Suzanne Kite’s AI art installations, for example, model a Lakota framework of data sovereignty: intelligence that emerges only through reciprocal, consensual interaction. Unlike systems that assume user consent via opaque terms of service, her kinetic machines require the viewer’s physical presence—and give something back in return.
“It’s my data. It’s my training set. I know exactly what I did to train it. It’s not a large model but a small and intimate one,” Kite says. “I’m not particularly interested in making the most technologically advanced anything. I’m an artist; I don’t make tech demos. So the complexity needs to come at many layers—not just the technical.”
Where Kite builds working prototypes of consent-based AI, other artists in this cohort explore how sound, robotics, and performance can confront the logic of automation, surveillance, and extraction. But Native people have never been separate from technology. The land, labor, and lifeways that built America’s infrastructure—including its tech—are Indigenous. The question isn’t whether Native cultures are contributing now, but why they were ever considered separate.
Native technologies reject the false binaries foundational to much Western innovation. These artists ask a more radical question: What if intelligence couldn’t be gathered until a relationship had been established? What if the default were refusal, not extraction? These artists aren’t asking to be included in today’s systems. They’re building what should come next.
Suzanne Kite
Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ (Seven Little Girls)
2023
For Kite, the fundamental flaw of Western technology is its severance of knowledge from the body. In this installation, a four-meter hair braid with embedded sensors translates the artist’s body movements into machine-learning algorithms. During her live performance, Kite dances while the braid reads the force and rhythm of her gestures, generating audio responses that fill the museum gallery of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Below her, stones arranged in patterns reflecting Lakota star maps anchor the performance in traditional astronomical knowledge. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock)
2019
... continue reading