Imagining Drumbytes and Logging in Powwows: A History of Community Imagination in Canadian-Based Aboriginal New Media Art
Name
Maria Victoria Guglietti
Type of Resource
text
Genre
Thesis
Abstract
--Description taken from "Imagining Drumbytes and Logging in Powwows:A History of Community Imagination in Canadian-Based Aboriginal New Media Art"--
This thesis proposes a history of community imagination within the Aboriginal new media field in Canada. Aboriginal new media art is an artistic field that emerged in the mid-1990s, when Aboriginal contemporary artists and cultural producers adopted the Internet to articulate a presence online. A significant aspect of Aboriginal new media art is its commitment to develop, perform and represent community through technological means.
The central argument of this study is that Aboriginal new media art is an artistic field where community is imagined and practiced. This work of imagination does not passively reflect cultural relations of production and reproduction, but mediates these relations, affecting the development of the field. At a theoretical level, this study develops a program that bridges the gap between studies of community imagination and imagined communities. To this end, it engages with an interdisciplinary body of work that encompasses the sociology of culture, cultural studies, community informatics and research on online communities and sociality. At a methodological level, this thesis reconstructs the development of community imagination through the discursive analysis of online projects as well as interviews with Aboriginal new media artists, government art officials and Aboriginal curators. As a result, the history of 315366community imagination is divided in three moments, each defined by a hegemonic model of community imagination: community empowerment, community as online performance and community as poetics.