Aesthetics, Art, & AI: Kite

The Haggerty Museum of Art is pleased to share information about this program organized by the Center for 21st Century Studies and the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison featuring Kite (a.k.a. Suzanne Kite) whose work will be on view at the Haggerty from January 23 to May 16 in the exhibition This Side of the Stars.

Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and scholar. Her groundbreaking scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance, often working in collaboration with family and community members. Kite develops body interfaces for machine learning driven performance, sculptures generated by dreams, and experimental sound and video work. Working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013, Kite is a first American Indian artist to utilize Machine Learning in art practice.

Kite has been included in numerous publications such as Atlas of Anomalous AI, Indigenous Futurisms, Creative AI Database from Serpentine Gallery, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art. Kite was the Global Coordinator for the Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence Workshops supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, resulting in the publication of the Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.

Her artworks and performances have recently been featured at the 2024 Whitney Biennial; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), 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 received her PhD from Concordia University.

About Aesthetics, Art, & AI

With support from the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Center for 21st Century Studies and the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison present a collaborative series of public programming that focuses the relationship between AI and artistic practice, exploring how AI-generated aesthetics reshape creative production, authorship, and interpretation. By engaging scholars, artists, and technologists, we examine the ethical and aesthetic implications of computational creativity, raising fundamental questions about artistic agency, originality, and the boundaries between human and machine-generated cultural production.

Images: (left)Portrait of Kite by Rita Taylor (right) Kite, cone of bright metal, the size of a die (3), 2025, mixed materials, approx. 4 x 4 x 5 inches, © Kite. Courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery. Photo by Rik Sferra