What’s in a Look
Aesthetical Needs and Desires
Starting Point
The initial prototype for Virtual Aamjiwnaang, an online interactive platform to share the stories from and about the Southern Ontario Anishinaabe Nation, is in many ways the equivalent of a slightly sophisticated stickmen storyboard. Here’s a tree (far left). Next to it is a baseball field, a nondescript rectangular building, a few meters away another, as well as one with a rooftop mimicking a teepee, the band office. Across from all is a petrochemical plant.
Though effective in situating where important places are in relation to one another and in mapping where each story belongs, the current design provides little, if no emotive information. In other words, it doesn’t give clues as to how it feels to be in Aamjiwnaang. Is it serene? Beautiful? Grim? Frightening? All of these? This is where aesthetic choices come in. For the past few months, I’ve gone back and forth with Elders and Youth from the community, as well as the Environment Committee trying to decide what the look -and therefore feel- of the virtual version of their territory should be.
Should it look real?
My first instinct was to use what is readily available: Google Street View. Beyond ease, it also offers the additional benefit of being as real a representation as imaginable. Or so I thought. When I introduced the idea, a resident of Aamjiwnaang frowned. Their home was undergoing renovations when the Google mobile rode down the street. It was captured with plywood boards covering the doors and windows, a sight that risked playing into some of the injurious stereotypes regarding the ways Indigenous people live.
Google Street View, like any photographic capture, is a temporary truth.
Along the same lines, other locals were concerned about privacy and revealing too much. Places that are sacred should be protected, while important landmarks, some of which might go unnoticed, like the cottonwood tree that stands tall across from the Arlanxeo polymer plant, should be singled out. Google Street View was out. And a discussion on the level of realism to implement in the platform began.
Trained as a journalist, I was conscious of the ethical perils of pretending that an interpretation of reality was reality. Given that the community had opted to represent only the significant, I didn’t want to fool people into thinking that the online version was an exact replica of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Photorealism was out, in favour of a more expressionist aesthetic.
Which features matter most?
During my six years visiting the community, people often spoke of their conflicted relationship with their territory. A haven and source of pride, it is also a landscape they have come to fear. When discussing Virtual Aamjiwnaang, the Environmental Committee stressed that they hoped it would translate that feeling of confinement, while focusing on celebrating the land and the community. After all, had the Anishinaabek people not staked their claim to it, this green oasis would have been completely erased.
“maps demarcate contested territories, represent institutionalized power and in many ways fix the term of future negotiations […] The map is a form of knowledge that has the power to dispossess” — Hunt & Stevenson (2016)
In this context, paying more attention to the features of Indigenous land than Western spaces subverts mainstream mapping practices by inverting the usual hierarchy. Hence, while the whole scene is intended to give a sense of scale and space, showcasing the size of the First Nation and demonstrating the industries’ proximity to living quarters, the online representation should focus on Aamjiwnaang. Accordingly, the features of the Anishinaabek reservation ought to be more detailed than that of the surrounding plants. The community felt that showing them as colourless shapes on the edge of the frame would help focus the visitors’ attention on Aamjiwnaang while still highlighting their looming, alien presence.
Asking these questions matters because aesthetics shape how the visitors perceive the interactive spaces and stories.
If game mechanics can provide the verbs of the player experience (and thus implicitly answer the question “what will the player do?”), game aesthetics can provide the nouns and adjectives (and thus implicitly contribute to the answer to the question “what will the player’s experience be?”). — Simon Niedenthal (2009)
In other words, and related to all immersive or interactive experiences, aesthetics by providing additional, and at times subliminal, information create an atmosphere that affect one’s sense of presence as well as shape their emotional response.
References
Hunt, D. & Stevenson, S. A. (2016). Decolonizing geographies of power: Indigenous digital counter-mapping practices on turtle Island, Settler Colonial Studies. http://doi:10.1080/2201473X.2016.1186311
Niedenthal, S. (2009). What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics, Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/09287.17350.pdf
