Fragmentary transmissions: on the poetics, practice, and futurism of Listener

Abstract

Listener is a foray into the Indigenous future. In her performance Kite impersonates a cloaked diasporic Oglála wanderer who listens for transmissions beyond the range of the humanly audible. This article provides different frameworks with which to approach Listener. Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) will give insight into her background, introduce her art, and discuss some of the guiding questions behind it. This is followed by a dialogue with Baudemann, a non-Indigenous scholar who is interested in Kite’s motivations to create Listener, her use of technology, and her view of the future. This second part is a transcription of an interview conducted via Skype, an electronic transmission over a long distance. In the final part – an addendum, or afterthought – Baudemann contextualizes Listener as a Lakȟóta Futurism. Photos and a brief summary of the performance provide further insight into the piece. Framed as textual and visual transmissions, the short essays, transcribed dialogue, and images constitute signals in different frequencies, and they ask the reader to attune anew with every page they turn and to question again and again their own way of reading, of listening.

Keywords:

• indigenous futurisms
• diaspora
• decolonization
• Lakȟóta
• technology

Notes on contributors

Kite, aka Suzanne Kite, is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer. She was raised in Southern California and earned a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a Ph.D. student at Concordia University, where she is a Research Assistant with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakȟóta mythologies and epistemologies and investigates the multiplicity of mythologies existing constantly in the contemporary storytelling of the Lakȟóta through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon-fiber sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint Unheard Records.

Kristina Baudemann is an instructor and Ph.D. student in the department of English and American Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg in Germany. She has contributed to the Extrapolation special issue on ‘Indigenous Futurism’ and to The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion. In 2014, she was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is currently working on her dissertation project, entitled ‘Signifying Futures: Future Imaginaries in Indigenous North American Literatures and New Media Arts.’

Notes

1 Personal conversation with my grandfather in Kyle, South Dakota, June 7, 2018.

2 This summary of the performance of Listener was adapted from Kite’s website at kitekitekitekite.com.

3 The Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) can be found at abtec.org/iif/.

4 Device for measuring the acceleration of an object.

5 Angles of rotation along an axis.

6 Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishinaabe) is an intermedia artist and currently the IIF Artist-in-residence; see benesiinaabandan.com.

7 The Wekinator is an open source software program for machine learning developed by Rebecca Fiebrink that ‘allows users to build new interactive systems by demonstrating human actions and computer responses, instead of writing programming code’ (wekinator.org).

8 An L-system or Lindenmayer system is ‘a type of string-rewriting mechanism’ (Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz 1990, 2) named after biologist Aristid Lindenmayer. Lindenmayer and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz explain its functioning principle as follows: ‘The central concept of L-systems is that of rewriting. In general, rewriting is a technique for defining complex objects by successively replacing parts of a simple initial object using a set of rewriting rules or productions’ (1990, 1).

9 This quotation is taken from Nicole Kelly Westman’s insightful article in LUMA Quarterly 2 (8), entitled ‘Concrete Constructs of Linearity,’ where she discusses her experience of Kite’s Everything I Say Is True, a 2017 performance piece. Access the article via the LUMA Quarterly website.

10 See DeMallie (1984) and Neihardt (2014).

11 In Lecture on Two Locations, Kite challenges mapping practices by approaching two unspecified locations through Western mapping methods. For more information, see kitekitekitekite.com.

12 The live police scanner evokes themes of crime and punishment, and it renders present the urban spaces outside the performance space. These transmissions conjure up the phantom of the surveilling state and its judicial system.

13 According to Grace Dillon (2012, 10), Indigenous Futurisms perform decolonization in the form of a ‘returning to ourselves,’ which Dillon understands through the Anishinaabe concept of ‘biskaabiiyang’ (10). Kite’s description of her experience of the ‘folding of time’ in ceremony in this article, her own use of Lakȟóta words, and the efforts of her Oglála character to center Lakȟóta voices might be considered a performance of a Lakȟóta returning.

14 Gerald Vizenor’s notion of survivance describes the absence of academic authority over ‘native’ (Vizenor [1994] 1999, viii) material, scholarly embrace of shifting cultural signifiers, and the untiring efforts to be precise, responsible, ethical, and historically accurate. As Vizenor states in Manifest Manners, ‘[s]urvivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name’ ([1994] 1999, vii).