Future Directions in Indigenous Research: Digital Life

Public Lecture followed by light refreshments

The College of Arts and Social Sciences is hosting the 2013 Future Directions in Indigenous Research Public Lecture

Despite the ubiquity of smart phones in northeast Arnhem Land, Yolngu have not acquiesced to the idea that everything can—and should—be made available to cameras and the worldwide web. With an abiding sense of the potency of the invisible, Yolngu use digital media to materialize ancestral relations, liven up the living, and potentially remedy what one Yolngu man sees as the detrimental effects of bark painting.

Anthropologist and filmmaker Jennifer Deger has developed a uniquely collaborative, practice-led approach to her research into visual culture and indigenous media as a result of working for almost twenty years with the community of Gapuwiyak in northeast Arnhem land. As a trainer, producer and co-director with the Gapuwiyak Media Project she has fostered the production, distribution and exhibition of films, installation artworks, and, more recently, phone-made videos. Currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dr Deger has published widely on new media, sensuous anthropology and experimental ethnography, including her book Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (2006).