Convergence at the Crossroads of Modernity: Indigenous Australian New Media Art

In 2004 Stephen Muecke announced that “indigenous modernity is indeed possible” yet “this modernity is quite different from European modernisation processes since it developed its own forms, later including modernist and postmodernist aesthetics” (2004, 5). Pushing Muecke’s contention further, it may be argued that Indigenous New Media artists are rewriting the Western history of time and modernity for contemporary audiences. The reification of a specific conceptualization of time lies at the basis of what may be termed the “possessive investment” in white modernity and the ‘new’, a story that remains largely invisible in the persistent severing discourses of development of Media Studies (Lipsitz, 2006). White modernity continues to be the unmarked norm of Modernity’s historicity (i.e. of what counts as part of its history), which includes or excludes artworks according to shifting definitions of modernity and pre- or post-modernity. The growing number of Indigenous Australian New Media artists, such as Brook Andrew, Brenda L Croft, Destiny Deacon, Christian Thompson, Tina Baum, Jason Hampton, and Michael Riley counters the digital revolution rhetoric of the 1990s which assumed that New Media were going to push aside and absorb Old media, thus framing them as modern and ancient. “Convergence Culture” is starting to emerge as an important process for Indigenous Media scholars and artists who try to imagine the future of the entertainment industry and claim that old and new media have and will interact in ever more complex ways (Jenkins 2004). Following Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2001), I will attempt a multimodal analysis of some of the signs, indexes and symbols of modernity in Indigenous Australian New Media works and their critical appropriation of the unmarked norm of modernity’s historicity (i.e. of what counts as part of its history).