Digitizing North: A Critical Discussion of Jonathan Harris's The Whale Hunt

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn May 2007, media artist Jonathan Harris spent nine days living with an Inupiat family in Barrow, Alaska, where he documented the ancient tradition of the whale hunt in a series of 3,214 photographs, which he later assembled into an interactive database documentary aptly named The Whale Hunt. As designed object, The Whale Hunt is a technical marvel of Flash-based interactive design par excellence, yet for all its merit as a boundary-pushing mode of digital storytelling, it remains a story of North told by way of the South. This paper queries the concept of “digitizing North” and questions of “story” through a discursive analysis and post-colonial critique of The Whale Hunt as representation of North, where North is understood as a vast and shifting discursive field and a cultural imaginary. By interrogating the three main constitutive texts—the database documentary, artist statement, and digital storytelling interface, the paper critically examines their narrative conventions and representational modes toward identifying what ideological investments are being made and legitimated in discursive formations of North.