Kite and Devin Ronneberg

Kite and Devin Ronneberg
Fever Dream, 2021, interactive multimedia installation (television, projector, LIDAR detector, digital video), dimensions variable.
Courtesy the artists.

Fever Dream is an interactive multimedia installation by Kite, an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer, and Devin Ronneberg, a multidisciplinary artist of Kanaka Maoli/Okinawan descent working primarily in sculpture, sound, image-making, and computational media. The work brings together their mutual interests in the implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, Indigenous ontologies, and bodily interfaces. In response to the audience’s proximity, a CRT TV flips between channels algorithmically tuned in to scraped footage of conspiracy theories, paranormal and extraterrestrial sightings, and recent news broadcasts. The work plumbs the depths of the settler colonial psyche and the ways in which settler conspiracies are often founded on a denial of Indigenous agency and futurity, such as “ancient aliens” being responsible for the building of Indigenous earthworks and monuments. The work and its library of rotating footage function as a conspiracy generator for settler futurity, reliant on dispossession and the colonial cover-up. UFO sightings, space cults, and military-science Youtube theorists intermingle with press briefings on the oppression of “illegal aliens” (the dismissal of migrant rights at the border), uranium mining on Indigenous territory, and nuclear paranoia. GPT-2 generated subtitles, also built from a curated library, draw the viewer in, encouraging us to overcome colonial biases by first breaking through embedded conspiracies, mythologies, and desires.

DESCRIPTION

In the center of the image, a black C R T television from the 1990s that is part of Kite and Devin Ronneberg’s multimedia installation is visible through a two-foot gap between the walls, standing on a three foot tall white rectangular plinth, its screen illuminated and drawing the viewer forward.

ARTIST BIO

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations. Devin Ronneberg is a multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and living in Los Angeles, working primarily in sculpture, sound, image-making, networking, engineering, and computational media, his work is currently focused on the unseen implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, and the radiation of invisible forces. Ronneberg’s work has most recently exhibited at MoCNA, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Imaginenative 2019. Ronneberg co-founded the Los Angeles underground imprint Private Selection Records, and produces, djs, and performs live under the Aerial moniker. He holds a BFA in music technology from California Institute of the Arts and is an experimental aircraft designer / builder at Berkut Engineering.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

This webpage provides both images and description to render a virtual experience of each artist’s work. Below is an image gallery that includes installation shots and details of Kite and Devin Ronneberg’s installation. In-depth written descriptions that provide visual, auditory, contextual, and other sensory information are available below the image gallery.

Exhibition Photography © EFA Project Space/Yann Chashanovski