Paper short abstract:

Assembling, curating, remixing, remediating, co-designing, cut-and-paste poetry … any of these terms seem more apt than 'writing' when it comes to describing the creation of a manuscript co-authored with my Yolngu colleagues about mobile phone art and the work of making things new.

Paper long abstract:

Assembling, curating, remixing, remediating, co-designing, cut-and-paste poetry … any of these terms seem more apt than 'writing' when it comes to describing the creation of a manuscript co-authored with my Yolngu colleagues about mobile phone art and the work of making things new.

In the Aboriginal languages of east Arnhem Land, 'yuta' means new. 'Yuta anthropology' is the term that my friend and colleague, Paul Gurrumuruwuy, uses to describe our decade-long shared experiment with form, image, and voice. Yuta is a kind of Yolngu remix: an art of incorporation by which the new is rendered in relationship to the old; a riffing mode of co-creation fuelled by the improvisational energy and outlook of a 'yuta generation'.

Phone & Spear is a book that performs its argument: it does not simply analyse relations, it seeks to materialise and mobilize them. This result differs from collaboratively-written, community-authorised accounts of Indigenous lifeworlds: our purview is broader, our aims more inclusive, and our methods more risky.

Ours is a work of creative remediation: an experiment in cut-and-paste poetics that responds in kind to the social aesthetics given form and life in emergent art practices that use Google Play to render ancestral themes. Approaching images as affective agents, understanding vision as socially generative, and taking assemblage as a loving act of world-making, we have created a visual anthropology that goes beyond the observational; one concerned with praxis, processes, and relationships; an artful anthropology energised by repetition and juxtaposition, rather that things that stand alone.