INYAN/ZINTKALA/INYAN KAGAPI (STONES MAKE BIRDS MAKE STONES), 2021
Description
Created in response to Martha Tuttle’s installation, A stone that thinks of Enceladus, on view at Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, New York) from July 15, 2020, through November 8, 2021, Kite’s video work INYAN/ZINTKALA/INYAN KAGAPI (STONES MAKE BIRDS MAKE STONES) utilizes StyleGAN to create generated photographs of stones trying to reassemble birds. Sounds in the work include recordings of a Hudson River estuary, the river lapping at the feet of a poet, the Taos hum, a Jacob’s Ladder electrical device, the rehearsal of a conch shell sextet, a harp excerpt from a previous work, and the artist’s voice. The voice speaks in the messy verbalizations generated by GPT-2, trained on texts from Storm King Art Center’s landscape information and poetry by Gabriel Kruis in collaboration with Martha Tuttle.
This video work interrogates ideas of landscape as a reflection of the soul of the settler: non-Indigenous, white America’s inability to rest until it fully owns the land. It cannot rest until achieving indigeneity. This colonial desire—the quest for Indigeneity—is a quest for a new religion and a new mythology. Such stories are formed and re-formed through traumatic, apocalyptic events that defy human comprehension, such as the genocide of millions of humans and nonhumans. The fear of the unknown grows closer and closer in America—a fear that shapeshifts, haunts, and terrorizes—like a being in the dark, or the savage in a darkly forested periphery. Ethical relations with nonhumans—deer, birds, stones, machines, and extra-terrestrials—are possible, but humanity would have to choose to understand nonhumans through ontologies that lead to ethical relationships. Lakota ontologies, mythologies, and cosmologies already include the nonhuman and extra-terrestrial. These understandings are not based in fear of the unknown, but respect for the unknown.
Previous Showings
New Nature, Goethe Institute,
• Berlin from November 16 to December 6, 2020
• Montreal from November 16 to December 6, 2020
• New York City from December 15, 2020 to January 8, 2021.
INYAN/ZINTKALA/INYAN KAGAPI (STONES MAKE BIRDS MAKE STONES), JOAN Los Angeles, Presented by Art Papers, May 6, 2023.
