Lakota Ontologies, AI, and Graphic Scores Find a Symbiotic Home in the Waking Dreams of Kite

Wooden blocks in various shapes are stacked on top of bright floral blankets onstage at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC) on the evening of Friday, Dec. 6; the triangles, staircases, and crosses are derived from the Lakota language. Performing artist, visual artist, and composer Kite (Suzanne Kite) gathers around the blocks with seven students, and together they arrange them into mosaic graphic scores born from stories that came to them in their dreams. Then, they take a seat and improvise their way through the paths they’ve created, bridging technology, visual art, and music into one.

That was just one of the dream scores developed during Kite’s two-day residency at EMPAC. This residency offers composers a unique opportunity to workshop new pieces, and Kite’s took place on December 5-6. On the first day, seven students created their own visual scores with the wooden blocks in an open rehearsal. The next day, these pieces were performed on a program that also included one of Kite’s graphic scores.

For the last five years, Kite has been intensively researching dreams. Her dream scores have been made in collaboration with esteemed groups like the Silk Road Ensemble and Third Coast Percussion and have traveled to unexpected places, like an open field in Boseman, Montana, where they were performed during the 20-minute duration of an eclipse.

Kite at EMPAC — Photo by Michael Valiquette/EMPAC

She is also the director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College, which was recently designated as a Humanities Research Center on AI by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The center explores ethical frameworks for making AI rooted in Indigenous practices. And she’s a visual artist working with large animal hides that she adorns with stars and glitter.

At its heart, her work unites scientific and artistic disciplines through custom worn electronic instruments, research, visual scores, and more, with dreams serving as a connecting force between them. It is a practice rooted in Lakota ways of making knowledge, in which body and mind are always intimately intertwined. “Visions, imaginings, composition, improvisation, all could be thought of as a dream,” Kite said in our interview at EMPAC. “What a great bridge into music, what a clear discussion that we can have about something difficult to grasp. It connects people across cultures.”

Exploring the unknown ignites Kite’s passion. She began her musical journey as a violinist studying classical music, which she picked up from her aunt who she describes as a “rockstar” Klezmer violinist. At community college, she found herself playing violin constantly: in orchestra, ensembles, and as a soloist. At the same time, she began going to raves and developing a deep interest in electronic music, which eventually led her to joining the experimental ensemble Sonic Boom while studying at CalArts.

Kite in performance with student musicians, EMPAC — Photo by Michael Valiquette/EMPAC

With Sonic Boom, she arranged a song by electronic musician Aaron Funk (a.k.a Venetian Snares); the breakcore mashup features a schmaltzy violin concerto that gradually transforms into pulsating beats. Kite’s face lit up as she searched Spotify for the song and played it, remembering how that was a crucial turning point in her life. “It was through that process where I slowly moved into being like, ‘oh, I’m a composer. I’ll use electronic things. And I want my own custom instrument.’” She and her friend James Hurwitz then teamed up and made her first custom electronic instrument, which has progressed into the body sensors and machine learning technology she works with today.

When Kite performs, she dons electronic sensors on her wrists, chest, ankles, and in her hair or ponytail, moving her body to distort her melodies. In one of her compositions performed at EMPAC, she put her custom instrument in motion, performing from a score shaped like a star projected on a screen. Words spilled out of a laptop, swirling around the ensemble’s improvisations.

Her movements were slow and gradual, stilted yet fluid as she pulled her arms across her chest like an archer pulls a bow and arrow; she crouched and spun her hair against the ground and stretched her legs with quiet determination. The closer her sensors were to each other, the more grainy the electronics became until they eventually burst into cavernous, rumbling noise while the filaments of feathery cello and melodica floated above.

Students create dream scores with Lakota language blocks — Photo by Michael Valiquette/EMPAC

This type of cross-disciplinary performance art opens up new avenues for Kite – she isn’t a trained dancer, but that allows her even more room to experiment and learn. “I’ve really stopped doing formal music stuff – through-composed music I’ll avoid at all costs. I avoid playing violin because I tipped over to the point where I know too much, and I really don’t like it when I don’t do a really, really good job,” she said. “But when I do fine art stuff, I’m like, ‘you can do whatever you want.’”

Her improvisation often grows from her visual scores, which are informed by Sadie Redwing’s studies of the Lakota visual language. Kite became interested in using this language as a means of sharing music with her family in a way that made sense to them and was easy to understand. “It’s very legible to Lakota people to look at these symbols,” she said. “They’re really flexible and, I think, digestible for non-Lakota audiences.”

At the open rehearsal, she used this language to bring student volunteers into the process of creating their own dream scores. She encouraged each of them to remember a dream, then use the Lakota designs to tell the story. They each created their own visual score, and four of them played theirs through improvisations on pentatonic scales. Each score took on its own theme; one might feel airy, made of a bunch of floating feathers, while another sounded dark and stormy, born from the lightning symbol.

The process offered the students their own opportunity to explore, much like Kite does herself. “I really love mentoring students, and it’s great to get to work with the students here,” she said. “Wrangling crazy ideas, organizing them into something sensible, being sensitive to your audience’s needs, and being careful with time, being self aware – those are all skills I can share.”

These days, Kite spends much of her time wondering about meaning. Dreams have led her down a rabbit hole with more questions than answers, an infinite search to better understand these ephemeral stories that end up shaping our lives. Kite is of the belief that we are dreaming 100% of the time; if she tries hard, she can even conjure a dream while wide awake. So much of her work is about exploring the impact of dreams on our lives through art-driven projects, but she ponders where it comes from. “What is meaning, anyway, and how could I go find it if I’ve just been making it all the time?” she wondered. But, like always, she has a plan to get out of those questions, another experiment in the making ready to investigate.

I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.