«Digital Futures» by Elizabeth Povinelli (Vectors 3.2) is about creating an archive of decades of anthropological work among the aboriginal people in northwest Australia. Reading it was a challenge to my patience, but after I read it, it lingered in me for days.

Centered around Ruth Yarrowin’s life, the feature consists of a series of maps mapping locations central to her life and her ancestors. The maps are dated 2007, 1997, 1943, 1930 and 1900. Only when all the locations on a map are visited does a new map appear, allowing the reader to dig further back in history. As such, the feature is more linear than a printed book, where one always has the option to skip pages and read ahead.

If a reader is annoyed by this forced structure, there is much more to be frustrated from in this text. Each map has one to four locations. Each location consists of three videos, with a short written paragraph underneath, serving as an introduction. The videos are edited together from visual material from Povinelli’s fieldwork: Mostly videos of Yarrowin and her family, but also family photgraphs, and some times news clippings or handwritten field notes. More often than not, the sound is incomprehensible. Written lines crawl across the screen, forcing the reader to select his/her focus: Either trying to read the very slowly moving text, or trying to watch the images, because doing both at the same time can’t be done. Some videos even have two simultaneous layers of written text, one scrolling vertically, one horizontally, making it impossible to read everything. The reader is left with scraps, glimpses of themes, but few details.

The overarching theme in the feature is memory, touched on in four different ways: Yarrowin’s life history, told in reverse chronology. Ruth’s memories of traditional tales and myths, and her wish to bring this further to new generations. The history of land claims in the area, as a series of riots and following court rulings, where the court has tried to establish which families have the historical ties to the land required by modern Australian law. And lastly, the attempts to capture all this, and information from a century of anthropological work in the region, and among Yarrowin’s family, in a new public archive. How such an archive at all is possible is the overarching theoretical theme, a theme that is not so much discussed, as it is problematized through all the examples with Yarrowin in the centre.

I found this work so frustrating to read, and so time consuming, I would probably not have had the patience to finish it all, was it not for my analytical purpose. But afterwards, having read most (not everything, I admit), a have a feeling of having visited a site, beginning to understand, having pieces in my memory that I can begin to assemble, but not knowing it all. I believe this was the effect Povinelli wanted to achieve, and it has left an impression in me.

Perseverance is a virtue, I guess.