That flowing, or unifying, nature of water as a way of describing digital art is “not unexpected in our island nation”, argues Maree Mills in her 2009 essay ‘Pou Rewa: The Liquid Post, Māori Go Digital?’ Rakena’s term ‘toi rerehiko’ is a combination of rorohiko (the reo Māori word for computer, or electric brain) and rere (to flow). The liquidity of digital media has been a key theme of the writing that surrounds Māori moving image artworks. This space allows for relationships across terrains where the issue of identity lies not so much in geography but in the development of communities in fluid spaces that are both resonant with mythologies, whakapapa and belonging, and responsive to contemporary technologies. It is a fluid medium through which movement, both travel and floating occurs. For Māori artists, it is “like the ocean our tupuna crossed”. In 2003, Rachael Rakena described digital space as “a new realm of the cosmos”. It disappears behind my palm, only soft edges poking through. Looking at the image as I write this, I stretch my hand over the screen, trying to cover it. Seen by most of us on screens no larger than a television – but more likely a cell phone – a terrifying vastness we can hardly begin to understand is reduced trillions of times over. Perfectly still, it cannot describe the noise and turbulence that defines its subject: that is an understanding it leaves for us to account for. The photograph, a burning orange circular glow reminiscent of the effect created by staring at a light and then squeezing your eyes tightly closed, is an impossible vision – pieced together by a global network of telescopes that compose one large telescope larger than Earth, the gaps in their vision filled in by computer algorithms. I was struck by the image’s refusal to be ‘held’. 2Īs I was writing this, the first photograph of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, was published by the Event Horizon project, an international team of more than 300 scientists and thirteen institutions. It was Barclay’s hope that new forms of engagement with the many records that have already been created – images, films, oral histories – underpinned by the “Māori knowledge of what spirit shines through” them could guide their return, to the people and places where the “held image” was taken from. In that process, filmmakers “become custodians of other people’s spirits”. With film, he says, an image leaves the place where it was made “and will probably never return”. In 1990, Barry Barclay described film-making and the act of “taking pictures” as a kind of robbery.

Drawings of memory pictures