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Live from the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College: Kite's "Listener" (Audio)

Nov 18, 2023

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is a groundbreaking Oglála Lakĥóta performance artist, visual artist, composer, and scholar—the first American Indian artist to use machine learning in art practice. In the performance Listener (2018–ongoing), Kite brings together older technologies, such as Lakota visual language, with contemporary ones like machine learning.

The site-specific performance Listener speculates a future through Lakota ontology, narratively and physically manifesting a relationship with metals in electronics, performed via an electronic interface woven into hair (hair is sacred to the Lakota). The sonic landscape of the piece includes live police scanners, synthesizers played by the hair, and algorithmically rearranging poetry with a voice speaking of a future landscape, prophecies, dreams, rumors, and the possibilities in listening. More at https://ccs.bard.edu/events/548-listener-by-kite