in the Hawaiian workshops I can also provide an outsiders view, so here we go!

Straight from the main menu the game is charming. The game’s audio is in ʻOlelo Hawaiʻi, but you can choose to view the subtitles in English as well. There is the option to choose between Adult and Child, but I didn’t find much difference between the two. The art style of the main game is endearing, with blocky shapes and polygonal surfaces. This was a smart move for creating characters and scenery as it is less difficult to make compared to smooth and rounded surfaces. By embracing this simple style players are more likely to be forgiving of anything strange, which is crucial when a game is being made on such a time crunch as the Skins workshops have.

The voice recording in this game as characters talk and sing is quite good; nice and clear. The music is fantastic as well, and the sound overall really ‘wowed’ me. In cutscenes, where story is being told, the videos are eye-catching and creative. The work put into trying to be informative and entertaining is apparent as the storytelling aspects are succinct and don’t run on too long where players may tune out.

The minigames are a mixed bag. After hearing moʻolelo, or chanting, a typing game is unlocked. The player must type in the words in the correct order before they run out of time. It was only in this game that I noticed a difference between selecting Adult or Child at the main menu. Adult seemed to have the words fall faster while Child gave slightly more breathing room. It is a challenging game that brings to mind dark memories of playing learn-to-type games in grade school. On the plus side I did end up paying much closer attention to the words of the chant.

Another minigame comes after learning a lesson about preservation; take one fish and leave one fish. I must admit that I wasn’t able to figure out how to ‘win’ this game. I pulled in my fish and sorted them based on the vocal reactions I heard, tried to split the type 50/50, and finally just did a general even split. I had no indication if I had done things correctly or not, just the stats of fish I caught and so I eventually gave up and moved on.

The final minigame was the hardest for me. The story told here is the most dense, and I would recommend watching it twice so you can appreciate the visuals and absorb the information better. The gameplay portion is no joke! The player is tasked with creating a route for water to flow from a start point, through as many farm plots as possible, and to the reservoir. You are given two path blocks to work with and they’re randomized. The game is not afraid to mess with you and give useless blocks over and over. I really feel like luck is a necessary component to win this one.

At the end of the day you return to your home to sleep, where an ending scene told me that I had done well, but not well enough. After multiple attempts I had to ultimately accept that I won’t be the savior of the world, however if you play and win please share with us! Tweet at us or post on our Facebook page so that we can congratulate the heroes of nature, or console those who couldn’t overcome the trials.

Regardless of if you win or lose, the game is bright and inviting with an optimistic tone despite the dire warnings. I would recommend giving it a go! Once you’re done you could also take a swing at any of the other Skins games available, all were made with passion.

Last month a number of our lab members travelled to the 19th imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, ON to take in the proceedings and represent IIF/AbTeC. From a wide array of amazing events, Undergraduate Research Assistants Ray Tqoqweg Caplin, Kahentawaks Tiewishaw and Graduate Research Assistants Maize Longboat and Waylon Wilson each chose a screening or artist talk to report on.

Hope to see you next year at the 20th anniversary of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival!

The Witching Hour

Friday, October 19

Ray Tqogweg Caplin

This was my first time ever attending the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival. Expecting to see various great works from many talented Indigenous filmmakers, I was indeed not disappointed. Throughout the festival, many screenings had an atmosphere of Fine Art and professionalism; this, combined with the many films I had seen talking about hard, depressing topics, left me with a sober, sombre mood. That is, until the campy yet devious Witching Hour.

Expecting an hour of exclusively spooky, cautionary tales, I was delighted to find campy, B-film, budget short films, each of which made me laugh out loud with the audience! I was particularly charmed by three machinima shorts of one to two minutes in length, the first of which was entitled First Impressions, by Sto:lo / Cree artist Andrew Genaille. In it, a woman is frightened at the sight of a zombie, who then addresses her assumptions that because he is dead, and a zombie, his place is in the ground, and that he is not a normal person. He proclaims that he is and thus educates her to not cast judgment on others so hastily. To say the least, it’s a subversion gag … and I loved it.

The Witching Hour was definitely one of my favourite screenings; its tricky, kitschy tone was a relief from other, more sombre films, which is fine by me. What’s more, I’m hoping to submit one of my short films to this film block next year!

Alanis Obomsawin: In Discussion

October 18, 2018

Maize Longboat

On the evening of Thursday, October 18, the legendary Abanaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin joined the festival program for an interview with Kerry Swanson, Chair of the imagineNATIVE Board of Directors. Obomsawin began by screening an excerpt from her forthcoming film, entitled Jordan’s Principle, that chronicles the story of Jordan River Anderson, a young Cree boy born in 1999 with complex medical needs. Jordan’s medical treatment was delayed because federal and provincial governments could not decide on who was responsible for paying and he eventually died in hospital at the age of five, having never lived in his family home. His story sparked policy and legal changes, namely Jordan’s Principle, which saw the federal government adopt a child-first policy to support children with disabilities in the future. As of 2016, Jordan’s Principle is now law in Canada, available to all First Nations children. However, these services remain difficult to access and Alanis Obomsawin’s film seeks to bring attention to Jordan’s story in hopes that it will help others in similar situations.

The discussion wasn’t only limited to talking about her films. For much of the second half of the session, Alanis told a story about her efforts to raise funds to create a pool for the children of her community, Odanak First Nation, before she began to make films. Since the nearby Québécois town would not allow Indigenous children to enter their pool, the only solution was that Odanak build its own. Through her hard work, determination, and help from others, Alanis was able to finally get the pool built. Ironically, when the neighbouring pool closed, Québécois children were welcomed to swim in the new pool at Odanak.

My main takeaways from Alanis Obomsawin’s interview were her wit and her generosity. She had the crowd laughing all the way through her stories, which she recounted in detail. Her strength as a person and as an issue-oriented filmmaker is profoundly inspiring and every bit deserving of the standing ovation she received at the conclusion of this discussion.

After The Apology

Saturday, October 20

Kahentawaks Tiewishaw

This screening included Lost Moccasin by Roger Boyer, Idle No More Ginger Cote, and Larissa Behrendt’s After the Apology. Together, these films brought to light the ongoing struggle of families who have been subjected to colonial government policies. In North America, we know of Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop, which worked to assimilate Indigenous children by removing them from their families and culture. Similarly in Australia there were the Stolen Generations, in which Aboriginal children were unjustly taken from their homes and placed with white families or in Missions.

While various apologies have been issued for these atrocities by their respective governments, their efforts have not yet ceased. Still, Indigenous children in both North America and Australia are plucked from their families under the guise of ‘child protection’ by government agencies, which lack an understanding of the cultural and economic differences between our nations. Moreover, these agencies mistake systemic poverty for neglect, and remove children to be placed in homes deemed acceptable by colonial society. Though the films often reminded me of our inherited cultural traumas, they also reassure me that we are not alone on the path to recovery. They illustrate that Indigenous people everywhere are fighting the same battles, living the same realities, and are part of the same family. What I took away from these films is this: Colonial entities recognize that in family there is strength, which is why they tried so hard to disrupt ours. Imagine the empowering effects that would come from Indigenous people across the globe recognizing our greatest strength, each other!

Tectonic Shift

Thursday, October 18

Waylon Wilson

The Tectonic Shift screening addressed motifs such as Indigenous spiritualism, inter-generational sharing, death, relationships, survivance, and looking inward. The seven short films presented in this panel were a mix of fictional narrative and documentary, however most of these films were based on or at least inspired by true events.

The prominent shared theme of these narratives was the impactful practice of cultural and spiritual knowledge by the main characters. In Tama, a young Maori man practices and performs the Haka as a way to defend himself and his brother from an abusive relationship and alter the mind of their abuser, while in The Grave Digger of Kapu, an aging uncle teaches his nephew the spiritual significance and responsibility in digging graves for their community. In each of these spiritual short films, the characters exercise their new or existing spiritual knowledge as a way of externalizing their innate strength to make change within their relationships and community.  

In the discussion panel that followed, the artists and people involved in the production shared their interrelated experiences and inspirations behind making these films. Each held a direct reciprocal relationship to the communities portrayed on-screen and contextualized the importance of each film’s message to their community.

Archiving Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

Floppy disks, hard drives, slides, CDs, tape-based videos, paper materials, photographs — these account for just some of the materials born from Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace’s twenty plus years of production both on and offline [fig. 1]. These materials give shape to extensive networks of Indigenous artistic creation and collaboration since the beginnings of media experimentation to today, and trace a history of media art with Indigenous makers at the centre. Today, they form the basis of the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace archives and the  starting point for a much larger project: the Initiative for Indigenous Futures’ Aboriginal New Media Archive.

For the past six months, Mikhel Proulx, RA and PhD student and Art History Department faculty member, and I, research coordinator for AbTeC/IIF, have been sorting materials related to AbTeC’s activities—both in physical and born-digital formats—and sketching out possible ways of organizing and caring for them to ensure accessibility and long-term preservation. The ultimate goal is to develop an archive of the work of Indigenous new media artists, beginning with AbTeC, that is publicly available online but housed locally in the Indigenous Futures Cluster at the Milieux Institute at Concordia University. While there’s much work to be done, we’ve had a busy spring and summer laying the groundwork for the archive project that’s worth sharing!

Is This Permanence: Preservation of Born-digital Artists’ Archives

This past spring, we attended the symposium “Is This Permanence: Preservation of Born-digital Artists’ Archives” hosted at the Yale Center for British Art [fig. 2]. We presented our project alongside archivists, technologists, and curators from major institutions in North America, who, like us, are grappling with the challenges of preserving a wide range of born-digital materials and, at the same time, making these materials, or at least aspects of them, available for public access and engagement. The strategies for preserving digital artist records addressed by these institutions were diverse and, at times, improvisatory as new challenges required new methods in an ever-changing digital landscape.

The Yale conference helped us to conceptualize our project in practical terms like workflow and structure, and to draft a working list of system requirements while we researched various applications for the archive. It also helped to confirm some things we were already doing! John Bell’s (Dartmouth) presentation on practices of digital archiving within online gaming communities was illuminating for its emphasis on community-specific metadata. A historian’s perspective on what information to preserve will be different from a programmer’s, or an artist’s, or a community member’s. Learning how different communities might interact with AbTeC’s archives and the connections between these communities is an important aspect of our project and one that will be further explored in conversation with IIF partners and project stakeholders.

Artist and new media scholar Jon Ippolito delivered the final keynote “Your Archival Format Will Not Save you” in which he discussed the strategy of emulation as a viable means of preserving and experiencing web-based artworks in their original format. An emulator was used to reactivate CyberPowWow—the groundbreaking online chat room and virtual gallery of contemporary Indigenous art—for its presentation in AbTeC’s retrospective Filling in the Blank Spaces, discussed in an earlier post [fig. 3]. The keynote, and our own emulation strategies, emphasize the importance of contextualization (in our case, running CyberPowWow on the original computer program The Palace and through the original browser version) and activation over static and self-contained archival formats. We need for archival formats and archives that, as Ippolito states, “are expansive and creative enough to capture the vibrancy that makes the art of our era worth preserving in the first place.” This, and attending to the particularities of what makes this an Indigenous archive—not just in terms of content but how we build relationships between objects and entities and direct methods of engagement—steer our ongoing work in organizing the Aboriginal New Media Archive.

Artefactual Systems Access to Memory Camp

These broader considerations inform how we determine our practical needs, such as which software to use for the organization and storage of archival descriptions and digital objects. This aspect of the project has been particularly challenging in light of the proliferation of content management systems and tools available, each with their own strengths and unique capabilities. However, we have narrowed our focus to one system created by Artefactual Systems.

Access to Memory (AtoM) is a web-based open-source application for standards-based archival content and a promising option for us to implement. It is easy to navigate, accepts a variety of file types, and is integrated with Archivematica, Artefactual’s digital preservation system. As an open-source software that employs a community-based development model, AtoM is sustained by collaboration, openness and generosity—aspects of research-creation that AbTeC privileges in our own activities.

Last month, Mikhel and I attended a 3-day training and information camp for professionals working with AtoM at Robarts Library in tkaronto/Toronto. We learned the nuts and bolts of the system from inputting archival descriptions to cleaning up messy data and importing in into AtoM. It was useful to see how the system could be used to map social relationships and complexities like nationhood and multiple languages latent in our data.

As this project moves forward, we will continue to demo AtoM and determine an appropriate archival structure that supports our various needs. Further discussions on Indigenous archives and Indigenizing archives with Indigenous archivists and librarians are needed to further flesh out the project’s potentials, in addition to understanding the needs and perspectives of the archive’s users and stakeholders.

A recorded version of Sara and Mikhel’s presentation at “Is This Permanence” is available online, starting at 51:30.

URL: https://britishart.yale.edu/symposium-permanence-preservation-born-digital-artists-archives