SATURDAY April 28
Creating Indigenous Futures: Indigenous artists discuss their work in relationship to futurity and creative reclamation
Looking ahead to future generations, sustained by the strength of our ancestors and wise to the challenges of living in fraught times, how do we bring our values as Indigenous people to our work in creating Indigenous futures? As artists, how do we apply Indigenous science and technology to creating these futures? This session is organized by Erin Genia(Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate),a first year Masters of Science candidate in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT.
Courtney Leonard (Shinnecock), Jackson Polys (Tlingit), Kite (Oglala Lakota)
Respondent: Mario Caro
Kite, Nonhuman Futures
In this presentation, Kite will discuss her art and research practice using the framework of “responsible truth” versus “epistemologies of domination and control” as proposed by Lee Hester. What is contemporary Lakota mythology? How are these investigations made possible through wearable computing? Contemporary mythology is created through rumor, conspiracy, belief, storytelling and non-human knowledge as well as through ideas of ancestral land-base, ‘cosmologyscape’, and events in time forming space. She will present her current computational body-interface as an example of wearable technology as Lakota knowledge-making and computer-human interactions as a way to explore Lakota ontologies of non-human interiority.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School. She is currently a PhD student at Concordia University and a research assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her research investigates contemporary Lakota mythologies and epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records.
textiles + materiality research cluster 