Transference, Tradition, Technology

Edited by Dana Claxton, Melanie Townsend, and Steven Loft

Walter Phillips Gallery Editions in association with Indigenous Media Art Group and Art Gallery of Hamilton

In a dialogue with Hawaiian artist Puhipau, filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk talks about the process of putting Inuit stories on film, first in a series of shorts made for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, then in his acclaimed feature Atanarjuat The Fast Runner. “Why did I start working in video?” he says in the new book Transference, Tradition, Technology. “I guess I saw southern filmmakers coming up north to make programs about us. And they would do a terrific project, but you’d see the props and they were not the way they should be. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I started doing it, to do it right.”

Kunuk’s inspiration and motivation, his adaptation of modern techniques to traditional stories, follows a few of the themes of Transference, Tradition, Technology, subtitled native new media exploring digital culture and released by The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery Editions in association with Indigenous Media Art Group and Art Gallery of Hamilton. A history of Native media art, it includes work by artists including Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, Dana Claxton, Alanis Obomsawin, Buffy Ste-Marie, and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, among many others.

This book of essays by artists, curators, and scholars frames the landscape of contemporary Aboriginal art, the influence of Western criticism and standards, and the liberating advent of inexpensive technologies including video and online media.

“To govern ourselves means to govern our stories and our ways of telling stories,” artist Marjorie Beaucage is quoted in the book, speaking about the creation of the Aboriginal Film and Media Arts Alliance in the early 1990s. “It means that the rhythm of the drumbeat and the language of smoke signals can be transformed to the airwaves and modems of our time. If we remain true to the value of traditional storytelling practices, we can use the new technology without destroying the culture.”