ABSTRACT

The back-story to this book was my engagement with the scholarship of Richard Sherwin’s Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque,2 especially after viewing his Vimeo presentation at the Visualizing Law in the Digital Age conference.3 I was excited about what I saw as a kind of surrealism, which I thought would open up an opportunity for shaping a text that would be more suitable for both Indigenous readers and today’s cyber-youth. I was looking for a shape that would allow for a transitional guide from the written to the visual – a sort of Indigenous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy4 that would incorporate essays, tales, poetry and links to visuals through a mosaic of texts. This search led me to The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Topographic Man,5 written by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan – a writer who specialized in the ‘non-linear form of writing which re-elaborates the alphabetic form so as to give the written page a tactile and multi-sensory dimension’.6 The Gutenberg Galaxy was an attempt to take the reader out of the safe linear world and into a mosaic of ideas in a series of essays that allowed the replacement of logical thought with free association and the artistic, visually controlled juxtaposition of ideas.7