Kite
WANÍYETU WÓWAPI, or winter counts, are a Lakȟóta method for recording time. Drawn on hide or, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, paper or muslin, winter counts consist of sequences of pictographs organized in a circular array, with each pictograph representing a given year’s most important event. The keepers of the winter count are charged not only with recording new events but with relating the community’s history by translating the symbolized events to an oral performance. Past events are not just known, nor do they exist squarely in the past; rather, they are returned to in a cyclical performative retelling that emphasizes their presentness and reflects the circular nature of the winter count’s pictographic record turning back in on itself.
Suzanne Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, scholar, and composer who works under the name Kite, productively explores the tension between the pure presentness of performance in the Western tradition and the cyclical reformative nature of Lakȟóta time. An enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Kite is among the foremost Indigenous artists exploring the capacity of music, video, installation, and digital technologies—including wearable interfaces and machine learning—in combination with performance to examine the embodiment and visualization of contemporary Lakȟóta ways of knowing.
As a faculty member and the director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College, Kite leads research on Indigenous approaches to artificial intelligence, exploring ways in which AI technologies might integrate with Indigenous knowledge systems (see, for example, her coauthorship of the 2018 article “Making Kin with the Machines”). That research is centered in her own understanding of Lakȟóta systems, universal structures, language, and narratives, including their visual expression. Having long explored these questions and concepts in her artistic practice, she has recently brought them to the fore with renewed force, condensing a disparate array of artistic experiments under a single umbrella of performance, thought, and facilitation. Since 2013, Kite has been deploying wearable systems that translate her physical movements in performance into video and sound. The most recognizable of these devices are her long, artificial braids, which she rigs with sensors and connects to machine-learning interfaces. Pȟehíŋ kiŋ líla akhíšoke. (Her hair was heavy.), 2019, was one of her earliest performances with such a device. In that piece, Kite’s braid, linked up to a computer running custom software, translated her bodily movements—a choreographed sequence of often contorted and frantic gestures—into shrill waves of synthesized sound. In that and subsequent braid performances, data gleaned from the sensors’ tracking of her movements feeds a machine-learning algorithm, yielding generative models of a Lakȟóta body in motion.
By virtue of their interactivity, Kite’s wearable art systems extend naturally to participatory installations that serve as both stage and medium for an audience’s embodied performance. The work Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock), 2019—a room-size installation produced in collaboration with Devin Ronneberg—consists of eight braids that hang from the ceiling like the legs of a spider. Visitors are invited to bend and move the braids, inflecting the sounds emerging from the installation in response to the generative sounds or “voice” emerging from the digital entity above, thus creating a feedback loop between the presentness of the audience’s manipulations and the mutable archive of sound.
In recent years, Kite has begun to produce a series of scores that at once document past performances and serve as scripts to be realized in the future. The scores, such as Wógligleya (Tȟuŋkášila Čečiyelo), 2021, created with Lakȟóta musician Santee Witt, are written in an abstract geometric lexicon based on the “shape kit” adapted by Lakȟóta designer Sadie Red Wing from historical Plains quillwork motifs. Arranged for musicians or performers or functioning as diagrammatic layouts for sculptural installations, these scores are typically mandala-like in form, at once evoking star maps, blankets, circuitry, and winter counts. Such pieces are the focus of Kite’s current exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the scores are displayed as large vinyl prints that sometimes include written instructions for performers. Previously, Kite has produced hanging leather and textile pieces decorated with designs based on Lakȟóta women’s geometries, embroidering these motifs in conductive thread or rendering them in beadwork on fabric or deer hide; she identifies such pieces as “tactile music scores,” representing fragments of dreams and language. In these and the more recent scores at MIT, the semiotic vocabulary of the Lakȟóta shape kit functions as abstract notations for musicians and performers to interpret. For Wógligleya, the score began with songs exchanged between Witt and the birds outside his home, and grew to incorporate symbolic representations of the dreams of the Third Coast Percussion Ensemble, who commissioned the piece, which they then musically interpreted. The scores thus present Lakȟóta geometric designs as a legible visual language with room in its meaning for variable reinterpretation, like musical notation.
Many of the recent scores, such as Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya (Dreamlike Star), 2024, translate Kite’s own dreams into the Lakȟóta visual lexicon, which she then realizes as large-scale installations, incorporating stones arranged in sculptural designs, LED lights, projections, rare-earth minerals used in computing, and other objects whose animacy she seeks to explore. Performers are invited to choose a path through these labyrinths, enacting a personal reading of the abstract symbols, the resulting performance becoming a doubly mediated interpretation of the source dreams.
Dreams have become a particular focus for Kite in recent years. Her 2024 Creative Time commission with Alisha B. Wormsley, Cosmologyscape, for example, solicited dream contributions from the public via an online portal (cosmologyscape.com) and translated those entries into algorithmically generated mosaics installed on sculptural benches and steps in Brooklyn’s Ashland Plaza. Dreams function as a source of inspiration but also, in the artist’s words, as an “ancestral technology” for connecting between earthly and metaphysical realms. In Lakȟóta culture, dreams are spiritual gifts and significant sources of wisdom, and in Kite’s research, they are potential sites of data for Lakȟóta ways of knowing.
Kite is open about her priorities—“Native audiences, Lakȟóta audiences”—and the Lakȟóta semiotic system used in her scores is for the most part readable only to Lakȟóta community members. “All I can do is make good art and seek to be in conversation with elders in my community who are intellectuals, and make sure my art remains in conversation with their philosophical interests,” she has said. For the non-Native viewer, though, she refuses easy legibility. The turn to refusal as a tactic has gained purchase over the past decade in contemporary Indigenous artistic and intellectual circles owing to the writing of Indigenous-studies scholars such as Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard. In anthropology, refusal entails a denial of access to cultural resources and insider knowledge that might be exploited solely for outsiders’ benefit. For Kite, refusal means resisting what she calls “hungry looking” (the term is a play on Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson’s concept of “hungry listening”)—that is, the desire to consume and fetishize the cultural differences and ways of knowing as they appear in contemporary Indigenous art. Kite is wary of viewers (and institutions) looking to flatten or essentialize her art to a romanticized or one-note understanding of Indigenous thoughtways. Nonetheless, many of the ideas within Kite’s oeuvre are exhaustively explained in her own writing, though most viewers will not have knowledge of this background, much less the means to access it.
The difficulty of Kite’s scores differentiates her from peers in the contemporary Indigenous art world who have seen recent success by balancing legibly Indigenous-coded visual elements of their heritage with accessible idioms of contemporary art, such as abstraction and assemblage. By centering her work on the illegible spaces of Lakȟóta ways of knowing, Kite performs an anti-ethnographic logic, which is to say that her work exists—both in real time and in the archive—in a way that is not accessible to a colonial system of organization and study. In this way, Kite works in the legacy of James Luna, who in his famed Artifact Piece (1987), as the art historian Jane Blocker has observed, destabilized the logic of the colonial archive by putting his own body on view, thus calling attention to and undermining the hegemonic display and organizational systems that define how cultures are represented. Like Luna, Kite is participating directly in a system of cultural recording, but her refusal to legibly encode or concretize her scores for the mainstream destabilizes the ethnographic gaze and its desire to document, categorize, and control Indigenous culture, language, and bodies. Like the winter count, Kite records events in her scores for an insider audience, notates them, and returns to them repeatedly, like the cyclical turn of the seasons.
An upcoming performance this spring at MIT of Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya (Dreamlike Star), titled after the Lakȟóta name for the star cluster also known as the Pleiades, is the latest iteration of a work that Kite began more than two years ago. First installed in 2023 at the Fourteenth Shanghai Biennale, where it took the form of a towering sculptural installation, the piece will appear at MIT as a graphic score (Kite’s first for a full orchestra) that guides conductors and musicians through a “mutual dream.” Kite’s performance will incorporate several elements: five body sensors interacting with an arrangement of stones on a mirror, a choreographic interpretation of the symbolic score, recordings of orchestral interpretations of the score, and live musical composition and video interaction. The body, the score, and the installation, when they come together in time, will relive the dreams that provided its structure, an afterlife recorded—and transmitted—in graphic Lakȟóta form, serving as a script for future performances, at once legible and not, to frustrate the hungriest of gazes.
Christopher T. Green is a is a writer and art historian based in the New York area. He currently serves as visiting assistant professor of art history and environmental studies at Swarthmore College.
