List Projects 31: Kite

Iteration and translation are fundamental to Kite’s work, which prompts viewers and collaborators to listen closely to each other as well as to dreams and nonhuman beings. 

Her practice—spanning experimental composition, graphic scores, video, sculpture, and live performance—examines Lakȟóta ontology and ethics alongside emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence. Featuring video documentation of individual and collaborative performances alongside scores that translate dreams into a Lakȟóta grammar of symbols, Kite’s List Center exhibition brings key aspects of her performance and composition practice into focus. 

Kite has worked with interactive interfaces for music and live performance since 2013, and a number of works on view feature the artist’s signature wearable interface: a length of braided hair that uses machine learning to modulate light, video, sound, or AI-generated text through a performer’s movement and touch. Somewhere between instrument and sculpture, the braid is woven with digital sensors that enable this nonhuman entity to “listen without ears.” In parallel, Kite has developed an extensive body of scholarship on Indigenous protocols for AI, proposing more ethical futures for this technology.

The exhibition’s central installation, Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya (Dreamlike Star) (2024), also serves as a stage for the artist’s performance of the same title. A hallucinatory, immersive environment of doubles and reflections, Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya emerges from Kite’s translations of dreams into Lakȟóta visual language, expressed in this work as a constellation of stones that is also a score. Projected behind it is an expansive network of stars in a purple night sky. The imagery and objects (stones, stars, and shapes) that recur in the video, in its reflection, and in the sculpture evoke a vast, interconnected universe: Earth and sky are entangled in what Kite calls an “ancient and future dance.” Here and throughout Kite’s work, dreaming and waking, land and cosmos, human and nonhuman are brought into forms of ethical and reciprocal relationship. 

List Projects 31: Kite is organized by Selby Nimrod, Director of Exhibitions and Commons, MIT School of Architecture + Planning and former 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.