Kite: Listener | Sunday 21 June

Kite’s digital video installation in Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts is a visual representation of a machine made by the artist to listen to sound centred in Lakota understandings. This work is completed by Kite’s live performance of Listener – which we will livestream via Facebook Live on Sunday 21 June at 2 pm. 

The performance is based on a science fiction story about a woman wandering alone in the future, receiving transmissions from the Far Place on her Listening devices. Through this work, the artist asks, “How can Lakota understandings of hair affect the design of technology? What does a Lakota data-visualizing interface look like?” 

In order to perform this score, the listener must read the shapes as they appear, tactilizing the shapes through a hair-braid interface which changes a synthesizer, which sends sound to machine-learning software, which manipulates the video, affecting each shape as it forms and forms and forms.

Kite (aka Suzanne Kite) is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies 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.

Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts is a traveling exhibition curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, and organized by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Canada and Independent Curators International (ICI). The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, with the generous support from ICI’s International Forum and the ICI Board of Trustees. Additional support has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter Program, the Isabel and Alfred Bader Fund of Bader Philanthropies, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Kingston Arts Fund through the Kingston Arts Council, and the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund at Queen’s University.

Kite, Listener, 2018, Performance documentation. Photo by vog.photo. Collection of the artist.