Truth,' a special collection of essays on new media art, ceremony, animation, sensory immersion, and other hyperreal interventions by Aboriginal and First Nations artists, curators, and academics. This essay introduces the contributing Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors who are working across this emergent field of cultural production. Developing key concepts in critical dialogue with Indigenous practice-based activism and history, it argues that works of the Indigenous hyperreal serve to challenge dominant frameworks of anthropology and canonical art theory. It provides historical and conceptual background for understanding the importance of these works as vital strategies of survival taking shape in neocolonial contexts across Indigenous territories of Australia and Turtle Island today. [Aboriginal art and new media, hyperrealism, Indigenous aesthetics]
to the dominant interpretation of these paintings as representations of 'country'-cartographic 'maps' of the landscape, narratives of Dreaming Ancestors, flora, fauna, species-my argument is that these works bespeak a particular breasted experience and expression, a cultural way of doing and being in the world; what I want to call a breasted ontology. This breasted ontology is literally manifest in the ways in which these paintings are produced and, in turn, experienced by the viewer. That is, these works arguably engender a bodily relation between viewer and image. This viewing relation is not a matter of a viewing subject who, kept at a distance, comprehends an object of ocular focus and vision. Rather, this relation instead is one in which the viewer relinquishes her sense of separateness from the canvas; where a certain coming-into-being in relation to the painting occurs. One does not so much know these works cognitively as lose oneself in them. Through viewing these works, as it were, one becomes vulnerable to their sensibilities in so far as they incite an enmeshment, an enfolding, and encapturing, even in their materiality.
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