Keywords: aborigenal art, Indigenous new media, convergence, multimodality
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 Australian new
media artists are rewriting the Western history of time and modernity for
contemporary audiences. The growing number of Indigenous Australian
new media art projects counters the digital revolution rhetoric of the 1990s
which assumed that new media were going to push aside and absorb old
media. Conversely, Indigenous Australian new media artists unsettle the
unmarked norms of modernity's historicity (i.e. of what counts as part of its
history) through a critical appropriation of "multimodal" discourse (Kress
2010).