1 WARNING: THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS CULTURALLY SENSITIVE MATERIAL FOR ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIGHT ISLANDER PEOPLES. CAUTION SHOULD BE EXERCISED AS IT MENTIONS PEOPLES NAMES AND CONTAINS CLAN IMAGES FROM THE NGARINYIN, ARANDA, WALPIRI, WIK AND PITJATJANTJARA PEOPLES. THE DATE OF THE LAST UPDATE WAS 27 TH NOVEMBER 2006 Narratives of Creation and Space: Pilgrimage, Aboriginal, and Digital. By James Barrett I would like to approach digital media via brief examinations of spatial and narrative discourse networks not often associated with the digital. This approach is meant to suggest that digital media is a product and a producer of a dynamic realignment of cultural assumptions globally, such as what is considered to be “narrative”. The cultural fields that I discuss in relation to digital media are the performance of pilgrimage and some of the story telling systems of the Australian Aboriginal nations. In relation to pilgrimage the 9 th century Buddhist stupa of Borobudur on the Indonesian island of Java is examined here as an example of spatial hypermedia that immerses the pilgrim in a story manifest through interaction. My use of the term ‘digital’ refers here to media systems that rely on digital technologies. This applies to a huge array of artifacts from the mobile phone in your pocket to the laptop or PC on your bench. The major features of digital media relevant here is the effectiveness of the technology at constructing spatial relations in representation and the demand of the direct involvement of users as co-creators in what is represented. In short, not only do you press the buttons, you are also on the screen, in the story or creating the scene. There are pragmatic rules to the uses of digital media asserted by the material structures (hardware) and programming (software) of the media. The code used in a web page or a computer game contains rules about how the media can used, such as how it cannot or can be modified and adapted. Outside these rules of the material artifact there are judicial rules such