KITE
Iron Road in collaboration with Corey Stover and Becky Red Bow, 2021
single-channel video, stones, drone
Iron Road was made in collaboration with Corey Stover and Becky Red Bow. The video was installed on the floor and documented conversations with her family who did not appear on screen. Instead, drone footage of South Dakota set the stage for the expansive stories they related about family history, important dreams, and the significance of stones in Kite’s family. The story of her great-great grandmother Elizabeth Iron Road escaping the Wounded Knee Massacre on foot was a central part of the piece. Near the monitor, the video’s central story was recounted in Lakota geometric language. Using a design methodology developed by Sadie Red Wing, the speakers in Kite’s video conveyed not only a story about her ancestors but also provided the listener with a lexicon for ‘reading’ the geometric arrangement of stones on the floor.
Wichahpih’a (a clear night with a star-filled sky of a starlit night) 2020
silver thread on blue satin, 14 ½” × 14”
Tho Win (Blue Woman I) 2019
silver thread on blue leather, 4’ x 4’
Šuŋg’íkteowápi (Poison Map I) 2023
deer hide, glass, 5' x 3'
Wičháȟpiowápi (Star Map I) 2023
deer hide, glass, 5' x 3'
Made of leather or satin, these embroideries were iterative and experimental versions of Lakȟóta women’s geometric designs. They were created on a Tajima embroidery machine and made with various versions of electrically conductive embroidery thread in order to be interactive; some were scores to meant to be interpreted by musicians.
On October 14, the final day of Invisible Prairie, Kite and local musicians interpreted these graphic scores during the partial eclipse that occurred that morning.
ABOUT KITE
Kite (Suzanne Kite) is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence (AI), and contemporary art and performance.
She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sound, video, performances, instrument building, wearable artwork, poetry, books, interactive installations, and more.
Kite’s work has been included in publications such as Atlas of Anomalous AI, Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), and The Funambulist. Her award-winning article “Making Kin with Machines” and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) were featured on the cover of Canadian Art.
Kite has been working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013. Her artwork and performance have been featured at numerous venues, including the Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS122, Anthology Film Archives, Chronus Art Center, and Toronto Biennial of Art. Honors include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellowship, which allowed her to collaborate with top experimental artists and develop a film with AI techniques, Fever Dream (2021); Women at Sundance|Adobe Fellowship; and Common Field Fellowship, among others.
In fall 2022, she gave a talk at Bard as part of the Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives conference, hosted by the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a three-year project that proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies approach to revitalize the undergraduate American Studies Program.
BFA, California Institute of the Arts; MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School, Bard College; PhD candidate, Concordia University. At Bard: Spring 2023.
2023 Tinworks Artist Suzanne Kite