Artworks | 2RO 25
Kahionhaktà:tye | Otekh Labs Project
This project is a prototype artwork exploring the intersections of wampum—as a living cultural form—andcontemporary digital technologies. Rooted in Haudenosaunee traditions of wampum as a medium of diplomacy, memory, and relational knowledge, the work engages with AI, machine learning, and emerging media as extensions of land-based forms of intelligence. Rather than treating technology as separate from culture, this project positions it within a larger interconnected ecosystem where digital systems, ancestral knowledge, and environmental processes inform one another.
The prototype takes the form of a digital wampum composition, drawing on bead-like video patterns and generative processes that are guided by both archival knowledge and real-time environmental data (taken from sensors along the Grand River). These data streams act not as abstract numbers but as expressions of the land and its intelligences—water, wind, temperature, ebb and flow—translated into the visual and sonic registers of the artwork. In this way, the wampum prototype becomes not just a representation of knowledge but a dynamic interface between human, nonhuman, and more-than-human forms of intelligence.
As part of a larger ecosystem of ongoing research-creation, the prototype contributes to developing methods for relational AI—systems that acknowledge the reciprocity between cultural protocols, land-based teachings, and digital infrastructures. This ecosystem includes experimental projects with VR, sensors, archives, and community-driven data sovereignty frameworks. The wampum prototype is an early step in imagining how technologies might be designed not simply as tools, but as participants in a broader network of responsibilities and relationships.
Transmuting Energies | Walker English
Transmuting Energies uses the idea that energy is always in flux and that energy can be transmuted or changed by the individual. The law of conservation of energy states that “energy cannot be created or destroyed”,however it can be changed from one form into another. Transmuting Energies centres around that Idea, using negative energies brought on through colonization and transmuting it into something more positive and useful. Throughout this project, Blackfoot iconography such as petroglyphs and pictographs have been researched and implemented into my contemporary art practice. Several large scale canvases have been created, using collage as the main technique to present various pictographs, petroglyphs, Blackfoot history, culture, and language. Present and historical Blackfoot struggles against Canadian colonialism are also a central theme in the canvases. The project is still on-going, with the next step being implementing A.I. and other emerging technologies to create interactive art installations. Implementing these emerging technologies I hope to reach wider audiences, as well as continue to develop and widen my own art practice. In addition, including emerging technologies like the touch designer program and artificial intelligence to my art practice, I believe, effectively shows the ever changing flux that is always present. This work is important because it reclaims and revitalizes Indigenous knowledge systems through tools that have historically been used to suppress them. It also challenges dominant narratives around technology by asserting that Indigeneity and innovation are not opposing forces, but rather deeply interconnected.
Dancing Molecular Landscapes | SJ Okemow
My practice-based project offers a critical re-examination of the aesthetic practices ofbiomolecular visualization, reframing these questions through a decolonial lens to ask what newvisual aesthetics are possible to represent emergent, non-linear, and interconnected molecularand cellular events. This work thinks critically about western science narratives of objectivityand I seek to embed my identity as a Nêhiyaw woman, as well as my lived experience withautoimmune illnesses and disorders, into the process.