  Kusuoka's measure on fractals is a Gibbs measure of a very special kind,
because its potential is discontinuous, while the standard theory of Gibbs
measures requires continuous (actuallly, H\"older) potentials. In this paper,
we shall see that for many fractals it is possible to build a class of
matrix-valued Gibbs measures completely within the scope of the standard
theory; there are naturally some minor modifications, but they are only due to
the fact that we are dealing with matrix-valued functions and measures. We
shall use these matrix-valued Gibbs measures to build self-similar Dirichlet
forms on fractals. Moreover, we shall see that Kusuoka's measure can be
recovered in a simple way from the matrix-valued Gibbs measure.
