Suzanne Kite’s AI artwork installations, for instance, mannequin a Lakota framework of information sovereignty: intelligence that emerges solely by way of reciprocal, consensual interplay. In contrast to methods that assume consumer consent by way of opaque phrases of service, her kinetic machines require the viewer’s bodily presence—and provides one thing again in return.
“It’s my information. It’s my coaching set. I do know precisely what I did to coach it. It’s not a big mannequin however a small and intimate one,” Kite says. “I’m not notably curious about making probably the most technologically superior something. I’m an artist; I don’t make tech demos. So the complexity wants to return at many layers—not simply the technical.”
The place Kite builds working prototypes of consent-based AI, different artists on this cohort discover how sound, robotics, and efficiency can confront the logic of automation, surveillance, and extraction. However Native individuals have by no means been separate from know-how. The land, labor, and lifeways that constructed America’s infrastructure—together with its tech—are Indigenous. The query isn’t whether or not Native cultures are contributing now, however why they had been ever thought of separate.
Native applied sciences reject the false binaries foundational to a lot Western innovation. These artists ask a extra radical query: What if intelligence couldn’t be gathered till a relationship had been established? What if the default had been refusal, not extraction? These artists aren’t asking to be included in as we speak’s methods. They’re constructing what ought to come subsequent.
Suzanne Kite
2023
For Kite, the elemental flaw of Western know-how is its severance of information from the physique. On this set up, a four-meter hair braid with embedded sensors interprets the artist’s physique actions into machine-learning algorithms. Throughout her dwell efficiency, Kite dances whereas the braid reads the power and rhythm of her gestures, producing audio responses that fill the museum gallery of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Beneath her, stones organized in patterns reflecting Lakota star maps anchor the efficiency in conventional astronomical information.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
2019
This set up makes use of embedded AI to talk and reply to viewers, upending assumptions about intelligence and company. “Individuals pay attention shut, I whisper / The rock speaks past listening to … Many countries talking / We converse to one another with out phrases,” it intones, its lights shifting as viewers have interaction with its braided tendrils. The piece goals to convey what Kite calls “more-than-human intelligence”—methods rooted in reciprocity, the elemental precept that every one relationships contain mutual trade and duty.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Raven Chacon
2021
Raven Chacon’s Pulitzer Prize–profitable musical composition Unvoiced Mass premiered in 2021 on the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee. The piece generates what he calls “sounds the constructing can hear”—digital frequencies that exploit the cathedral’s acoustics to create spectral voices with out human vocal cords, a technological séance that offers presence to historic absence. Every site-specific efficiency is recorded, producing materials that mirrors how sensor networks log presence—however solely with specific consent.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Nicholas Galanin
2025
Galanin’s mechanical drum set up levels a battle between machine movement and human reminiscence, asking what occurs when tradition is carried out with no consenting physique. A field drum—an instrument traditionally carved from pink cedar and hung with braided spruce root—is right here product of cherrywood and suspended from the ceiling on the MassArt Artwork Museum in Boston as is historically accomplished in Tlingit plank homes. Performed at tribal conferences, celebrations, and ceremonies, these drums maintain sonic reminiscence in addition to social perform. A mechanical arm strikes, unfaltering, on the tempo of a heartbeat; like a warning, the sound pulses with the stress between automation and ancestry.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
2025
This Herculean bronze sculpture forged from deconstructed fake totem blocks serves to indict settler sabotage of Native know-how and tradition. In contrast to as we speak’s digital data—from genealogical databases to digital variations of sacred texts just like the Bible—Tlingit information is carved in wooden. Galanin’s totem poles underscore their perform as info methods, their carvings encoding historical past, mythology, and household.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Petala Ironcloud is a California-born Lakota/Dakota and Jewish author and textile artist based mostly in New York.
