List Projects 31: Kite

Kite is an artist, scholar, and composer whose work examines contemporary Lakȟóta ontology alongside machine learning and artificial intelligence.

For over a decade, Kite has worked with digital interfaces for music and live performance. One long-term project, a series of performances and installations featuring a hair-braid interface, consists of interactive or wearable sculptures that use machine learning to translate a performer’s movement and touch into video and sound. In parallel, Kite has developed an extensive body of scholarship on Indigenous protocols for AI. She suggests that Lakȟóta ontology can guide the way to more ethical, less extractive futures of technology. Much of her work is animated by a spirit of relation, enfolding both human collaborators (such as family members and other artists) and nonhuman entities, like stones and the components of computers.

In recent years, Kite has turned to dreams as both an ancestral technology and a research-creation methodology. In works that have taken the forms of stone sculptures, embroidered deer hides, performances, and a participatory web project, Kite draws on a geometric visual language stewarded by Lakȟóta women and two-spirit people, translating her dreams (and those of others) into this vocabulary. Some of the artist’s experimental designs serve, in turn, as abstract scores for musicians to interpret. Much of her work is structured by acts of mediation and translation, but it also embodies an awareness that—as her grandfather Mahpíya Nážin once said—“everything is related because we all come from the same place.”

List Projects 31: Kite is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, and Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant. 

Kite (aka Suzanne Kite; b. 1990, Sylmar, CA; lives and works in Catskill, NY) is an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and scholar. Her artworks and performances have recently been featured at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Center for Art, Research and Alliances, New York; and the 2024 Shanghai Biennial; among other venues. Her awards and honors include a Ruth Award, a 2023 United States Artist Fellowship, a Creative Time open call commission (with Alisha Wormsley), and a Creative Capital grant. She is currently Director of Wihanble S’a Lab, Distinguished Artist in Residence, and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard College. Kite holds degrees from California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and Concordia University. She is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe.