A new vanguard of Native American artists are challenging the tech industry by rejecting the kind of data models that prioritise quantity over quality and focus on extracting the most useful information, in favour of those that put human relationships at their core.
As well as interrogating the data industry, their works also explores themes of automation, surveillance and extraction in relation to sound, robotics and performance.
One artist, Suzanne Kite, uses embedded AI to respond to viewers, creating what she calls “more-than-human intelligence” and overturning assumptions about intelligence and agency.
Another, Raven Chacon, premiered a Pulitzer Prize winning musical composition which gave presence to historical absence using spectral voices generated from electronic frequencies.
All of the artists’ works recall and reclaim the legacy of indigenous technological innovation, with many asking what should come next as opposed to asking to be included in existing systems.