In collaboration with Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Kites digital video installation Listener included in the exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, is a visual representation of a machine made by the artist to listen to sound centered in Lakota understandings. This work is completed by Kites live performance of ‘Listener’ which will livestream via Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery’s Facebook on Sunday, June 21 at 2 pm. The performance is based on a science fiction story about a woman wandering alone in the future, receiving transmissions from the Far Place on her Listening devices. Through this work, the artist asks, How can Lakota understandings of hair affect the design of technology? What does a Lakota data-visualizing interface look like? In order to perform this score, the listener must read the shapes as they appear, tantalizing the shapes through a hair-braid interface which changes a synthesizer, which sends sound to machine-learning software, which manipulates the video, affecting each shape as it forms and forms and forms. For more information about upcoming Soundings events and performances at Kitchener-Waterloo Gallery, visit their website here. Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts is a traveling exhibition curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, and organized by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University, Canada and Independent Curators International (ICI). The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, with the generous support from ICIs International Forum and the ICI Board of Trustees. Additional support has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts New Chapter Program, the Isabel and Alfred Bader Fund of Bader Philanthropies, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Kingston Arts Fund through the Kingston Arts Council, and the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund at Queens University.
