In the start, as one model of the Haudenosaunee creation story has it, there was solely water and sky. According to oral custom, when the Sky Woman grew to become pregnant, she dropped through a gap within the clouds. While many animals guided her descent as she fell, she ultimately discovered a spot on the turtle’s again. They labored collectively, with the help of different water creatures, to raise the land from the depths of those primordial waters to create what we now know as our earth.
The new immersive expertise, “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe,” is a vivid retelling of this creation story by multimedia artist Jackson 2bears, also referred to as Tékeniyáhsen Ohkwá:ri (Kanien’kehà:ka), the 2022–24 Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence on the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology. “A lot of what drives my work is finding new ways to keep Haudenosaunee teachings and stories alive in our communities, finding new ways to tell them, but also helping with the transmission and transformation of those stories as they are for us, a living part of our cultural practice,” he says.
A digital recreation of the normal longhouse
2bears was first impressed to create a digital actuality model of a longhouse, a conventional Haudenosaunee construction, in collaboration with Thru the RedDoor, an Indigenous-owned media firm in Six Nations of the Grand River that 2bears calls dwelling. The longhouse isn’t solely a “functional dwelling,” says 2bears, however an necessary non secular and cultural heart the place creation myths are shared. “While we were developing the project, we were told by one of our knowledge keepers in the community that longhouses aren’t structures, they’re not the materials they’re made out of,” 2bears remembers, “They’re about the people, the Haudenosaunee people. And it’s about our creative cultural practices in that space that make it a sacred place.”
The digital recreation of the longhouse connects storytelling to the bodily panorama, whereas additionally providing a shared area for neighborhood members to collect. In Haudenosaunee worldview, says 2bears, “stories are both durational, but they’re also dimensional.” With “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe,” the longhouse was dropped at life with drumming, dancing, knowledge-sharing, and storytelling. The immersive expertise was designed to be communal. “We wanted to develop a story that we could work on with a bunch of other people rather than just having a story writer or director,” 2bears says, “We didn’t want to do headsets. We wanted to do something where we could be together, which is part of the longhouse mentality,” he says.
The energy of collaboration
2bears produced the venture with the assist of Co-Creation Studio at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. “We think of co-creation as a dance, as a way of working that challenges the notion of the singular author, the single one point of view,” says documentarian Kat Cizek, the creative director and co-founder of the studio, who started her work at MIT as a CAST visiting artist. “And Jackson does that. He does that within the community at Six Nations, but also with other communities and other Indigenous artists.”
In an individualist society that so typically facilities the thought of the singular writer, 2bears’s apply affords a strong instance of what it means to work as a collective, says Cizek. “It’s very hard to operate, I think, in any discipline without some level of collaboration,” she says, “What’s different about co-creation for us is that people enter the room with no set agenda. You come into the room and you come with questions and curiosity about what you might make together.”
2bears at MIT
At first, 2bears thought his time at MIT would assist with the technical facet of his work. But over time, he found a wealthy neighborhood at MIT, a spot to discover the bigger philosophical questions referring to technology, Indigenous data, and synthetic intelligence. “We think very often about not only human intelligence, but animal intelligence and the spirit of the sky and the trees and the grass and the living earth,” says 2bears, “and I’m seeing that kind of reflected here at the school.”
In 2023, 2bears participated within the Co-Creation Studio Indigenous Immersive Incubator at MIT, an historic gathering of 10 Indigenous artists, who toured MIT labs and met with Indigenous leaders from MIT and past. As a part of the summit, he shared “Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe” as a piece in progress. This spring, he introduced the most recent iteration of the work at MIT in smaller settings with teams of scholars, and in a big public lecture introduced by CAST and the Art, Culture and Technology Program. His “experimental method of storytelling and communication really conveys the power of what it means to be a community as an Indigenous person, and the unique beauty of all of our people,” says Nicole McGaa, Oglala Lakota, co-president of MIT’s Native American Indigenous Association.
Storytelling in 360 levels
2bear’s digital recreation grew to become much more necessary after the longhouse in the neighborhood unexpectedly burned down halfway through the method, after the crew had created 3D scans of the construction. With no constructing to venture onto, they used ingenuity and creativity to pivot to the venture’s present iteration.
The immersive expertise was exceptional in its sheer dimension: 8-foot tall photos performed on a canvas display screen 34 toes in diameter. With video mapping utilizing a number of projectors and 14-channel encompass sound, the story of Sky Woman coming all the way down to Turtle Island was given an immense kind. It premiered on the 2RO MEDIA Festival, and was met with an enthusiastic response from the Six Nations neighborhood. “It was so beautiful. You can look in any direction, and there was something happening,” says Gary Joseph, director of Thru the RedDoor. “It affects you in a way that you didn’t think you could be affected because you’re seeing the things that are sacred to you being expressed in a way that you’ve never imagined.”
In the long run, 2bears hopes to make the set up extra interactive, so contributors can interact with the expertise in their very own methods, creating a number of variations of the creation story. “I’ve been thinking about it as creating a living installation,” he says. “It really was a project made in community, and I couldn’t have been happier about how it turned out. And I’m really excited about where I see this project going in the future.”