AustLit

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). [Author's abstract]