Contemporary Strategies of Sonic Agency: Conversations with Damon Locks, Suzanne Kite, and Warren Realrider

Mateo Galindo is an interdisciplinary artist and curator from Carlsbad, NM. He has studied at the University of New Mexico and Hunter College. Galindo’s practice focuses on sound, sculpture, and performance, dealing with themes surrounding sonic agency, cultural resonance, improvisation, and memory. He is also co-creator of Atomic Culture, a curatorial platform dedicated to site-specific public performance and interventions founded in 2015. Now living and working in Marfa, Texas, he recently established a gallery called ¿Tierra y Que?, which is dedicated to exhibiting work by Indigenous, African American and Latin/a/e/o/x artists. He is a recipient of the 2019–23 Tulsa Artist Fellowship and is a 2023–24 ISCP NYC institutional resident.

Michele Thursz is a curator, art adviser, and accredited appraiser who operates under the umbrella of A Post Media Network. Post media is a term used to describe the continuous evolution of media use and its effect on artists’ practice and culture. Seek Art LLC provides appraisal services for public and private art collections in the United States. Michele specializes in pre-war, contemporary, and emerging art. She has written and led public conversations about contemporary art and related professional issues. She has presented as a guest cultural producer and critic for various organizations, including Creative Capital, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon, and the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Michele serves on the board of directors for Harvest Works in New York City and is also on the editorial board for Resonance: Sound and Culture. Her work has been reviewed and featured in various publications, including the New York Times, Forbes, Wired, Art Forum, Art in America, Frieze, the LA Times, and Asia Art Pacific.

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based musician, deejay, multimedia artist, and educator. He has worked with a wide variety of individuals in several disciplines. As a musician, he has explored the margins of post-hardcore in the 1980s with Trenchmouth; played dub, jazz, and vanguard improv with the Eternals; and been a core member of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra. In 2015 Locks founded the Black Monument Ensemble. After years of rehearsal and public performance, Where Future Unfolds, their full-length debut, appeared in 2019. NOW, recorded outdoors during the pandemic, followed in 2021. In April 2023 Locks appeared on Exploding Star Orchestra’s Lightning Dreamers, while July saw the release of New Future City Radio, a multimedia duo collaboration between Locks and Mazurek.

Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sound, video, performances, instrument building, wearable artwork, poetry, books, interactive installations, and more. Her work has been included in publications such as Atlas of Anomalous AI, Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), and The Funambulist. Her award-winning article “Making Kin with Machines” and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) were featured on the cover of Canadian Art. Kite has been working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013. Her artwork and performance have been featured at numerous venues, including the Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS122, Anthology Film Archives, Chronus Art Center, and Toronto Biennial of Art. Honors include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellowship, which allowed her to collaborate with top experimental artists and develop a film with AI techniques, Fever Dream (2021); Women at Sundance |Adobe Fellowship; and Common Field Fellowship, among others. Kite holds an MFA in music and sound from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College, and a PhD in interdisciplinary studies from Concordia University.

Warren Realrider is a Pawnee/Crow multidisciplinary sound artist based in Norman, Oklahoma. While studying painting at the University of Oklahoma he began to explore sound, materials, and site as elements of his art practice. He created the Tick-Suck noise performance project in 2016 and has since presented his solo works and sound performance collaborations in varied Tulsa locations as well as locales such as Spokane and New York City. His works such as III KitapaatuI and Unassigned Data work within the unclaimed spaces between contemporary anti-plains existence, universe engagement, and untethered sound to create hypnotic structures of human/item interface. Realrider works to play the tensions and time locations between objects, functions, and movements to create sound pieces lashed to the frameworks of harsh noise, improvisation, and experimental composition.