Kite
Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) presented the premiere of Listener, a performance work by Kite (aka Suzanne Kite), at Knot Project Space. The performance marked the first iteration in a series of new world-building projects by the Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer that weaves together a diasporic Lakota science fiction narrative.
Listener was an iterative, site-specific performance artwork which engaged with Lakota epistemologies through computational media, machine learning algorithms, and narrative, using a custom technological suite enacting relationships between the body, the user/performance interface, and the computer. The performance system consisted of a hair-braid interface with movement, audio, video, sculpture, and text creating a spiral feedback dynamic between body and system.
Most survivors will stay in these cities because they cannot know the terrain,
forced to rely on falsified maps
which all have roads that lead back the way they came.
Lawless listening devices prey on wandering Locatables.
The only true survival technique is to Listen.
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, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD student at Concordia University. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota mythologies and epistemologies and investigates the multiplicity of mythologies existing in the contemporary storytelling of the Lakota through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records.