Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road) consists of an installation, music composition, computer system and performance.

The installation was exhibited by the Vera List Center at PS122 Gallery in New York City from December 3, 2021 – December 12, 2021.
The gallery was organized beginning from the entrance door around the space. Two-hundred feet of plastic (fake) hair braided with LED lights began at the front door, leading the viewer past the introduction text and graphics down a hallway and to a darker gallery.
This darker gallery had quadraphonic speakers along the perimeter, pointing in towards the center. Two full walls of projections displayed three orbs of swirling colors, with colors of Lakota Fairburn Agate. On a slow, periodic change, the projects zoom into and enter the center orb, with volcanically swirling color overtaking the projection.
In the center of the room, a section of hair braid drops from the ceiling to the floor. Sections of this hair braid are bound with leather hair wraps, protecting three sections of sensor packages. A single piece of sheer blue cloth was tied to the braid, representing a prayer flag for my grandfathers.

In this process, I invited musicians to record improvisations based on three pieces of media which became their ‘score’: an animation of an agate stone, the methodology graphics titled Imákȟaheye (Method), 2021, Kite and Bobby Joe Smith III, and a private audio file of myself singing the Inyan (stone) Song heard in Inipi Ceremonies. Their improvisations were connected, slightly arranged or adjusted in the Ableton Live digital audio workstation and set as arrangements of channels. These audio channels were connected to a system of patches built by Devin Ronneberg in the program TouchDesigner and trained to mix the arrangement of audio channels based on the position of the hair braid sensors and control the animations in TouchDesigner.

This system sent OSC messages to the machine learning system called Wekinator , which had been trained to turn up the volume on certain channels based on the position of the hair braid in the room. Wekinator sent OSC messages back to TouchDesigner to control movement and formation of the animations of round agate spheres. When interacting with the braid, moving towards the back of the room brought the saxophone and synthesized noise out of the mix, the corner of the room highlighted the harp and banjo, the center of the room, viola. In the resulting documentation these physicalized zones are audible.

Wekinator allowed me to use all my own movements to train the software, allowing for a completely Lakȟóta data set, created by my Lakota body. This does not mean the machine learning system was a specifically Lakȟóta system. In this process it became clear that the artwork can only mimic circular feedback of information from the machine, interpretable by my ear during performance and the audience’s ear during interaction.

During the performance, the audience was seated on the floor around the braid. My goal was to create the simplest performance possible, where I spoke about what I had learned in the process for 15 minutes while moving the braid. I improvised what I spoke out loud, listening to the music I was making with the braid. I spoke about stars and stones, cosmologyscape, and other topics.

In this performance, I move and the computer translates that movement into sound. The sound is translated into video, to which I then react with more body movement. The computer learns how to react to me by using machine learning techniques. I set up this symptom to represent the concept of Lakȟóta ontology where stones are beings, an ontology that is generated through body-oriented knowledge making, just as knowledge is generated through songs in collaboration with nonhuman beings. This performance is a representation and enactment of a process where songs emerge from the body.